By Chris Satullo
You don’t need to be told this is one momentous election coming up on Nov. 3.
Even so, let me ask: Are you paying the attention you should to the down-ballot races that won’t get nearly the same media coverage as the painful iron-cage match between the two rambling geezers named Donald and Joe?
In particular, the elections for members of your state legislature?
Next year, in many states, these obscure lawmakers will quietly make decisions with huge consequences for our democracy. Decisions that will determine whether for the next decade we will have a functioning U.S. House of Representatives and effective state governments – or endure more of the polarized dysfunction that has typified the last 10 years.
These politicians will draw the district boundaries that will govern elections to the U.S. House and state legislatures for the next decade.
They could do so in a fair way that respects community interests, promotes competition and, over time, might breed a greater spirit of compromise. Or they could do what they so often do – gerrymander the hell out of the lines to protect their own hides and give their team a cheating advantage at the polls.
Let me tell you a little story.
After Barack Obama whupped John McCain in 2008 and Democrats seized big majorities in both congressional chambers, many Republicans glumly surveyed the wreckage and began commissioning reports to puzzle out how to respond.
But one savvy group of GOP operatives took a different, activist tack. While the Dems are beaming over their snapshots of Obama and Oprah in Grant Park and paying no attention, they said, let’s figure out how to take control of as many of the state capitols – governorships and legislatures – as we can in 2010.
Why? Because that’s where the election maps that would shape U.S. House and state legislative races for the next 10 years would be drawn in 2011, based on the 2010 Census.
If we can put people in place to jigger those lines with a heavy red tilt, they correctly reasoned, we can build a congressional majority that will thwart whatever Obama and Harry Reid try to do.
They called their plan Project REDMAP – and it worked nearly to perfection. (Journalist David Daley tells this tale in chilling detail in his book Ratfucked.). The list of swing states they targeted will sound familiar: Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and a few others. Project REDMAP scarfed up huge piles of cash from rich GOP donors and threw it behind attack ads in small statehouse races in 2010 that had never seen such spending or sophisticated venom before. Coupled with the rise of the Tea Party (also fueled by big, dark money), the impact was lethal to a legion of Democratic statehouse incumbents who never knew what hit them.
Once in office, these hungry GOP majorities and compliant governors grabbed those Census numbers and began bending, spindling and mutilating election districts for partisan advantage to a degree never before seen in the history of the Republic.
Yes, gerrymandering has been around since Patrick Henry tried to stick it to James Madison, but it was taken to a whole new level by Project REDMAP’s use of Big Data and sophisticated mapping software. (To be fair, on the few occasions when Dems got the chance in 2010, e.g. Maryland, they also gerrymandered to a fare-the-well. It was mainly a GOP enterprise in 2010 simply because the red team was more on the ball.)
Even without REDMAP, the GOP might have taken back the House in 2010 – thanks to Tea Party fervor and the criminal apathy of parts of the Obama coalition. But gerrymandering certainly swelled the rout and locked in the results – until the 2018 “blue wave.”
One telling data point: In every regular election held under the blatantly gerrymandered 2011 Pennsylvania map, the GOP won a 13-5 majority in the state’s House delegation, even though each time the state’s voters split nearly evenly between parties. In 2018, after a state court threw out the gerrymander, replacing it with a map drawn by a Stanford prof, the House delegation split 9-9. Coincidence? Nah.
Gerrymandering is too often seen as merely a matter of twisty lines on a map that spawn funny nicknames. No, it is diabolically precise cheating that robs millions of Americans of a fully meaningful vote. It is a bug in the operating system of democracy. It fuels polarization and gridlock.
When you know, thanks to a friendly map, that you can never lose in a general election, the only threat to your job is a primary challenge from someone on the fringe of your party. This leaves you no incentive to heed the mass of voters or moderate your stances. Compromise is a dirty word to the primary voters who hold your fate, so you don’t do it.
Want to know why we can get so little legislative movement on, for example, gun violence prevention measures supported by vast majorities of Americans? In part because gerrymandering cements the NRA’s sway over GOP lawmakers: Annoy the gun lobby and it will “primary” you. The moderate voters who might salute your courage will never get a chance to reward you at the polls.
North Carolina is a purple state where REDMAP concocted a notorious congressional gerrymander that has since been thrown out by the courts (and a legislative one that produced in Raleigh a GOP majority so Cro-Magnon that it decided banning transgender bathrooms was a hill worth having the state’s economy die on). It’s a fine place to study the malign effects of the 2011 gerrymander that ripples through our society unto this day.
Mark Meadows. Know the name? He’s now the president’s chief of staff. Previously, he was the leader of the hard-right Freedom Caucus in the U.S. House where, as a newly minted freshman, he fomented the 2013 government shutdown, went on to lead the revolt that ousted Speaker John Boehner, opposed relief aid for Hurricane Sandy and made destroying the Affordable Care Act his life’s mission.
Now, as chief of staff, he’s a roadblock to any new stimulus bill that would help those left jobless, hungry or in danger of eviction by the pandemic. (I feel duty-bound to mention: He’s supposedly a very nice guy personally, the rare ideologue with friends across the aisle.)
How’d Meadows, a Tea Party darling, get into Congress? The gerrymander of 2011.
North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District used to center around Asheville, that hip enclave of craft brews and folk festivals in the state’s western mountains. In 2010, its congressman was Heath Shuler, handsome former All-American quarterback and No. 1 NFL draft pick, a seemingly unbeatable Blue Dog Democrat.
But then Shuler got a load of how the new GOP map of 2011 had sliced and diced his district. In that classic gerrymandering move known as “cracking,” the map split Asheville and its cluster of Democratic voters among multiple districts. Shuler didn’t even bother to run for re-election. Meadows took the seat – and the ACA hasn’t had a moment’s peace since.
Elections have consequences – even obscure races for legislative seats in, say, Gastonia, N.C., can have national effects that ripple on for a decade…
To a high school in Parkland, Fla.
To a schoolroom in Chester, Pa., chronically underfunded by a state legislature somehow dominated by low-tax ideologues from the state’s least-populous counties.
To a hospital in McAllen, Texas, where a mother fights for her life, the lack of insurance having led her to wait too long to get treated for COVID-19.
To Louisville, the Twin Cities and Kenosha.
In some of the states that saw REDMAP gerrymanders in 2011 – notably Michigan and Missouri – voters of both parties have risen up, sick of the arrogance, the cheating and the dysfunction, to pass reforms that snatch the mapping pen from the hands of self-interested pols. The reforms give it instead to citizen panels or disinterested professional geographers. Of course, even then, state lawmakers have scrambled to try to nullify the will of the people.
The battle to slay the gerrymander, or at least curb its toxic effects, is incomplete. In my state, Pennsylvania, a bid to create an independent redistricting commission failed. So the usual suspects in Harrisburg still have the power, although a broad-based citizens coalition will watchdog their work. I help run one of the groups in that coalition, Draw the Lines PA. Similar watchdog efforts continue in other states.
Yes, huge matters are on the ballot in November and arcane old gerrymandering might seem far down the list. But if we don’t pay some attention to electing people who are willing to reform election redistricting – or at least let those whom we do elect know the issue is very much on our minds – we run a huge risk.
We should not let this sturdy bug in our democracy’s operating system quietly thwart many of the changes we desperately seek on policing, social justice, education funding, climate change, tax policy and all the momentous rest.
–
In Pennsylvania, to know where the candidates stand on gerrymandering reform, you can go to FairDistrictsPA and click on “Know Before You Vote”. If you live in another state, the Brennan Center for Justice site is a good place to start to find out where your state stands and where to find the local advocates.
–
Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.