Congress’s redistricting wars are mostly over. Much of the commotion surrounding him turns out to be overheated.
Before we look at the results of this cycle, it is worth familiarizing ourselves with this topic.
The first and most critical point is that the equal population requirement across districts severely limits the effects of partisan redistricting. It seems that this requirement was guided by the creators of the Constitution.
The framers required a federal census to be conducted every 10 years to determine how seats in the House of Representatives would be distributed based on population. I believe ours was the first regularly scheduled census in history and one of the first to tie representation to population.
The argument that the framers favored districts of equal population is strengthened by the fact that the number of seats they allocated to the states in 1787 for the First Congress matches quite closely the numbers resulting from the results of the first census in 1790.
In 1842, Congress expressly required the states to create districts of equal population. This provision was abolished in 1929 when Congress adopted an automatic reapportionment formula after each census. However, in 1964, the Supreme Court imposed a “one person, one vote” standard on both congressional and state legislative districts – an outcome that I think the framers would have found appropriate.
But equal populations leave restricted room for political manipulation. To understand why, imagine a square-shaped state with two districts in which the northern half votes 55% Republican and the southern half votes 65% Democratic. If you divide the districts along a north-south line, you get two districts with a 55% Democratic share. The east-west line gives one Republican and one Democratic district. Which plan is fairer? It depends on which party you prefer, right?
What happens if public opinion shifts away from Democrats by 10 points, which happens frequently and may have been the case since November 2020? The north-south line then creates two Republican districts, but the east-west line still creates one district on each side.
Which plan is fairer? You can argue both ways.
The situation in states with multiple districts is not so straightforward, except perhaps New Hampshire, which has not changed the boundaries of its two districts much since 1881, but this time it may, but the principle is the same. The implication is that there is no truly impartial way to draw district boundaries. A redistricting person who has no knowledge of partisan patterns – and no one interested enough in this issue has all that knowledge – will draw lines that favor one side more than the other, and factions of one party more than their rivals.
But as our second hypothesis shows, boundaries may not favor the intended side when opinion changes. Districts full of college graduates who favored Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) in 2012 voted Democratic in 2018 and 2020. Districts full of white non-college voters who favored President Barack Obama in 2012 voted Republican in 2016 and 2020
The redistributors who drew the lines in 2011 and 2012 did not and could not have predicted these changes. Those setting the boundaries in 2021 and 2022 do not and cannot know how the political views of various groups will change by 2030, and perhaps even by 2024.
A party’s vote concentration also makes a difference, putting it at a disadvantage in districts of equal population, for reasons suggested by our hypothetical square state. In recent elections, Democratic voters were largely concentrated in central cities, nice suburbs and college towns, while Republican voters are spread more evenly throughout the rest of the country.
This enabled Donald Trump to win one presidential election and almost win another, despite having an advantage over Democrats in the popular vote. But Republicans didn’t always have the advantage here. George W. Bush and Obama won 51% of the popular vote when re-elected. But Obama’s 51% gave him 332 electoral votes, while Bush gave him only 286.
Democratic demographic concentration means redistricting Democrats must draw more grotesquely shaped districts than Republicans. David Wasserman, a redistricting expert at the Cook Political Report, noted that Florida, Ohio and New York have anti-gerry provisions in their state constitutions, but only Democratic New York had its 2022 redistricting plan rejected for this reason. .
But then look at the maps. The New York Democrats’ plan included many districts as disparate as Elbridge Gerry’s 1812 masterpiece, from which the term “gerrymandering” comes. On the other hand, Republican districts in Florida and Ohio have relatively compact shapes and pristine lines.
Wasserman rightly noted that the New York court’s decision tilted the overall effect of redistricting toward the Republicans. But the Democratic advantage he was among the first to notice, and which I did not anticipate, was developed by partisan state courts in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Moreover, a supposedly nonpartisan commission in California has created a partisan gerrymander as grotesque as anything created by the behind schedule Republican Phillip Burton (D-Calif.). Liberals who shouted that partisan redistricting would mean the end of democracy had little to say about these plans beyond boasting.
Since the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision, neither side’s redistricting advantage has proven to be sustainable. Liberals rarely complained about Democrats’ significant redistricting advantage in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. They only recognized the threat to democracy when Republicans gained similar advantages in 2000 and 2010. The 1990s were a partisan era, and the 2020s seem to be close to that as well.
Neither party had a enormous enough redistricting advantage to maintain a majority in the House for the full inter-census decade from the 1980s, well into Burton’s heyday, who was succeeded by his widow in 1983 , and in 1987, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Despite Republican redistricting plans, she is now serving as Speaker of the House for the eighth of the last 16 years. Partisan redistricting is not a threat to democracy; it is simply a marginal and inevitable factor in the system linking representation to the population.
