By Chris Satullo

Pennsylvania has a new congressional map.

Michigan has a model the rest of the land should follow.

Ohio has a donnybrook.

And, nationally, the way Republicans are whining and weeping over the unfolding results of congressional redistricting makes me think of my 6-year-old grandson.

Wait, let me be fair to little Brian. In the last year, he’s grown up a lot, so that when he loses at one of the games he loves so much, like Uno or Life or Jenga, he just smiles, shrugs and says, “Good game, Nanny and Pop-Pop. Can we play again?”

A few years ago, if he lost, it was all trembling lips and teary eyes. And indulgent grandparents that we are, against better judgment, we’d stack the deck and ignore the rules so he could “win.”

So, yeah, that’s the Brian, the 4-year-old one, that the Republicans remind me of.

As state court after state court rejects the GOP’s efforts to gerrymander the nation the way it did in 2011, Republican mouthpieces like Chris Christie (yeah, that guy) decry the courts as “partisan rubber stamps” and vow revenge against judges who thwart the party’s biased will.

Ten years ago, the last time election maps were drawn, the Republicans clutched the mapping pen (or mouse, really) in most of the key battleground states that determine control of Congress. They rarely let Democrats, or the general public, get a glimpse of what they were up to before they rammed wildly partisan election maps – for Congress and state legislatures – down the voters’ throats.

They got the leverage to do that through a very smart political strategy, adopted after Barack Obama shocked them in 2008, of pouring money into state elections in key battleground states. This was for the express purpose of gaining control of statehouses so they could gerrymander the heck out of the maps set to be drawn inside those buildings in 2011.

For much of the last decade, Republicans enjoyed winning way more statehouse and congressional seats than their overall share of the vote could justify, thanks to the skewed, pro-GOP election maps they concocted.

Old saying in politics: “Pigs get fed; hogs get slaughtered.” In state after state – and nowhere more than in my home state of Pennsylvania – GOP mapmakers used sophisticated software to squeeze out every last electoral advantage, frequently producing bizarrely shaped election districts whose only logic was partisan. Some became widely mocked emblems of out-of-control gerrymandering.

This overreach produced an alarmed, outraged reaction among many voters. They responded by filing lawsuits, proposing independent commissions that would take the mapping mouse out of incumbents’ hands, and launching public education campaigns so that informed voters would never sit still for such nonsense again.

And you know what? This time, they’re not sitting still. In Michigan, a feisty millennial named Katie Fahey led an astonishing grassroots campaign to create a new independent commission, winning a state referendum resoundingly despite a flood of dark money opposing her.

In Ohio, reformers got a less sweeping win than Fahey’s, but the Byzantine checks and balances they created have been holding GOP gerrymanders at bay, thanks largely to the courage of Ohio’s Republican chief justice, who keeps providing the key vote to reject state and congressional election maps that drip with favoritism to the R’s. 

Stay tuned on that one.

Now to North Carolina. In 2011 a Republican lawmaker in charge of the mapping process actually said out loud that the only reason he did a map giving his team a 14-2 district advantage (in a purple state) was he couldn’t figure out how to get to 15-1. And Republican lawmakers were back at it this time.

A state appeals court, however, rejected the GOP gerrymander, which looked to lock in a 10-to-4 advantage for the R’s. The court imposed a map where the GOP seems to have the upper hand in eight districts and the Dems in six. In other hands, in a state with 36 percent Democrats, 33 percent independents and 30 percent Republicans, it’s a fairer map. (The way Dems tend to cluster in urban areas, while Republicans spread out over more land, often gives the GOP a slight built-in advantage in congressional elections that fair maps should not try to offset fully.)

In Virginia, which also created a redistricting commission, that bipartisan panel stalemated, throwing the issue to its Supreme Court, whose special masters produced a solid, even-steven map.

Now to my beloved Pennsylvania:

On Wednesday, the state Supreme Court – which had earlier drop-kicked into oblivion the GOP-friendly congressional map passed on party lines and promptly vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf – chose a new map.

The court had before it a menu of 13 options, several of which were a tribute to the surging engagement and sophistication of average voters around this issue. In a Feb. 18 hearing, the justices, with their 5-2 Democratic tilt, made quite a show of expressing their displeasure that this task had been dumped on them by the inability of Harrisburg partisans to reach a compromise. (Basically, the justices are fretting about Republican threats to revise state judicial elections into a system with gerrymandered regional districts.)

The hearing showed how far both public and judicial understanding of election map-making nuances have advanced since 2011. It was almost a master class in things like compactness metrics, partisan tilt metrics and how to think about the vague but important term “community of interest.”

The map finally chosen is a good one, but not the best the justices had available. It was drawn by a Stanford professor, just like the new map this same court imposed in 2018 after invalidating the GOP’s crazy gerrymander of 2011. This map’s big claim was that it altered the 2018 districts the least of any of the maps under consideration. (The old map is a dead letter, because the state lost one congressional seat in the 2020 Census.) 

The chosen map, though, has more partisan DNA than other options. While it was presented by a group of citizen petitioners, they were represented by a powerhouse Democratic election lawyer.

In my utterly biased opinion, the justices had at least two better choices. One was a fine, fair map drawn by a group of Pennsylvania-based mathematicians and data scientists. The best choice, again by my completely biased lights, was the one from Draw the Lines PA, a citizen-driven anti-gerrymandering initiative that I helped found in 2017 but am not actively involved with right now. Draw the Lines ran a series of public mapping contests, putting into the hands of ordinary voters the same computing tools that partisan pols use to craft their twisty lines. The contests showed that even 14-year-olds could draw maps that were clearly better across all measures of fairness and quality than the insane crap politicians have been giving us for decades.

Thousands worked on more than 1,500 maps that were submitted to the contests. Draw the Lines formed a group of about 40 of its very best citizen mappers and set them to work jointly crafting the map that was submitted to the court. The math-nerds’ map and the Draw the Lines map were similar in terms of quality metrics. Both had the virtue of being made in Pennsylvania by Pennsylvanians.

Still, the map the court chose does provide the state’s voters with a fairer framework for congressional elections than anything the pols in Harrisburg have concocted in decades.

Republicans nationwide are growing apoplectic because:

1. The unfolding results of congressional redistricting are not producing the built-in advantages to which they’ve become accustomed and…
2. The party’s new official stance is that any election their candidate loses is, by definition, a fraud, an outrage and a sham.

Granted, fairness demands that I mention this: In some states where Democratic pols do hold the pen, like New York, they are also gerrymandering their little hearts out. But when someone like Chris Christie accuses these Dems of hypocrisy, that reaches a mega-level of hypocrisy my storehouse of adjectives cannot describe.

Here’s how the national scorecard looks, according to FiveThirtyEight.com’s indispensable redistricting package:

With some maps still up in the air, so far the Dems look to have 177 districts that either tilt or lean their way. The Republicans have 160. And 31 seats look to be intensely competitive.

The national party affiliation breakdown: The latest Gallup Poll has 46 percent of Americans identifying or leaning Democratic; 43 percent Republican.  Hmmm, these midterms might be a fair fight after all.

So why the big change from the blatant congressional gerrymander of 2011 to the more praise-worthy results now unfolding? I’d submit that it was American voters in historic numbers taking notice of what was being done to them. They got educated, got busy and got loud, to a level some lawmakers and many judges could not help but notice – and, in the end, heed.

The gains in good process and fair results are much more dramatic in some states than others – and they are fragile everywhere. But they form a hopeful story about the future of our threatened democracy. Those are in short supply these days, so I cling to the ones I can find. So, perhaps, should you.

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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