Politicians begin remap of a changing Georgia

ATLANTA — Georgia has changed: It added 1 million residents over the past decade, saw shrinking white and rural populations, and witnessed Democrats winning statewide elections for the first time in over 20 years.

Those realities will drive decisions by the Republican-controlled General Assembly when it starts redrawing the state’s political maps next week in an intense and partisan process that will help determine Georgia’s representation in Congress and the state Capitol for the next decade.

At stake is power over every policy decision affecting Georgia, including taxes, voting rights, education, abortion and gun control.

The special redistricting session that begins Wednesday at the Gold Dome will be filled with contentious debates as Republicans try to preserve their majorities in a state whose voters are nearly evenly divided between Democrats and the GOP.

While Georgia has diversified over the past 40 years, its representation doesn’t reflect those shifts.

White legislators make up more than two-thirds of the General Assembly in a state that’s just 50% white, leaving people of color without proportional representation. A majority of white voters in Georgia typically votes for Republicans, and over 90% of Black voters generally support Democrats, according to exit polls.

Census data shows that nonwhites accounted for all of Georgia’s 11% population growth since 2010, but redistricting could prevent them from winning more seats in next year’s elections. Meanwhile, the state’s white population has slightly declined, and fewer and fewer people live in rural Georgia, where most of the General Assembly’s leadership resides.

“We’re in a state where people of color and the white community are very polarized” between Democrats and Republicans, said Karuna Ramachandran, campaign manager for the Georgia Redistricting Alliance, an organization advocating for racial minorities in redistricting. “What we’re going to see is a very partisan process to benefit the majority party.”

Lawmakers are required to reshape political lines so each congressional district in Georgia has roughly the same number of voters. The same is true for each state Senate district and each state House district. Districts have to be contiguous, and lawmakers should try to avoid “unnecessarily” drawing two or more incumbents into the same district, according to rules approved by the House and Senate earlier this year.

But regardless of those guidelines, the process often results in gerrymandering, in which legislators choose their voters by shaping districts in a way that maximizes their chances of re-election. They won’t stop there. The special session will also include hearings over whether Atlanta’s Buckhead community should become its own city, along with potential fights over the rise in violent crime and posturing by legislators preparing for next year’s elections.

At least 11 lawmakers have announced campaigns for higher office, and a few others are considering doing so. All 236 General Assembly seats and the state’s 14 congressional seats will be on the ballot in 2022.

While Georgia’s electorate was nearly evenly split between the two political parties in last year’s elections, Republicans, who hold 58% of the General Assembly seats, will be scrambling to solidify their control by redistricting Georgia in a way that stalls recent gains by Democrats, who attempted to do the same thing when they held power for decades.

“It’s an existential crisis for the Republican Party in the sense that the state is changing and they want to continue to be the dominant force in the Legislature,” said Benjamin Taylor, a political science professor at Kennesaw State University. “If they can get it done in a way the courts give an OK to, that will help them maintain power for some time to come. If they don’t do a very good job, then they could see their power ebb away much more quickly.”

Republicans say they will follow the law, making maps that are nondiscriminatory with equal populations in each district. But as the majority party, Republicans have the votes to pass what they want.

“Taking into account that they are the majority party, that’s not unfair. That’s politics,” said Ben Harbin, a Republican who was in the House for over 20 years, until 2015. “Maps are going to be more favorable to the majority party, but that’s the nature of this beast.”

Legislative leaders so far haven’t unveiled proposals for state legislative districts, and just days before the redistricting session is set to begin, the House hasn’t published a map for Georgia’s congressional seats.

But it’s likely that neither Republicans nor Democrats will be happy with the final maps — with some of the more conservative members of the GOP wanting their party members to go further to pick up additional seats versus trying to solidify their hold on the ones they already have.

Also, despite the rules approved by the chambers, some lawmakers on both sides will be drawn out of their current districts, raising the likelihood they’ll have to run against a colleague in 2022 if they want to stay in the General Assembly.