Newt Gingrich has devised a new plan to get himself a few steps down the road to the G.O.P presidential nomination. The best part about it: it throws in sharp relief what has gone wrong with American politics.

By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

Professor Newt Gingrich’s latest plan for prolonging the bitter Republican primary battle in hopes of a miracle (or at least until his favorability ratings sink to the single digits) involves a strategy of campaigning in the most conservative enclaves of California, which for the first time this year will reward most of its Republican delegates to the first-place finisher in each congressional district.

Under this theory, if Gingrich does well enough in targeted pockets of the most populous state, he could wind up with as many delegates as if he had won outright in smaller states—and thus be a force to be reckoned with all the way to the nominating convention in Tampa in August. As an electoral strategy, this has about as much chance of winning the nomination for Gingrich as a blizzard does of striking Palm Springs on the day of the primary, June 5.

“It’s kind of pathetic, and a patently bankrupt strategy,” said Thomas Mann, one of Washington’s pre-eminent congressional scholars, with a perch at the left-leaning Brookings Institution.

But Gingrich’s plan is also a metaphor for a lot of what’s wrong with the American political system these days, because the mere fact that there are such politically polarized geographic pockets—and that politicians and their pollsters, direct-mail experts, and strategists have made a science of exploiting them—is part of the reason Washington doesn’t work anymore.

“It’s kind of pathetic, and a patently bankrupt strategy,” said Thomas Mann, one of Washington’s pre-eminent congressional scholars.

Gone are the days when congressional districts might actually require candidates to campaign for votes in the middle. A combination of decades of hyper-partisan redistricting (designed above all to protect incumbents of whatever stripe) and a remarkable pattern of residential self-selection (NPR listeners buy organic together in one suburb, while N.R.A. members circle the wagons down the road) has made most of the nation’s 435 congressional districts redder and redder—or bluer and bluer—than ever, with only a handful of truly contested seats.

“There’s no question that we have had ‘The Big Sort,’’’ Tom Mann told me, referring to the 2008 book of that title by the Texas journalist Bill Bishop and his sociologist colleague Robert Cushing, which explored the trend of geographic self-selection by every trait imaginable. “People have tended to be more and more attracted to neighborhoods and communities with like-minded people. It’s what produces, frankly, most of the safe Democratic and Republican districts, more so than redistricting does.”