Redistricting may not be so bad for Democrats after all
Courts are blunting some of the party’s feared losses in states controlled by GOP.
WASHINGTON — Democrats haven’t gotten much good news in recent weeks, but here’s one piece: Redistricting, the once-adecade process of drawing new lines for congressional and legislative districts, is turning out better for them than expected.
Both parties gerrymander when they can, but in this cycle, like the one 10 years ago, Republicans have had more opportunities to do so than Democrats.
In part, that’s because the GOP has full control over more state legislatures. Another big factor is that voters in some large Democratic states — notably California — have taken redistricting out of the hands of lawmakers and given it to independent commissions.
So Democrats started this redistricting cycle at a significant disadvantage and expected the worst.
Instead, the results so far — with more than half the states having set their lines and most of the others well along in the process — have upended projections that line-drawing alone would net Republicans enough seats to erase the small Democratic majority in the House.
When all is done, it’s even possible Democrats could emerge with a slight gain compared with the current maps.
That won’t solve the other problems Democrats face: inflation, the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, the pattern of the party in the White House losing seats in midterm elections.
Odds remain strong that Republicans will regain House control after November’s voting.
But with the final big fights coming soon in two major states — Florida and New York — Democrats are in better position than they counted on when the process began a year ago.
Partisan impact, of course, is not the only reason to care about gerrymandering. The skewing of district lines to favor political interests hurts democracy even if it doesn’t strongly favor one party.
This year’s round of linedrawing has had two notable features, both bad: a drastic reduction in the number of competitive districts and the elimination of districts in Texas, Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina in which Black or Latino voters made up the majority.
A new report from New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice documents the effects of gerrymandering so far.
On the competitive front, the report notes that in the Republican-controlled states that have finished redistricting, 54 districts in 2020 went for former President Trump by more than 15 percentage points. Under the new maps, that number of lopsided Republican districts will soar to 70.
The number of districts with large majorities for President Biden also would go up, although not as much. What disappears are the toss-up districts that either party could win.
Twelve states so far — seven controlled by Republicans and five by Democrats — have passed gerrymanders that would be illegal if the voting rights legislation that Democrats failed to move through the Senate last week were to become law, the center determined.
Lawmakers in Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio on the GOP side and Illinois and New Jersey on the Democratic side have approved the worst gerrymanders, they found.
That list, however, points to one of the big constraints on gerrymandering this year — the willingness of some state courts to act as a check.
The Ohio gerrymander that the report called out got wiped off the books this month when Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled the map violated the state constitution.
There’s a good chance that North Carolina’s Supreme Court will overturn the gerrymander in that state too.
The Ohio court was enforcing what the state’s voters decided in 2015 when they approved a ballot measure that barred the Legislature from redistricting in a way that “unduly favors or disfavors a political party or its incumbents.”
The congressional map drawn by the state’s Republican Legislature broke that rule, the state court said. The justices pointed to the Cincinnati area, for example, which the Legislature had sliced into three districts, diluting its Democratic voters in a sea of rural Republicans.
In a state that tilts slightly to the GOP, the map would have given Republicans 11 heavily favorable seats, compared with two strongly Democratic seats and two competitive ones.
“The evidence overwhelmingly shows that the enacted plan favors the Republican Party and disfavors the Democratic Party to a degree far exceeding what is warranted” by the state’s political geography, Justice Michael Donnelly wrote in his opinion for the court’s 4-3 majority.
Republican officials had argued that the language of the ballot measure was too vague for a court to enforce and should be considered merely “aspirational.”
In 2019, a similar argument persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to rule against efforts to rein in gerrymandering on the federal level.
Such claims “present political questions beyond the reach of federal courts,” wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
But this case was different, the Ohio justices ruled. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t contain language about gerrymandering; thanks to the 2015 ballot initiative, Ohio’s does.
Following the voters’ directive doesn’t require strict proportional representation, the court said. But it does forbid a divvy as out of whack as the one the state Legislature approved.
Notably, the court ruling was bipartisan. Ohio’s justices are elected on partisan ballots, and the court has four Republican justices. But Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, joined the three Democrats to strike down the gerrymandered map.
In a separate case, the court also struck down the new map for the state Legislature. In both, it ordered up new versions. On the congressional level, that probably will net Democrats two seats.
The impact could go further because the Ohio ruling may influence other state high courts.
The next test will come in North Carolina, where the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a gerrymander more extreme than the one in Ohio.
North Carolina is more evenly divided than Ohio. But the new map would create 10 heavily Republican districts, one competitive seat and just three Democratic ones, down from the current five. The North Carolina high court, which has a Democratic majority, is scheduled to hear arguments about the maps on Feb. 2.
State courts can also have an effect even before they rule.
The most important example of that comes from Florida, one of the two big states yet to act.
Republicans hold a 16-11 majority in the Florida congressional delegation under a map produced after lengthy court fights.
The state gained one seat as a result of the 2020 census. The state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has pushed his own map, an aggressive gerrymander that would probably increase his party’s share to 20 seats.
So far, the state Senate has ignored DeSantis’ plan in favor of one that would produce about a 14-8 division of safe seats plus six competitive ones. The state House has been working on two plans that would provide more Republican seats than the Senate’s map, but probably fewer than the governor’s map.
Both houses of the Florida Legislature have Republican majorities, but like Ohio, Florida has a voterpassed constitutional provision limiting gerrymandering. No one can be sure how aggressively the state’s conservative Supreme Court would enforce the limits, but the prospect of more litigation has been one factor holding lawmakers back.
Then there are states where reform efforts have failed to restrain partisanship, notably New York, which is for Democrats what Florida could be for Republicans. Voters there passed an initiative in 2014 to create an independent redistricting commission, but it has proved toothless: The Legislature can reject the commission’s maps and draw its own. Gov. Kathy Hochul and other Democratic leaders have made clear that’s their plan.
Republicans hold eight of New York’s 27 seats. The state lost one seat after the census, and some Democrats have pushed for a map that would cut the GOP to as few as three seats in the new 26-member delegation.
Even as Democrats in Washington have pushed to impose new limits on gerrymandering, their co-partisans in Albany have moved to exploit the current system.
How aggressively they do so will go a long way to determining where the nationwide balance of power ends up.