Democrats have been buoyed by their gains in Tuesday’s midterm elections, believing they have a chance to gerrymander electoral districts to give themselves an enduring advantage after 2020.
Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said in an NPR interview that redistricting with a slate of newly elected governors could help the party big-time in redistricting over the next decade.
“We got crushed as a party in 2011 redistricting, and many of the seats to win the House this time were gerrymandered seats,” McAuliffe said in a Wednesday interview with NPR. “We’ll be able to stop that from ’21 to ’31.”
Voters in Michigan, Missouri, and Colorado on Tuesday easily passed ballot measures to change the way political districts are drawn. A similar Utah voter proposal clings to a narrow lead. Each aimed to end what critics call the anti-democratic practice of politicians choosing voters rather than vice versa.
The political line-drawing process has already yielded tangible benefits for Democrats. In Pennsylvania, a state Supreme Court decision this year forced redrawing on the lines by a neutral, court-appointed arbiter. Democrats ended up winning at least four new seats in the 18-member delegation — three new lawmakers and incumbent Rep. Conor Lamb, who beat a Republican House colleague in a redrawn Western Pennsylvania seat.
The Pennsylvania wins played a significant role in House Democrats winning at least 30 seats overall, more than enough to hand them the House majority.
House Democrats, though, may face a downside from the transfer of line-drawing power from politicians to independent commissions. That’s because they had a pretty good election night 2018 in some states where it’s about to kick in.
Through modern mapping technology, the longstanding practice — the commonly known term of gerrymandering goes back more than 200 years — has been raised to a high art. Before the 2018 ballot measures passed, lawmakers in 37 states had the power to draw congressional district lines. And they haven’t been shy about using it in states where one party — usually Republicans — controls all the levers of power.
Democrats contended they’d been effectively frozen out of fair competition for congressional seats by Republican-drawn gerrymanders in large-population states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Virginia, and they’ve talked up redistricting reform as a remedy.
Election Day’s results have cheered up Democrats. In Michigan, Democratic nominee Gretchen Whitmer gave her party its first gubernatorial win in a dozen years. Democrats also made significant inroads in the state legislature — trimming a 63-47 Republican majority to 58-52 in the next legislative session. Over in the state Senate, Democrats pared a 27-10 Republican majority (with one vacancy) to 22-16 come January 2019 .
That puts Democrats within striking distance of winning unified power in state government — and power to redraw district lines more favorable to the party. But the redistricting ballot measure that just passed strips them of any influence to redraw the lines.
In Colorado, Democrats won back the state Senate majority they lost in 2014. They already control the state House and held on to the governorship, with Democratic nominee Jared Polis winning easily.
That means Democrats are in a prime position to redraw legislative and congressional lines to their favor in the next round of redistricting after the 2020 census. But thanks to Centennial State voters, they’ll no longer have that power — not quite the electoral panacea McAuliffe and other Democrats had hoped for.
