Gerrymandering for Democracy

Sorry, but it's really the only way

Michigan's notorious old 14th District (2013-2023), drawn after the 2010 census to squeeze two districts' worth of Democratic voters into one district. I guess that would be fine with the Supreme Court since it was partisan in intent, though it also concentrated the state's Black, Arab, and Bangladeshi voters, but the newly founded Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission got rid of it after 2020, creating a map that has divided the House delegation into 6 Democratic and 7 Republican seats.

Got a somewhat weird perspective on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais v. Louisiana and the “race to the bottom” it has sparked from a piece by The New York Times’s Nick Corasaniti, who was also on the radio talking about it the other morning:

In Florida, Republicans could hold 24 of 28 congressional seats after they approved a new map this week that was drawn in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s decision. The math is stark: In a state where Vice President Kamala Harris won 43 percent of the vote two years ago, the G.O.P. could control 86 percent of House seats.

Democratic state lawmakers mentioned that lopsided statistic often on Wednesday as they tried unsuccessfully to stop the new map.

“You think that this is just about preserving a Republican majority in the midterm,” State Representative Fentrice Driskell of Tampa, the House minority leader, told her Republican colleagues. “I stopped by to tell you today that you are destroying democracy with this vote.”

Yet Democrats did something similar in Virginia last week, most likely giving their party 10 of the state’s 11 Congressional seats, or 90 percent of the congressional delegation, in a state where Mr. Trump won 46 percent of the vote.

Like, “Yet the Ukrainian military has been doing something similar in Russian-occupied territory and even Russia itself, targeting Russian forces with all the ferocity they can muster.” Don’t they know there’s a war on?

The point was amplified on the radio when a caller from Virginia emphasized the difference between Democrats in California and Virginia calling for voters to ratify their redistricting proposals in referenda while Republican legislatures in Texas and Florida and Louisiana and Alabama have shut the voters out of the decision (a similar Republican effort in Missouri was thwarted by a campaign calling for a referendum, which will apparently take place in November, though it remains unclear six months away which map they’ll be using for the congressional races in that election, while the courageous refusal of Republicans in the Indiana State Senate to follow Trump’s command has led to his attempt to throw them out in tomorrow’s primary, where his people have spent upwards of $4.5 million).

At least we were doing it democratically, said the caller. But Corasaniti poohpoohed that: a three-point margin in the vote leading to a 10 to 1 distribution of the seats didn’t sound very democratic to him.

Well, hell. Ukraine avoiding killing Russian civilians and treating POW’s generously and not kidnapping children doesn’t make them not at war, either. It just makes their war technique more civilized than the Russians’. The same kind of thing goes for Democrats; they understand it’s a war, and they intend to win—11 to one is better than 7 to 5—but they intend to carry it on with respect for common decency, unlike Republicans in Florida, where the government is openly defying polls and the state constitution to push his plan through, and the voters must be allowed to weigh in.

The other thing about that, which I think deserves much more attention than it’s gotten, is that the Democratic maps aren’t meant to be permanent. Democrats are fully committed to what’s currently known as the Redistricting Reform Act of 2025 (bicamerally introduced last fall by two Californians, Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Sen. Alex Padilla), but has been around in some form since 2019, when it passed the House with a bunch of other provisions but was stopped in the Senate as the For the People Act—calling for a ban on mid-decade redistricting and establishment of independent redistricting commissions in every state to take over the task from state legislatures after each decennial census, of the kind that already exist in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, New York (if just barely), and Washington.

While Republicans are universally opposed, on the specious grounds that such a thing would interfere with the states’ constitutional “rights” (the usual mask for efforts to take away individuals’ civil rights), but their aim is clearly to gerrymander themselves a permanent majority in the current struggle, as Trump explained with reference to his own attempt (which was too much even for Republican senators) to force all states to demand voters show up in person, with proof of U.S. citizenship:

“All voters must show proof of citizenship in order to vote,” he says. “No mail-in ballots, except for illness, disability, military or travel [you’d be required to include a copy of your citizenship documentation with request for an absentee ballot].”

He claimed that, if the bill were to pass, Democrats “probably won’t win an election for 50 years and maybe longer.”

One of the strongest arguments for electing large Democratic majorities to Congress this November is exactly that: paradoxically, Democrats must gerrymander now, as ruthlessly as they can, to be in a position to end the gerrymander forever.