Gerrymandering - Past, Present, Future

‘I think we’ll get five,’ President Trump said, and five was what he got. At his prompting, the Republican-dominated Texas legislature remapped the districts to be used in next year’s elections to the federal House of Representatives. Their map includes five new seats that are likely to be won by the Republicans, who already hold 25 of the state’s 38 seats. Until this year, the Democrat Al Green’s Ninth Congressional District covered Democrat-leaning south and south-western Houston. Now, it ranges east over Republican-leaning Harris County and Liberty County, with most of the former constituency reallocated to other districts. Green has accused Trump and his allies in Texas of infusing ‘racism into Texas redistricting’ by targeting Black representatives like him and diluting the Black vote. ‘I did not take race into consideration when drawing this map,’ Phil King, the state senator responsible for the redistricting legislation, claimed. ‘I drew it based on what would better perform for Republican candidates.’ His colleague Todd Hunter, who introduced the redistricting bill, agreed. ‘The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance.’

King and Hunter can say these things because there is no judicial remedy for designing a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a different case, Roberts contrasted the ‘sociological gobbledygook’ of political science on gerrymandering with the formal and objective science of American constitutional law.

‘Sociological gobbledygook’ teaches that the drawing of the boundaries of single-member districts can all but determine the outcome of an election. Imagine a state with twenty blue and thirty red voters that must be sliced into five districts. A map that tracked the overall distribution of votes would have two blue and three red districts. But if you can put six red voters and four blue voters in each of the five boxes, you will end up with five relatively safe red districts. This is known as ‘cracking’ the blue electorate. Or you could create two districts with six blues and one with eight blues, making three safe blue districts by ‘packing’ red supporters – concentrating them in a smaller number of districts. The notion that democratic elections are supposed to allow voters to make a real choice between candidates, or even kick out the bums in power, sits uneasily with the combination of untrammelled redistricting power and predictable political preferences that characterise the US today. But if it is so easy for mapmakers to vitiate the democratic purpose of elections in single-member districts, doesn’t neutrality demand some constraint on the ability of incumbents to choose voters, rather than the other way round?

After the Texas redistricting, Roberts’s belief that neutrality requires inaction appears even shakier. By adding five seats to the expected Texan Republican delegation, the Republican Party improves the odds it will retain, or even increase, its six-seat majority in the House in November 2026. Even a slight advantage gained through redistricting may have national implications because the Democrats’ lead in the polls is consistently small (around two points). Congressional maps are usually redrawn once every ten years, after each decennial census (the next one is in 2030). Mid-cycle redistricting does sometimes happen – Texas did the same thing two decades ago – but it is unusual. So is Trump’s open embrace of gerrymanders. In 1891, Benjamin Harrison condemned gerrymandering as ‘political robbery’. Sixty years later, Harry Truman called for federal legislation to end its use; a bill was introduced in the House but died in the Senate. In 1987, Ronald Reagan told a meeting of Republican governors that gerrymanders were ‘corrupt’. (...)

Democratic states have threatened to retaliate. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has scheduled a special election on Proposition 50, which would temporarily suspend the state’s independent redistricting commission, making it possible for the Democratic legislature to flip five Republican seats (43 of California’s 52 seats are held by Democrats). Like California, New York has a bipartisan commission, which usually redraws its maps once a decade. The Democrats have brought in legislation allowing mid-decade changes, but new maps won’t be in place until 2028. Democrats who used to be fierce advocates of independent commissions are now asking themselves whether they’ve been too slow to fight back. From a party that has a habit of bringing a knife to a gunfight, the question answers itself.

In the late 20th century, there were only ten seats nationally that repeatedly changed hands as a result of partisan gerrymandering, with control of the House flipping on just one occasion, in 1954. But in 2012, Republicans started to change this. Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia were all sliced up. The increase in gerrymanders was in part a result of Redmap, the Redistricting Majority Project, a Republican initiative set up in 2010 which invested in the races for the state legislatures, such as Texas’s, tasked with drawing district maps. In 1981, Democrats controlled the mapmaking process in 164 seats, while Republicans controlled it in 50. By 2021, the Republicans controlled line-drawing for 187 seats, the Democrats 49. At the same time, computers had made it cheaper and easier to design maps optimising one party’s performance without breaking the legal constraints on redistricting, such as the Voting Rights Act and the prohibition on districts drawn on the basis of race. In the 1980s, it cost $75,000 to buy software to do this; by the early 2000s, programs such as Maptitude for Redistricting cost $3000.

Just as in the late 19th century, urbanisation is now producing new political geography: migration from Democrat-leaning states such as California, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois means they will lose House seats after the 2030 census. Meanwhile, Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, all of which lean Republican, are set to gain seats. Texas’s gerrymander, in other words, foreshadows a change in national political power that is coming anyway.

by Azia Huq, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: The Ninth Congressional District in Texas, before and after this year’s remapping.

[ed. If you can't win fair and square, cheat. It looks almost certain that all national elections going forward will be a nightmare.]