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Virginia Democrats, in a rank partisan power-grab, just voted to replace the current fair and bipartisan congressional map with a naked gerrymander that will give Democrats 10 of the state’s 11 seats, despite Democrats having only about 55% of the state’s voters.
How can Democrats, the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy, justify a mid-decade partisan gerrymander? They point to Texas, where Republicans just did the same sort of thing.
VIRGINIA REDISTRICTING AND RAW POLITICAL POWER
Yet Democrats claim they are not merely going tit-for-tat. They claim they have the moral high ground. They seem to believe gerrymandering started with Republicans (it didn’t). They claim that this spat of mid-decade redistricting began with Republicans — that’s arguably true, depending on how you count their New York shenanigans. Also, they claim that Democrats, and only Democrats, are trying to ban gerrymandering.
Democrats have brought three “gerrymander bans” to the floors of Congress for a vote in the past five years. All three have failed along partisan lines. This shows, they argue, that Republicans don’t oppose gerrymandering, they only oppose Democrat gerrymandering. This allows Dems to paint their gerrymanders as turnabout that is fair play.
How seriously should we take this argument? Can one actually ban gerrymandering? What would that look like?
The problem
Voters are supposed to choose their representatives, but gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their voters.
Naked gerrymanders, such as the new Virginia map, are also undemocratic because they carve up states in an unnatural way. In this new map, four districts originate inside the Beltway in very blue and relatively dense suburbs of D.C. These districts then stretch across many counties into rural parts of Virginia.
The new 8th District runs from Arlington and Alexandria, more than 100 miles down the Potomac River, nearly to colonial Williamsburg. The 1st District runs from Arlington down to Fredericksburg before taking a 90-degree turn and reaching to the mouth of the York River. The 7th District runs from Arlington and Falls Church southwest toward Charlottesville before it forks off — one arm reaching toward Richmond and the other banging against West Virginia. It looks like a red lobster with a blue tail.
The people of Augusta County, Virginia, primarily employed in manufacturing things such as HVAC units and Hershey’s products, do not have much in common with the lobbyists and State Department bureaucrats of North Arlington, and so this district basically disenfranchises the rural voters.
Partisan gerrymanders also often create a ton of safe districts, which makes representatives immune to democratic accountability. In the 1998 elections, 164 congressional districts were competitive, according to the Cook Political Report, compared to 23 districts in the most recent election. Increased precision in gerrymandering is a major cause.
So if gerrymandering is bad, why is it spreading? The short answer: What’s bad for democracy is often good for politicians and party bosses. Virginia Democrats simply want more Democrats in Congress, just as Texas Republicans want more Republicans in Congress.
Also, if a red state were to stop gerrymandering, that wouldn’t stop the neighboring blue state from gerrymandering. Nobody wants to unilaterally disarm.
The common-sense answer then is a national ban on gerrymandering. If you follow gerrymandering debates online, you’ll see everywhere the claim that Democrats have tried exactly that.
The truth is less flattering to Democrats.
Gerrymandering bans
“As Republicans complain about Virginia restricting redistricting,” posted Democratic pollster Matt McDermott, “a reminder that Democrats tried to enact a national ban on partisan gerrymandering. Every single Republican voted no.” McDermott then posted the 2020 House roll call vote for the For the People Act.
It’s true Republicans all voted Nay on this bill, and it’s true that Democrats called it a “gerrymander ban.” But that ignores half the story.
The For the People Act was 884 pages long, and only about 10% of it addressed redistricting. The rest of the bill invalidated state voter-ID laws, while mandating extended early voting and no-excuse mail-in voting. Everything on the Democrats’ election wish list was in this bill, which passed the House along party lines but fell in the Senate.
Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD) was the chief sponsor of the bill. He happened to be the beneficiary of the single worst gerrymander in the United States at the time.
Sarbanes was first elected to Congress in 2006 in one of the most absurdly gerrymandered districts in the U.S. It spanned three counties plus four distinct and basically unconnected parts of Baltimore.
Then, Annapolis Democrats made the gerrymander worse, and Sarbanes’ district became arguably the single-worst gerrymander in the U.S. — all so that Democrats could have 7 of the state’s 8 congressional districts. This 3rd District, which Sarbanes represented for a decade, was popularly known as the “pterodactyl,” but that name didn’t come close to describing the district’s absurdity.
Sarbanes’ district from 2012 to 2022 reached from north of Baltimore to Annapolis’s historic waterfront to Montgomery County’s innermost suburbs, and even reached inside the Capitol Beltway. These communities were connected by fine filaments, and some parts were contiguous only by sailboat.
I could find no record of Sarbanes ever criticizing his state legislature for this gerrymander.
Even if you set aside Sarbanes’ hypocrisy and the nearly 800 pages of unrelated liberal pipe dreams, the Democrats’ “gerrymandering ban” was anything but a nonpartisan reform.
The bill laid out a slew of rules for a state to follow in redistricting and prioritized them. After the obvious constitutional requirements, the top three priorities focus on race-based voting — the kind of grouping that has historically led to the worst gerrymanders.
North Carolina’s 12th District in the 1990s was a perfect example. The state legislature’s first congressional map had only one black-majority district, and the Justice Department, under authority from the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ordered the state to draw a second majority-black district.
The legislature did this by connecting Durham to Charlotte by means of spindly lines that crossed 11 counties. It’s perhaps the worst gerrymander in U.S. history, and it was required by exactly the sort of race-first line-drawing Democrats now want to amplify.
The very last consideration in Democrats’ “gerrymandering bans” is respect for “communities of interest,” where once again, the bill prioritizes “racial” and “ethnic” communities over others. At the very bottom of the list of considerations, the bill says a state “may, in certain circumstances, include political subdivisions such as counties, municipalities, tribal lands and reservations, or school districts.”
So keeping cities, towns, and counties whole gets the very lowest priority in this “gerrymandering ban.” The worst offenses of the Virginia gerrymander — divvying up the populous blue counties and lumping them in with parts of spacious red counties — would be just fine under this bill.
The Democrats’ 2022 Freedom to Vote Act included language similar to the 2021 bill, but with a more detailed effort to prevent extreme partisan skews. Notably, that bill explicitly gave legislatures permission to use partisan voting patterns only in pursuance of creating majority-minority districts.
Democrats have introduced various stand-alone “redistricting reforms” in the current Congress. Some of these Democratic proposals require nonpartisan commissions to draw the lines and ban mid-decade redistricting. All of them prioritize racial gerrymandering over any other criteria when drawing districts.
It’s reasonable, then, for Republicans to oppose these Democratic bills. But what would a fair, bipartisan redistricting reform look like?
What might work
One major problem with gerrymandering reform is that nobody can agree on what a gerrymander is, and the factors that make a good, fair map sometimes clash.
Most amateur commentary on social media lays out a simple criteria: Does the partisan makeup of the congressional delegation match the partisan makeup of the state? If the state votes 40% Republican, then roughly 40% of the state’s districts should lean Republican.
But just as partisan power-grabs such as Texas and Virginia require ridiculous sprawling districts, requiring partisan proportionality would also often require that.
Good congressional maps have compact districts that respect county, city, and town lines. But under current federal court rulings, districts must have basically identical populations. This makes it harder to respect municipal boundaries.
VIRGINIA DEMOCRATS AGREE TO NEW MAP THAT GIVES REPUBLICANS JUST ONE SEAT
So here is what Republicans could propose for a redistricting reform:
- Require states to respect existing county, city, and town borders. Many states have rules like this. The rule has the virtue of generally (though not perfectly) keeping people with similar interests together. The bigger benefit is that this constraint makes it harder (not impossible) for partisans to draw an unfair gerrymander.
- Encourage compactness. If a more compact map (that respects county lines as much) would yield less partisan imbalance, that should count as evidence that the less compact map is a partisan gerrymander.
- End mid-decade redistricting. Expedite any legal challenges to a given map, and make it illegal for states to redistrict mid-decade except in the most extreme circumstances.
- Make all Voting Rights Act rules on redistricting subordinate to the above rules.
- Allow districts to vary in population by up to 10% if necessary with respect to existing boundaries.
It’s impossible to end gerrymandering. A law that did the above would limit gerrymandering. Incorporating nonpartisan commissions might also help.
“Just like the Founders had the idea that men were flawed creatures, and so the best thing you can do is try to create limits,” redistricting expert Sean Trende said. “I think the same is true of gerrymandering. There’s always a way to game the system, and so the best thing to do is place limits on it.”
