American liberals dominate this country’s cultural life. Universities, the news media, the entertainment industry, our cultural institutions—these are populated and run mainly, and in many cases exclusively, by liberals. What liberals, the vast majority of whom identify as Democrats, don’t dominate are our political institutions. Republicans consistently win more local, state, and federal offices than their Democratic correlatives.
This is true for a very simple reason: Modern liberal ideology may appeal to half the electorate in raw numbers, but it doesn’t appeal to many people at all outside densely populated metropolitan areas. In most places in America, people don’t care for it. Democrats refuse to acknowledge this and convince themselves, instead, that the deck is stacked against them. And sometimes it is, if by the “deck” you mean the law and the Constitution. Democratic presidential candidates won the popular vote in 2000 and 2016 but didn’t win in enough states to achieve electoral victory. This has been true in some state legislatures, where Republicans have won more seats in state elections where the Democrats won more votes. The large majorities of Democratic voters crammed into a few metropolitan districts are a political disadvantage.
In some states, Republicans have capitalized on their advantage by the timeworn means of gerrymandering. If you draw one district to include as many voters as possible from party A, you diminish party A’s presence in several neighboring districts and thus make it more likely that party B—your party—will take more seats. Democrats have engaged in plenty of gerrymandering themselves over the years, but with liberals gravitating to more populated areas, the gerrymandering advantage today goes more often to Republicans.
Liberals, as is their wont, have taken to the courts with their complaint. But federal law places the authority to draw district lines with the states, and unless the clear purpose of the redrawing was to divide the electorate along racial lines, there’s not much the courts are likely to do. Partisan gerrymandering is extremely difficult to prove beyond pointing out how a funny a district looks on a map.
In 2016, a U.S. district court did rule, in Gill v. Whitford, that Wisconsin Republicans had drawn districts specifically in order to minimize Democratic victories. Wisconsin Republicans appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. Oral arguments took place on October 3 with a decision likely come next June.
Plaintiffs in these cases usually argue that partisan redistricting has violated their First Amendment right of free association and their Fourteenth Amendment right of equal protection under the law. Drawing a connection between the shape of a legislative district and the rights of free association and equal protection requires the sort of mental gymnastics the Supreme Court’s conservatives are generally unwilling to engage in. But, in the 2004 case Vieth v. Jubelirer, Justice Anthony Kennedy, ruling with the majority that there had been no unconstitutional gerrymandering, explained that he did so only because there was no “clear, manageable, and politically neutral” standard for assessing the partisan fairness and thus constitutionality of a district’s shape.
The Wisconsin plaintiffs have taken Kennedy’s hint and are pitching their entire argument to him. A “clear, manageable, and politically neutral” standard, they say, has now been invented by a pair of political scientists named Eric McGhee and Nicholas Stephanopoulos. Their standard is the “efficiency gap.” If we understand it correctly, this “gap” is the total number of “wasted votes,” or votes cast for losing candidates, divided by the total number of votes cast in all other districts. If the difference is greater than 7 percent, the district lines have been drawn to generate an unfair advantage for one party.
Or something like that.
We’re not sure of the merits of McGhee and Stephanopoulos’s research, though it seems clear that it can’t come close to accounting for the innumerable oddities of any election. It’s often the case, for instance, that a party produces a terrible crop of candidates, and those candidates get wiped out for reasons that have little to do with demographics or the shape of districts. And what about candidates in uncontested or very poorly contested races? Or races in which third party candidates proved competitive? McGhee and Stephanopoulos may in time account for these and related variables, but their sort of poli-sci theorizing—“sociological gobbledygook,” as Chief Justice John Roberts unkindly termed it—doesn’t belong anywhere near a courtroom.
Nobody defends gerrymandering. It is a common but despicable form of hardball politics. If any state party feels that strongly about it, they are free to turn it into a political issue. That almost never happens, though—chiefly, we suspect, because minority party officeholders themselves benefit from it. The gerrymandered seats of incumbents frequently become safe from competition. These are the members of Congress and state legislatures who routinely win by 20 or 30 points. You won’t hear any complaints about gerrymandering from them.
The plaintiff party and their champions in the media would like us to believe that Gill v. Whitford is about the “health of our democracy” or some such. With voters of both parties increasingly “disenfranchised” by districts that lean lopsidedly to one party or another, they argue, many could conclude that their votes don’t matter and lose faith in our political system. They speak of partisan gerrymandering as if it’s a foolproof method for locking in a majority for all time and breezily reference “computers” and “data analytics” to suggest that the practice will become more sophisticated in the future and our electorate in turn more polarized.
Rubbish.
Gerrymandering is no guarantee: Partisan redistricting is mostly guesswork on the part of people with outdated and incomplete data. Nobody understands why voters plump this way or that way in an election, and nobody can predict it with anything close to accuracy. Even after the election’s over, claims by pollsters and consultants to understand what happened consist mainly of blind conjecture and pretentious balderdash. “Data analytics,” remember, told Hillary Clinton’s campaign she could count on Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Democrats undermine their electoral prospects in two major ways. They cluster in high-population districts, and they espouse unpopular views. They want the courts to fix the first problem, but they’d be better off working on the second.
