District maps cross the line
Illinois Democrats on Monday released their proposed legislative district maps. They are a textbook example of why partisan gerrymandering is a cancer eating away at our democracy.
Every gerrymander employs the same two tactics: dividing opposing-party voters into digestible districts and packing them together to create supermajority enclaves so they waste votes on a seat they would never lose. The new Illinois maps use these techniques so masterfully that they would make any practitioner of the dark redistricting arts proud.
Consider state House maps in the Chicago area. Democratic map wizards take thin slices of heavily Democratic precincts in the city and string them out, one on top of the other, to drown marginally Republican territory in the suburbs. This slicing is so obscene that election guru Sean Trende dubbed it “the baconmander.” That’s not a tasty dish for disenfranchised GOP voters.
Democrats also packed partisans of both parties into safe seats. House District 96, for example, takes Democratic parts of Springfield and strings them together with similar regions of Decatur to create a safe blue seat where none should exist. Republicans in neighboring rural areas are meanwhile packed into GOP-vote sinks such as House District 116.
The new maps are so brazen that progressive elections analyst Drew Savicki found they would create up to 85 districts expected to be Democratic in the 118-seat state House, even though only 69 Democrats would be elected in a map that fairly reflected the proportional strength of each party. So while Democrats would naturally win a majority because they dominate the state, the Democratic plan would net them nearly 80% of the seats from less than 60% of the votes.
It’s true that Republicans also pass egregious gerrymanders that use all the same techniques. I focus on the Illinois Democratic plan because it is the first to be finished after data from the 2020 census was fully released in August, and because it demonstrates that no party has a lock on political virtue.
Conservative election analyst Dan McLaughlin has found that Democrats have received a larger share of U.S. House seats than their share of votes cast in every one of their majorities going back to 1938. Some of that is because of voting patterns in the Deep South, or the tendency for majorities to win more than a proportional number of seats in the winner-takes-all, single-member district system used in the United States. Some of it, however, is because Democrats have amplified their power through gerrymandering for so long that it became mere background noise. Widespread Republican abuse of the system is a relatively recent occurrence.
Stopping gerrymandering is something democracy needs, but it will be hard to accomplish. Many advocates of good governance want courts to step in, but that’s inherently problematic. There’s no obvious objective standard that courts could use to judge whether a map is fair, as there is with official population counts that empower the Supreme Court’s “one person, one vote” standard. A local candidate’s popularity, or whether both parties decide to target a particular district, can have a great effect on an election’s results, rendering dubious any simple comparison of vote share to seats gained.
There’s also a problem with politicization of the courts. Nineteen states elect their Supreme Court justices, six in partisan votes. Another 19 states subject justices to retention elections to stay on the courts. It should be no surprise, then, that Democrats worked to elect majorities to the highest courts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina in the 2010s, and that those majorities then ruled that GOP-passed district maps were unconstitutional gerrymanders. In most states, getting the courts involved in redistricting simply shifts partisan game-playing to another forum.
The obvious solution is for both parties to agree to disarm. At the federal level, that would require passage of a law mandating some type of nonpartisan commission to draw congressional district lines. That idea is one provision of House Resolution 1, the Democrats’ election bill. Democrats would probably need to agree to forestall implementation of that legislation until after the 2030 census to have any chance of getting Republican support, but that might be worth it.
Alternatively, both parties could agree to adopt a constitutional amendment removing congressional and perhaps even state legislative redistricting from state legislatures, and installing them in a special, bipartisan body.
Every other major democracy that elects representatives via districts uses nonpartisan entities to draw the lines. For the sake of our democracy, the United States should do so, too.