Democrats and the 2021 Redistricting
Just how bad a position are Democrats in for the 2021 redistricting cycle? I explore and analyze what actually is the position that we find ourselves in within the backdrop of REDMAP.
After the 2010 Red Wave, Republicans held control of a massive amount of power at the state legislative and gubernatorial level – a level of power that they had not seen since the 1950s at least. This was all engineered by the Chris Jankowski-led Republican State Leadership Committee. David Daley’s book Ratf**ked details how Jankowski was devastated about the massive back-to-back blue waves that Democrats rode to near-unparalleled power in 2006 and 2008. Jankowski, however, in a move marked by sheer political genius, did not let this get to him. He immediately went back to the drawing board and came up with what came to be known as the Redistricting Majority Project, also known as REDMAP. Jankowski spent tens of millions of dollars at the state legislative and gubernatorial level to win chambers and governorships that Republicans had not held in decades (in some cases, up to a century or more, such as winning the North Carolina House and Senate, which Republicans had not held since Reconstruction), and they succeeded even beyond their wildest dreams.
The goal of REDMAP was to aggressively gerrymander the electoral maps for both the US House as well as the state legislatures. They accomplished this and then some. Republicans used their unified control in a whole bunch of states to draw what Jankowski referred to as “blue wave proof” maps – maps which would not yield Democratic majorities even in the strongest of Blue Waves. They largely succeeded. Following the 2010 redistricting, Republicans held on to the US House for eight of the ten years, only giving it up in the massive and nearly historically unprecedented D+9 Blue Wave that hit the nation in 2018 (the strongest one the nation had seen since the post-Watergate 1974 Blue Wave) as anti-Trump sentiment riled up Democrats and moderate Republicans to come out and put a check on the extremely unpopular president. With the 2018 Senate map being all but impossible for Democrats to yield a majority, the entire Democratic machine at all levels put its power to break the 2010 Republican gerrymanders and flip the US House. It happened.
However, the 2018 US House Blue Wave which broke the “blue wave proof” 2010 Republican gerrymanders obscure the fact that gerrymanders at the state legislative level from Wisconsin to North Carolina to Ohio to Florida (and many, many others) held and that Republicans hold outsized control of state legislatures all over the country. Wisconsin is so heavily gerrymandered even today that in the 2018 Blue Wave, despite Democrats winning the popular vote for the Wisconsin Assembly (lower house) by over eight points, Republicans held on to 64% of the seats. The Republican Party and its actors are absolutely shameless, and they do not believe in democracy - that much is obvious. Even today, Republicans hold outsized political influence at the state legislative level in a lot of states, some of which include Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Utah, Indiana, Missouri, Virginia, and even New Hampshire. American democracy, especially at the state level, seems to be on its death throes, and with the US Supreme Court’s abhorrent decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Republican-captured supreme court, in an extremely characteristic move, has greenlit any and all partisan gerrymandering to go on unabated, a decision that continues the long track record of this supreme court’s absolute hostility to democracy and the right to vote.
With the 2020 Census complete and the next redistricting cycle upon us, there is a lot of consternation among Democrats that we are on the pathway towards a complete redux of the post-2010 redistricting fiasco that left Democrats with almost no power in the US House and at the state legislative level for almost a decade. The 2010 gerrymanders have still largely held at the state legislative level, and as much as the 2018 Blue Wave helped Democrats reclaim in one night about a third of all the state legislative seats that they lost under Obama, Democrats are still in a bad position at the state level. This begs the question: With Republicans still in control of redistricting, how bad are the 2020 Republican gerrymanders going to be? And do Democrats have any hope at all of retaining power in the US House or state legislative level after this redistricting? I want to explore just how bad a situation Democrats are in this time around in this column.
To analyze this, we first need to establish what allowed Republicans to create such effective gerrymanders after 2010, why they held for so long, and why they eventually backfired and broke in 2018. The answers to all of these involve two different but related topics: the makeup of the parties’ coalitions and cultural polarization.
Historically, the Republican Party has been the party of affluent suburbanites, Christian conservatives, and non-industrial rural conservatives; these groups together can be put into the three legs of Reagan’s (in)famous Three-Legged Stool: fiscal conservatives/neoliberals, war hawks/neoconservatives, and cultural Christian conservatives/paleoconservatives. The suburbanites were the neoliberals, the Christian and rural conservatives were the paleoconservatives, and both tended to have neoconservative tendencies supporting strong national defense and intervention in the face of the USSR. Conversely, the Democratic Party has historically been the party of minorities, urban centers, and economically disadvantaged whites (especially those in rural areas). These groups made up the classic New Deal Coalition of FDR. These groups powered the Democratic Party’s nearly seven-decade long hegemony in the US House from 1930 to 1994 (excluding 1946-1948 and 1952-1954).
Until recently (around the 1990s at the presidential level and around the mid-2010s at the congressional level), the “swing regions” of the country were actually the rural areas. Since the New Deal Coalition started slowly fracturing in 1968, rural areas had been moving Republican, but they had not been Republican strongholds up and down the ballot until the mid-2010s. In this era, Democrats would be able to win congressional elections by keeping their urban centers and minorities engaged while also competing aggressively (and at times even winning) in the rural areas. The 2006 Blue Wave is the perfect example of this where Democrats won rural seats in Idaho, Iowa, the Dakotas, Arkansas, and Tennessee.
However, as the rural areas had started becoming more Republican as the Democratic Party took a left turn, especially post-1992, the two parties used to fight over the rural areas because these voters finally started to take their cultural values into consideration in the voting booth in addition to their addition to their economic values. In the contests between the two parties, Democrats would run up huge margins in the densely populated urban areas (Democratic strongholds since the 1930s), which Republicans would neutralize by winning huge numbers of votes in the nearly just as densely packed suburban areas (Republican strongholds since the 1950s). This would then leave the two parties to fight over the persuadable swing voters among rural and economically disadvantaged whites. Whichever side was able to win enough rural votes would then win the contest.
After the Democratic Party took an unabashed cultural left turn by nominating and then electing the nation’s first black president in Barack Obama while embracing a multicultural nation and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, though, the days of the rural areas being the “swing areas” were over. Since then, rural whites have been voting solely their cultural interests and moved solidly into the Republican Party post-2010. The first party to fully lose its “opposite wing” due to cultural polarization that has afflicted the nation since the 1960s was the Democratic Party. As the Democratic Party became the party of cultural liberals, economically disadvantaged but culturally conservative whites left the party and voted with the party that more closely aligned with their cultural values. Until the election of Barack Obama, culturally conservative but economically disadvantaged whites were willing to vote against their cultural interests in favor of their economic interests – until 2010.
However, affluent suburbanites had continued to vote their economic interest and stuck with the Republican Party at this point, which necessarily meant that they were voting against their cultural interests – until 2018. Just as the Democratic Party took an unabashed cultural left turn by nominating and then electing the nation’s first black president in 2008, the Republican Party took an unabashed cultural right turn by nominating and then electing the obsessively anti-immigration, anti-abortion, anti-affirmative action, and anti-gun control Donald Trump as president. With this, the same thing that happened to the Democrats in 2010 happened to the Republicans in 2018. Until the election of Donald Trump, culturally liberal but affluent suburbanites were willing to vote against their cultural interests in favor of their economic interests – until 2018. This then caused the Republicans to also lose their “opposite wing” due to cultural polarization; it took longer to hit the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, but not much longer.
This is all important context because in the post-2010 redistricting cycle, Republicans drew the maps under the assumptions that they would be able to continue the long draw of rural and economically disadvantaged but culturally conservative whites into their party while simultaneously holding on to affluent but culturally liberal suburbanites in their party as had been the case contemporaneously. Republicans made the bet that they would be able to simultaneously win culturally conservative but poor and ancestrally Democratic Fayette County, a Pittsburgh exurb, and culturally liberal but affluent and ancestrally Republican Montgomery County, a Philadelphia suburb. However, as the forces of negative partisanship driven by cultural polarization hit the nation in two massive shocks in 2010 and 2018, this assumption completely fell apart. This is why the 2010 gerrymanders backfired (or dummymandered) in 2018; cultural polarization ripped apart the Republican Party’s old coalition in 2018 just as it had ripped apart the Democratic Party’s old coalition in 2010.
As a nation, Americans are no longer willing to vote for their economic self-interest; they are only interested in voting for their cultural self-interest. At this point, the affluent suburbanite who lives in Edgeworth, PA (the wealthiest town in Pennsylvania and an inner-ring suburb of Pittsburgh in northern Allegheny County) is willing to pay a little more in taxes if it means that their gay neighbor does not get acid thrown at their face when they hold hands with their partner in public, and the poor white ex-industrial worker who lives in Forward Township, PA (one of the poorest towns in Pennsylvania and an industrial exurb on the southern tip of Allegheny County) is willing to accept a smaller pension check if it means that they can shut down the southern border and see a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the country”. Whether this is good or bad is not something I will talk further about in this piece, for that is a discussion for a different day.
With all that said, how is the situation looking for Democrats in this redistricting cycle with Republicans still having disproportionate power of the map-drawing pen? Honestly, it is not a good place to be, but it is a hell of a lot better than it was in 2010 for a couple of reasons. First, Republicans do not control unilateral redistricting power for nearly as many congressional seats this time around as was the case in 2010. Second, with the suburban realignment, the Republican Party is actually in a lot of internal angst (which they have mostly hidden from the public, but there is still plenty of reporting about it) right now about how they are going to redistrict such that they neutralize the newly emerging Democratic strongholds in the nation’s suburbs.
Consider the second reason first. Last time, Republicans were able to neutralize the massively Democratic cities by either packing them or cracking them followed by tying them to Republican suburbs. However, now that the suburbs are also Democratic, this is no longer a viable option because such a district might actually end up being more Democratic due to the suburban realignment. As the Republican Party has retreated farther and farther out of the nation’s metropolitan areas, it has completely retrenched into the rural areas, but there is an inherent problem with this new Republican coalition: It just is not big enough. By definition, rural areas are sparsely populated, so in order to achieve the nearly equal population as required by federal law, maximizing Republican advantage through redistricting the rural areas would not yield nearly as much fruit as it might seem based on land area.
Due to the “Big Sort”, the nation has basically packed itself; that is, liberals are now pretty much all in the metropolises while the conservatives are now pretty much all in the rural areas. With this being the case, for Republicans to create as effective gerrymanders, not only would they have to crack the cities, but they would also have to crack the suburbs. Last time, they were able to neutralize cities by first packing as much as possible into as few districts as possible and then cracking the remainder to take in then-Republican suburban areas which would overwhelm the urban core (poor Austin, Texas has suffered due to this to a massive extent). With the nation having self-sorted based on cultural ideology, though, they really cannot pack anymore effectively than the voters have already packed themselves intrinsically.
We saw this in Georgia. Republicans post-2010 packed the urban core of Metro Atlanta into three districts as much as possible, while cracking the remainder of the urban core into three more congressional districts with then-Republican strongholds in the suburbs. Fast forward to 2018, though, and due to the natural packing of cultural liberals into metropolises around the nation, those three previously “safe Republican” suburban seats now have two Democrats with the last one being Republican solely due to its extremely rural nature in its northern extent. It just might be that by packing themselves so efficiently, liberals and Democrats have made it impossible for Republicans to gerrymander by packing those voters more effectively anymore than they already are naturally.
The other side of this is that Republicans no longer have unilateral control to redistrict in several state that they had in 2010. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (two of the most egregiously gerrymandered states in 2010), there are Democratic governors who can veto overly gerrymandered maps. Also, with the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania now having a supermajority of Democrats (5-2), there is an additional check on the Republican legislature even if Governor Tom Wolf for whatever reason signs off on a Republican gerrymander, and the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania flexed its muscle and struck down the old, extremely gerrymandered congressional map as unconstitutional under the state constitution (and thereby nullifying any federal claims) in League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 2018 for unfairly advantaging Republicans. There is little question that the Democratic supermajority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will step in to do the same again if the map ends up being egregiously gerrymandered.
In Wisconsin, the only check on the Republican Legislature, unfortunately, is the Democratic governor for now. However, by narrowing the 6-1 Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court of Wisconsin to a bare 4-3 Republican majority in 2020, Democrats are in a place where they can still sue in state court and make a targeted argument at Justice Brian Hagedorn that Wisconsin Constitution prohibits excessive partisan gerrymandering. Even if that fails (and I think it will since Hagedorn was one of Scott Walker’s redistricting lawyers in the last cycle), the next election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court is around the corner in 2023, and if Democrats win that election, they will have a 4-3 majority that could then strike down the maps if needed.
In another swing state where Republicans find themselves currently in full control (and where they had full control in 2010) is North Carolina. Even though the state has a Democratic governor, the state constitution does not give the governor power to veto redistricting maps. However, there is still an important check on the ability of the Republican Legislature to enact an excessively partisan gerrymander through the Supreme Court of North Carolina. In 2019, Wake County Superior Court (a trial court) struck down the North Carolina legislative and congressional maps as being violative of the North Carolina Constitution for giving Republicans an unfair advantage in Common Cause v. Lewis. State Republicans decided not to appeal the judgement because if it had ended up in the North Carolina Supreme Court, they would have been guaranteed an adverse judgement.
Until the 2020 elections, the Supreme Court of North Carolina was supermajority Democratic at 6-1. If the North Carolina Supreme Court issued a judgement affirming the Wake County Superior Court, that would create a statewide precedent, which would require all future state courts to strike down maps that were excessively gerrymandered to favor one party over the other. Republicans did not want to take that chance with the 2020 redistricting cycle around the corner and the chance they had of flipping control of the North Carolina Supreme Court in ensuing elections. In the 2020 elections, Republicans ran the table in North Carolina judicial elections, and the Democratic 6-1 supermajority was reduced to a bare 4-3 majority. However, a majority is a majority, and if the Democratic North Carolina Supreme Court believes that any map enacted by the Legislature is excessively gerrymandered, they will almost certainly strike it down. That said, Democrats must find a way to hold on to their majority on the Supreme Court in the 2022 elections by holding all of their current seats up for election, or they will not have a chance to control the court until at least 2028. But still, for the time being, North Carolina Republicans will not be able to get away with a 11-3 gerrymander, and at the moment, that’s good enough considering the political geography of the state.
On the other hand, Virginia now has an independent citizens’ redistricting commission, which should make the maps competitive at the very least if not Democratic since the state is so blue now. New Jersey no longer has a Republican governor, and the New Jersey Supreme Court is back to Democratic control, meaning that things should be going our way there. Maine is also under a trifecta of Democratic control at this point, but given that Maine’s Constitution has a supermajority requirement for redistricting matters, it remains to be seen what happens and what concessions the minority Republicans can extract. Still, considering that both of Maine’s congressional districts are held by Democrats and both candidates won their races relatively comfortably despite Trump winning the Second Congressional District by seven points, I have my doubts of how much Republicans can expect to gain from redistricting in Maine.
Simultaneously, in the places where Democrats do have unilateral control of redistricting, they have given all indications that they are not going to hold back. In 2010, Republican Governor Susana Martinez vetoed the maps drawn by the Democratic Legislature in New Mexico, which allowed the courts to draw a competitive district along the southern border, but now, Democrats have unified control of Santa Fe, and based on what the Speaker of the New Mexico House has said, they are planning to put Yvette Herrell out of a job come January 3, 2023. New York Democrats have also played massive hardball with the state’s new redistricting commission since they have finally taken unified control of Albany by first refusing to deliver funds and then introducing a new constitutional amendment to effectively push out all Republican influence, and even if that amendment fails, the New York Constitution allows the Legislature to draw its own maps after rejecting those of the commission twice, which the Speaker and Senate Leader have all but guaranteed they plan to do.
Maryland Democrats drew an absolutely disgusting gerrymander in 2010 to eliminate one of the two remaining congressional Republicans, and they have made it no secret that once they draw the maps, Andy Harris will join the unemployment rolls along with Yvette Herrell on January 3, 2023. Even though Maryland has a Republican governor, the supermajorities in the Legislature all but guarantee that his veto will be overridden. Nevada also finally has unified Democratic control, and Democrats in the Legislature killed a proposed independent redistricting commission. Last time, Republican Governor Brian Sandoval vetoed the maps drawn by the Democratic Legislature, which allowed the courts to draw a competitive map. However, with unified Democratic control of Carson City, the two competitive suburban Las Vegas seats are almost certainly going to become more Democratic and less competitive after this round of redistricting.
My favorite example of redistricting hardball by Democrats so far, though, has been Illinois. In 2018, Democratic governor JB Pritzker ran a campaign where he promised to veto any gerrymandered maps, but as soon as the Illinois Legislature gathered behind closed doors earlier this year to draw state legislative maps in secret to protect their legislative supermajorities, he promptly signed them once they got to his desk. Under these maps, Republicans in the Illinois House are on track to lose at least five seats, more than one-tenth of their current ranks, and an even greater percentage of Illinois Senate Republicans are on track to lose their seats as well. Illinois Democrats even pulled a trick so dirty that it would have made ballot-stuffing Boss Tweed proud when they redistricted the Supreme Court of Illinois for the first time in about six decades in order to fortify their current 4-3 majority. Given all this, it is guaranteed that the Illinois congressional delegation will have several fewer Republicans beginning on January 3, 2023.
Also, in Michigan, Washington, California, and Colorado, despite these states having independent redistricting commissions, Democrats have managed to stack all of them. In Colorado, the “independents” include an organizer of the Denver Women’s March, a professor who used to sit on his university’s Diversity and Equality Board, a Native American environmental activist, and someone with an economics PhD who researches the economic impacts of climate change. In California, the commission hired a law firm to do the redistricting that litigated against the state’s gay marriage ban and saw it overturned, provided legal cover to those on the receiving end of defamation lawsuits by Trump and his team, and is currently challenging Republican voting restrictions in federal and state courts around the country. In Washington, the commission’s final composition will be on the hands of the Supreme Court of Washington, which is unanimously Democratic. In Michigan, the commission hired a lawyer who donated to the campaign of the current Democratic Secretary of State to help in drawing the maps, and the Supreme Court of Michigan also returned to a 4-3 Democratic majority after last year’s election.
Overall, Democrats are not in a “bad” position this time around when it comes to redistricting. They are not in a good position for sure, but they lot they now have is hell of a lot better than the one they had after 2010. That said, Republicans have plenty of advantages, too. They have unilateral control of redistricting in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Utah, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Nebraska, Kansas, South Carolina, and Arkansas, and in these states, they are on track to get away with bloody murder, especially in Florida and Ohio. Whatever maps come out of Tallahassee and Columbus will be absolutely disgusting, and given that Florida is the only swing state moving more towards Republicans, it seems unlikely to dummymander at any point in the foreseeable future while Ohio is essentially a red state at this point.
Republicans can also ignore the independent commission in Iowa if they want (possible though it seems somewhat unlikely at the moment) and break up the last remaining Democratic districts in Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. They have also stacked the Arizona Appellate Courts Appointments Commission, which makes appointments to the state’s independent redistricting commission, so they have played dirty with the independent commissions that they can play games with as well (and the commission hired a law firm to do the redistricting that was involved in the Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin Republican gerrymanders of 2010). For whatever it might be worth, Mitch McConnell (the boss of Kentucky Republicans) has asked the Legislature to leave Democratic Representative John Yarmuth’s Louisville-based district alone and not to crack it. The VRA will probably protect at least one majority-minority Democratic district in Tennessee, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Missouri, but that still leaves at least two currently Democratic seats from those states to be chopped up if Republicans want to do so. Personally, I am expecting the Nashville and Kansas City seats to be cracked into oblivion once the Republicans are done drawing those maps at the very least.
On the other hand, though, even though Republicans will be able to give themselves temporary cushion in Texas, Georgia, and Utah, their gerrymanders in those states are extremely unlikely to stand the test of demographic change over the coming decade. The massive, booming population of these states, especially in their suburbs, are, as Dave Wasserman described Georgia and Arizona, a “ticking time bomb”. This is especially true for Georgia. Right now, it is still a red-leaning swing state, but as Metro Atlanta continues to boom, no matter what gerrymander Republicans draw next year, it is almost guaranteed to backfire by the end of this decade – similar to how the Virginia Republican gerrymanders of 2010 backfired in 2018. Texas will probably take a little longer to dummymander; I still believe that Texas just is not yet there for Democrats to seriously contest the state. I think at the presidential level, Texas becomes actually competitive (such that Democrats should actually try to win it) in 2028, which means that Democrats will not really be able to contest it at the state level until right before the 2040 census if we assume that it moves blue at around the same pace Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and Colorado have been moving. For Utah, Republicans maintain unanimous control of the state’s congressional delegation by cracking Greater Salt Lake City among all four districts, but as Greater SLC continues to boom into the stratosphere and become one of the hippest and most liberal cities in the nation (my favorite anecdote about SLC is the fact that there’s a gay bar across the road from the headquarters of the Mormon Church), it, too, is on the same trajectory as its southwestern neighbors of New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona. Oregon Republicans have also managed to get a commitment from the House Speaker that they will have power at parity in redistricting after this cycle to stop the quorum busting, but Governor Pritzker also vowed to veto any gerrymandered map that came to his desk – and he did not.
So yeah, overall, even though everyone (especially Democrats) are expecting redistricting alone to deliver the US House to Republicans after next year’s midterms, the reality on the ground is not quite so simple. Democrats are not in a necessarily “good” place for this redistricting cycle, but they are also not in the complete doldrums like everyone is doomsaying. Given the situation that they find themselves in, Democrats have the best chance possible to influence and dominate redistricting in enough states such that redistricting alone probably will not be enough for Republicans to win the US House. Also, when Adam Kincaid (leader of the National Republican Redistricting Trust) is telling national Republican donors that he does not think redistricting alone will deliver the US House to the Republicans, we should take him seriously. If even he is expressing doubts about the efficacy of gerrymanders, there is real anxiety in Republican circles about this. Given the suburban realignment coupled with cultural polarization of the parties and the moves Democrats have made in states where they either control or can influence redistricting, Republicans will not be able to get away with another REDMAP. In fact, if they tried to pull another REDMAP with the same execution used last time, the maps will result in an immediate dummymander due to the aforementioned suburban realignment.
Do not count Democrats out of the running for the US House just yet. There still is a chance – slim though it may be – for Democrats to neutralize the Republicans’ redistricting advantages. Throw in the fact that Republicans are behaving extremely arrogantly right now about their prospects about taking the US House next year (Kevin McCarthy bet his house against Pelosi that he would be Speaker in 2023, and the NRCC announced 57 “target” seats before redistricting has even happened). Republicans should ask Hillary Clinton in 2016, Nancy Pelosi in 2010, Paul Ryan in 2018, and Mitch McConnell in 2021 just how much the American electorate likes to reward arrogant politicians who act like they are entitled to their seats and their majorities. Regardless, based on my best estimate, if both sides go the way they are expected to in this redistricting cycle in the states where they have influence (as I described in this column), the base partisanship of the US House in a standard D+4 election year should end up with 221 Democratic seats. The House majority is 218.
The voters giveth, and the voters taketh.
Very well articulated.
Excellent break down