Redistricting reform needs to go national
In a strange reversal of the Founding Fathers’ vision of Congress, members of the House of Representatives, designed to be closest to the people and elected every two years, face less real competition for their seats than senators. In 2014 and 2016, House incumbents’ re-election rates were 95 percent and 97 percent, respectively, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and the figure hasn’t dropped below 85 percent for at least half a century. Fortunately, the Supreme Court may be embarking on a belated effort to draw some boundaries on the partisan gerrymandering that contributes to such results.
A striking illustration was recently provided by the election of Doug Jones, the Democrat who won a close Senate race in deeply Republican Alabama while somehow, as one analyst pointed out, losing six of the state’s seven contorted congressional districts. The only district that went for Jones encompasses much of rural western Alabama’s African American population while sprouting conspicuous tentacles that draw in predominantly black areas of urban Montgomery and Birmingham. That renders neighboring districts more white and conservative while concentrating an inordinate share of reliably Democratic voters in a single constituency.
Unlike the immovable state lines that determine the electorate in Senate races, House districts are redrawn every 10 years, in most cases by state legislatures inevitably interested in protecting incumbents and maximizing the power of the ruling party. While California and a few other states have addressed the problem by delegating redistricting to independent bodies, partisan gerrymandering continues to distort the composition of Congress and legislatures; in 2012, for example, Democrats won the nationwide majority of the House vote but ended up in the minority by more than 30 seats.
Maryland Democrats probably have little in common with Alabama Republicans, but the congressional districts they drew reveal remarkably similar goals. They approached the most recent redistricting with what they called the “7-1 plan,” determined to break one of the state’s two remaining Republican-represented districts. Instead of the “packing” used to crowd a surplus of Alabama Democrats into one district, they employed “cracking,” diluting western Maryland’s Republican vote by splitting it between districts. This had the advantage of giving Democrats seven of the state’s eight congressional seats and the disadvantage of bringing them to the attention of the Supreme Court.
The court’s recent decision to hear a challenge to Maryland’s redistricting was an unusual step, given that it heard arguments in a similar case, against Wisconsin Republicans, in October. That suggests the court’s long neglect of partisan gerrymandering — as opposed to racial gerrymandering, which it has grappled with — could end soon.
Granted, it’s easier to ridicule convoluted districts than to devise an objective standard for judging them. But besides common sense, the court has a number of useful gauges at its disposal. Unmanipulated districts tend to minimize geometric complexity and hew more closely to existing boundaries between counties and municipalities. One recently developed measure, known as the efficiency gap, quantifies the level of gamesmanship according to the difference between a party’s share of votes and its share of seats.
By striking down politicians’ most brazen efforts to choose their voters rather than being chosen by them, the court can encourage more states to follow California’s lead and remove much of the partisanship from the process.