They Can’t Even Gerrymander Well

Republicans think they’ve won this round of redistricting. The voters get to decide.

It’s been a bad/good week for gerrymandering, depending on who you are. The federal Supreme Court ruled that redistricting to dilute minority voters’ power was constitutional, as long as they packaged it as a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one. As a result, states across the south are preparing to call emergency sessions of their legislature with the explicit intent of redrawing maps to remove their traditionally Democratic, majority Black, districts. At the same time, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the state’s pro-Democratic gerrymander, approved by voters in a referendum in April, violated the state constitution due to the intricacies of how it was passed in the legislature. This vote was intended as a retaliatory measure to the Republican redistricting in other states like Texas.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: gerrymandering is bad, redistricting for partisan purposes is bad, and voters by-and-large hate it. They should. Any sane post-Trump reconstruction agenda will almost certainly include federal regulations (or constitutional amendments) on how congressional districts are drawn, and this messy mid-decade fight will only ensure that. At the same time, it’s unlikely this will significantly dent the Democrats’ midterm advantage. The fundamentals are still there - opposition parties do well in midterm election years, the economy is sputtering, the Iran war is unpopular, and Donald Trump has a decade-long history of being elected then immediately turning a huge part of his voter base off after they remember who he is.

There is one area where the Dems do have to be concerned, though, and that is the demoralization of their voter bae.

Already, “normie,” non-politically clued-in voters in the Democratic base are on social media talking about how hopeless they feel that their vote has been “taken away.” Now, I get why they feel that way, no question. But Democratic activists and leaders have to channel that despair into anger. These angry voters are still going to be able to vote. And the Republicans may have made a strategic error: previous decades of gerrymandering involved packing heavily Democratic and minority communities into one or two districts. In 2010, for example, Louisiana Republicans snaked the 2nd Congressional District from New Orleans up through the uninhabited Mississippi River levee to Baton Rouge. This captured the heavily Democratic-voting neighborhoods of both cities and made the 2nd district, which elected a Republican just the cycle before for the first time in 100 years, an all but guaranteed Democratic district. But in that process, they made the 3rd and 6th congressional districts, which were swing districts that had recent history of Democratic representation, strong Republican districts that haven’t elected a Democrat since.

In contrast to packing, which leaves one or two strong minority party seats and a bunch of strong majority seats, the current round of redistricting eliminates the strong minority party seats by splitting those into the majority seats. Just north of me in Memphis, the Tennessee legislature took a strong Democratic seats covering the Memphis metro and split Memphis across three traditionally Republican seats. This is bad and should be considered an illegal attempt to undermine minority representation in federal elections, but under the SCOTUS ruling it appears it can pass as long as they make clear it’s for partisan purposes and not racist ones. (How charming.)

However, while that does make it harder for the Democrats to win a single seat in Tennessee, it also takes a bunch of super solid Republican seats and add a huge amount of Democratic voters to them. So now, in a landslide election year, Republicans have loosened their grip on a ton of seats across the South in an attempt to remove Democratic representation. Far from making their votes matter less, they may have accidentally made minority and Democratic votes even more impactful across more districts.

To be clear, this should end. This gerrymandering fight is going to continue into the next four years, and hopefully a new president and new congress gets some sort of agreement to stop it. I think that’s more likely than not - remember that state legislatures draw these maps, and I think all House members will get real tired of having their districts redrawn every single cycle without their input or say. I think the VRA-mandated minority districts are probably gone forever, but a new redistricting standard based on geography first and competitiveness second would restore many of them as a practical matter anyway, reversing obnoxious redraws like splitting Memphis across three districts. But this cycle voters should be angry that this happened, they should fight back - and turning the Trump GOP’s hubris against itself is a great way to start.