The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: gerrymander
Dead Gerrymander Expert Haunts North Carolina GOP

Dead Gerrymander Expert Haunts North Carolina GOP

North Carolina Republicans lied to a federal judge about how they rigged state elections, according to new court documents.

Common Cause, a voting rights group, is suing the state’s Republican lawmakers for creating gerrymandered legislative maps, made by contorting district lines to favor their party. The group previously sued the lawmakers for the same reason for maps drawn in 2011, and they won, but now they’re contending that the newly drawn lines are also gerrymandered. The case is set to go to trial on July 15.

The gerrymandered district lines, both from 2011 and the most recent, were drawn by Thomas Hofeller, a recently deceased, formerly prolific GOP election rigger, who also helped Trump’s efforts to rig the U.S. census. In a new filing Thursday, it was revealed that Hofeller helped shape more than 90 percent of the state’s newly gerrymandered maps by June 2017. That matters because Republicans told the court in July 2017 that no new maps had been created by that time, a clear lie.

And that wasn’t the GOP’s only lie to the court.

Hofeller apparently used data on voters’ racial demographics when creating the new lines, something North Carolina Republicans were forbidden to do by the court. Using that type of data, districts can be gerrymandered to diminish the representation and voting power of minority groups.

“Whether it’s rigging the census for partisan gain or manipulating voting maps for the same, that’s wrong and destructive to our democracy,” Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, said in a statement.

North Carolina Republicans seem pretty desperate to do everything they can to rig district lines, even if it means lying and breaking the law. But other attempts by Republicans to gerrymander haven’t held up well in courts. In 2018, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down that state’s partisan congressional gerrymander that was favored, and drawn, by Republicans. In the following November election, the party lost three of its 12 seats. Ohio’s Republican-drawn congressional map was also recently struck down.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

IMAGE: North Carolina voters protest state district gerrymander by Republican legislative leaders in 2018.

What’s At Stake In Supreme Court Gerrymander Decision

What’s At Stake In Supreme Court Gerrymander Decision

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard one of the most politically consequential cases in years, to decide whether partisan gerrymandering, or having elected politicians choose which voters do and don’t cast ballots in specific U.S. House and state legislative elections, is constitutional.

If you want to know why the GOP has not only controlled the House but has supermajorities in states that should be politically purple, such as North Carolina and Georgia, the answer is extreme partisan gerrymandering.

If you want to know why House Speaker Paul Ryan cannot control his most right-wing members, as exemplified by the House Freedom Caucus (which didn’t think Ryan’s bill gutting the Affordable Care Act went far enough), the answer is extreme partisan gerrymandering.

If you want to know why the Democrats face such a steep climb in 2018 to retake the House (because they need 24 seats and there aren’t dozens of competitive races), the answer is extreme partisan gerrymandering.

If you want to know why so many red states are passing voter suppression and anti-abortion laws, blocking LGBTQ rights, and sued to block Obamacare and climate change-related environmental protection laws, the answer is extreme partisan gerrymandering.

“Through redistricting, Republicans have built themselves a perhaps unbreakable majority in the House,” Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, wrote in 2013 about the House Freedom Caucus. “But it has come at a cost of both party discipline and national popularity. Nowadays, a Sunday-school teacher can defeat the will of the Speaker of the House.”

The Supreme Court’s case raising whether extreme partisan redistricting is constitutional comes from Wisconsin. There, despite only 23,000 votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in November 2016’s vote, Republicans hold two-thirds of the seats in its state legislature and House delegation. How did they get that power? It’s a pattern also seen in Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia—all states tipping the balance in national elections in recent years.

The answer is by segregating reliable Republican and Democratic voters, so Republicans could win on Election Day by smaller percentages than what Democrats would win by in their strongholds. That comes from drawing election districts so there were more reliable Republican voters in more districts, and crowding Democrats into fewer districts in their states.

Political district maps are redrawn after the once-a-decade federal Census. The result of the GOP’s extreme partisan mapmaking in 2011 has been its lock on the House, as well as on the red states that subsequently fought all things Obama and passed anti-abortion laws. These states have gone on to adopt the GOP voter suppression catalog to block Democratic voters, including tougher voter ID requirements to get a ballot, ending Election Day registration and voting, purging infrequent but otherwise legal voters, ending early voting, pre-registration of teens, etc.

In 2010 and 2011, Obama and the Democrats weren’t focused on blocking extreme redistricting and underestimated the GOP response to Obama and the Democrats’ 2008 landslide, which became one of their biggest errors. While Democrats today are waving the “never again” flag, their best hope for returning the political system to one based on competitive elections lies with the Supreme Court—which is hardly worth banking on. The Court has never invalidated political maps for arch partisanship; they only invalidate maps that are racially based to disenfranchise non-white voters.

The best way to understand how extreme redistricting works, and why it is so impactful comes from a Supreme Court decision this past spring, where the Court—before Judge Neil Gorsuch was seated—ruled that North Carolina’s congressional maps were illegal racial gerrymanders. In that decision, the Court’s majority noted that most Republican House members had been elected with 56 percent of the vote, while the state’s few elected Democrats won their seats with nearly 70 percent of the vote in their districts.

That figure—56 percent—is key. It’s in synch with what many election data analysts say is the built-in starting line advantage that the GOP achieved via redistricting: a 6-point head start. Needless to say, that is not all the GOP in these red states has done to disenfranchise Democrats. Stricter voter ID pre-empts another 2-to-3 percent of likely Democrats, according to academics, just as making voter registration tougher and narrowing voting options, like early voting, shaves off more fractions of a percent to tilt likely outcomes.

The Wisconsin case that prompted the Supreme Court review came after a lower court ruled that the maps drawn by its GOP in 2011 created so many wasted votes by Democrats that Wisconsin elections were anti-democratic. The Wisconsin GOP appealed and the high Court took the case.

What’s likely to unfold on Tuesday in the Supreme Court are exceptionally technical arguments about how to measure extreme partisanship and unfair, uncompetitive elections. Several years ago, Justice Anthony Kennedy, in another redistricting case, wrote that he wished that there was an objective standard. That prompted the legal team challenging Wisconsin’s maps to create a metric based on wasted votes.

But in the Court’s ruling last spring on North Carolina’s unconstitutional racial gerrymander—without Gorsuch—the Republican-appointed justices, including Kennedy, said in a dissent that partisanship was a part of human nature and politics. It might be odious, they said, but they were averse to regulating it. Whether that view holds is the critical question behind the Tuesday hearing at the Supreme Court.

But no matter what emerges, all Americans should note what extreme gerrymandering has done to the nation’s political culture and process.

It has ended competitive elections, boosted the most extreme Republicans in the South and Midwest, and left the nation split in two—with Democratic-run states on the coasts and vast red middle America. In numerous states, like Florida, there are cities with progressive mayors while legislatures and congressional delegations are deep red, and fervent political opponents.

Ultimately, extreme gerrymandering has undermined representative government, shrunk the role of citizens and empowered extremists—whether President Trump or the House Freedom Caucus. It’s allowed Republicans to create a structural starting-line advantage of nearly 10 points, regardless of candidates and issues. That has produced a nation where Democrats might win the popular vote but don’t win political power.

The Democrats’ Bad Map

The Democrats’ Bad Map

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica. This story was co-published with The New York Times’ Sunday Review.

Even as Hillary Clinton appears poised to win easily against a highly erratic candidate with a campaign in meltdown, a sobering reality awaits Democrats on Nov. 9. It seems likely that they will eke out at most a narrow majority in the Senate, but will fail to pick up the 30 seats they need to reclaim the House. If they do manage to win a Senate majority, it will be exceedingly difficult to hold it past 2018, when 25 of the party’s seats must be defended, compared with eight Republican ones.

The Republican Party may seem in historic disarray, but it will most likely be able to continue to stymie the Democrats’ legislative agenda, perpetuating Washington’s gridlock for years to come.

Liberals have a simple explanation for this state of affairs: Republican-led gerrymandering, which has put Democrats at a disadvantage in the House and in many state legislatures. But this overlooks an even bigger problem for their party. More than ever, Democrats are sorting themselves into geographic clusters where many of their votes have been rendered all but superfluous, especially in elections for the Senate, House and state government.

This has long been a problem for the party, but it has grown worse in recent years. The clustering has economic and demographic roots, but also a basic cultural element: Democrats just don’t want to live where they’d need to live to turn more of the map blue.

Americans’ tendency toward political self-segregation has been underway for a while now — it’s been eight years since Bill Bishop identified the dynamic in “The Big Sort.” This helps explain why red-blue maps of so many states consist of dark-blue islands in the cities surrounded by red exurbs and rural areas, a distribution that is also driven by urban concentrations of racial minorities and by the decades-long shift in allegiance from Democratic to Republican among working-class white voters.

That hyper-concentration of Democratic votes has long hurt the party in the House and state legislatures. In Ohio, for instance, Republicans won 75 percent of the United States House seats in 2012 despite winning only 51 percent of the total votes for the House. That imbalance can be explained partly by Republican gerrymandering. But even if district lines were drawn in rational, nonpartisan ways, a disproportionate share of Democratic votes would still be clustered in urban districts, giving Republicans a larger share of seats than their share of the overall vote. Winning back control of state legislatures in Pennsylvania and Michigan could help Democrats in redistricting in 2020. But it would help more if their voters were not so concentrated in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Detroit and Ann Arbor.

“It would be awfully difficult to construct a map that wasn’t leaning Republican,” said the University of Michigan political scientist Jowei Chen. “Geography is just very unfortunate from the perspective of the Democrats.”

More recently, a confluence of several trends has conspired to make the sorting disadvantageous for Democrats on an even broader scale — increasing the party’s difficulties in House races while also affecting Senate elections and, potentially, future races for the presidency.

First, geographic mobility in the United States has become very class-dependent. Once upon a time, lower-income people were willing to pull up stakes and move to places with greater opportunity — think of the people who fled the Dust Bowl for California in the 1930s, or those who took the “Hillbilly Highway” out of Appalachia to work in Midwestern factories, or Southern blacks on the Great Migration. In recent decades, though, internal migration has slowed sharply, and the people who are most likely to move for better opportunities are the highly educated.

Second, higher levels of education are increasingly correlated with voting Democratic. This has been most starkly on display in the 2016 election, as polls suggest that Donald J. Trump may be the first Republican in 60 years to not win a majority of white voters with college degrees, even as he holds his own among white voters without degrees. But the trend of increasing Democratic identification among college graduates, and increasing Republican identification among non-graduates, was underway before Trump arrived on the scene. Today, Democrats hold a 12-point edge in party identification among those with a college degree or more. In 2004, the parties were even on that score.

Finally, in the United States the economic gap between the wealthiest cities and the rest of the country has grown considerably. The internet was supposed to allow wealth to spread out, since we could be connected anywhere — but the opposite has happened. Per capita income in the District of Columbia has gone from 29 percent above the United States average in 1980 to 68 percent in 2013; in the Bay Area, from 50 percent above to 88 percent; in New York City, from 80 percent above to 172 percent. Cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Boston, exert a strong pull on mobile, highly educated, Democratic-leaning voters, while at the same time stirring resentment in the less prosperous areas those voters leave behind. And these economically dominant cities tend to be in deep-blue states.

How extreme is Democratic clustering? If you compare President Obama’s 2012 performance with Al Gore’s in 2000, you can see a huge increase in the Democratic percentage of the vote in the 68 largest metro areas. But it barely budged everywhere else. Some of that increase was caused by voters already in those cities flipping from Republican to Democratic. But it was also the gravitational effect.

This clustering of Democrats helps explain why Trump has been keeping it close in Ohio and Iowa, both states where some 72 percent of white residents over 24 lack college degrees, the highest share among the 13 most competitive states.

It works the other way in presidential elections, too. Democrats have gained in some other swing states with high levels of college-educated voters, like Virginia and Colorado, and they do at least reap a benefit in the Electoral College for having a lock on big states such as New York and California.

But it’s another story in the Senate, where this dynamic helps explain why the Democrats are perpetually struggling to hold a majority. The Democrats have long been at a disadvantage in the Senate, where the populous, urbanized states where Democrats prevail get the same two seats as the rural states where Republicans are stronger. The 20 states where Republicans hold both Senate seats have, on average, 5.2 million people each; the 16 states where the Democrats hold both seats average 7.9 million people. Put another way, winning Senate elections in states with a total of 126 million people has netted the Democrats eight fewer seats than the Republicans get from winning states with 104 million people.

Clustering is part of the problem. All those Democrats gravitating to blue strongholds like New York and California get the party no more Senate seats than Republicans get from Idaho and from Wyoming, a state with a population of about 580,000, slightly more than Fresno, Calif. If the Democrats are going to gain a lasting hold on the Senate, they have to win seats in swing states. But that gets harder the more that Democratic-leaning voters flock to big, blue states, abandoning swing states like Ohio, where the Republican Rob Portman is gliding to re-election, or smaller red states where Democrats might still have a shot at holding Senate seats, like Montana, Indiana or North Dakota.

Jenn Topper has thought about this dynamic a lot, because she’s a clear example of it. Topper, 31, grew up in Beavercreek, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, a city that has lost nearly half its population since 1960. She left for college at Florida State, then for a public relations job in New York, then for a political communications job in Washington.

“When you grow up in Ohio, there’s a bigger world out there, and if you know about it, you just want to go to it,” she said.

A couple years ago, Topper and some colleagues who were also from Ohio were excited to meet “their” Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown, at an event. He asked them where they lived in Ohio. But they don’t live in Ohio — and won’t be able to vote for him in what is sure to be a tough race in 2018.

Topper’s high school classmate Brett Stelter, 31, left Dayton after attending Ohio University. His father was a district parts manager for Honda, which has a plant near Dayton, and Stelter himself did part-time work at the plant. But his dream was to be an actor, and so he ended up in Los Angeles.

“There’s just nothing to do in Ohio,” he said. “The jobs are limited, but it’s not just the jobs and the industries that are in Ohio, it’s the mind-set that I didn’t gravitate to.”

Stelter, who voted twice for Obama, is disappointed that his vote is superfluous in California, and tries to make up for it by engaging on social media with people back home — people like his father, who is leaning toward Trump. “Part of me wishes I could be there to personally talk to people instead of trolling them on the internet,” he said. But his political irrelevance is not enough to make him consider moving back. “Going back to Ohio to be able to vote every four years is not enough for me.”

This clustering is happening even as many smaller cities and outlying regions are experiencing mini-cultural renaissances. For one thing, a foodie or beer snob now has much less to complain about when contemplating dining outside a big coastal city. And most of these places are much more affordable than Brooklyn or Los Angeles. But they can’t seem to compare with the profusion of cool elsewhere.

Even cities making comebacks, with restored downtown buildings and plenty of locally brewed I.P.A., have the memory problem. If a city was on the ropes when young people left it, it’s frozen in that form in their image of it. “You’re competing with memory,” Topper said. “People look back and remember what it was like when they were there. You don’t often hear about how things are moving or growing or new things are happening. That picture of when you have left is all you have.”

Of course, some people do go back. Brittney Vosters, 30, who went to high school and college in Dayton, left for several years, living in Chicago and enrolling in graduate school in public administration at Rutgers in New Jersey. She recently moved back to Cincinnati so her husband could go to graduate school in northern Kentucky. It has struck her how much her former Dayton classmates have sorted out politically. “It’s noticeable that the people who left are more liberal-minded and the people who stayed are more Republican,” she said.

And this sorting out is self-perpetuating, too. The fewer people you encounter of the opposite political persuasion, the more they become an unfathomable other, easily caricatured and impossible to find even occasional common ground with. By segregating themselves in narrow slices of the country, Democrats have also made it harder to make their own case. They are forever preaching to the converted, while their social distance also leaves them unprepared for what’s coming from the other end of the spectrum. Changing that would mean adopting a broader notion of what it means to live in a happening place, and also exposing themselves to discomforts that most people naturally avoid, given the human tendency to seek out our own kind.

Vosters, for one, appreciates that her vote counts a lot more now in Ohio than it did when she was in New Jersey and Illinois. But she has no doubt where she’d like to end up for good. For her next move, she said, “I’d look at the political map and go toward the blue, because it’s more comfortable to be around people who are like you.”

Photo: Democratic members of Congress rise to their feet for a standing ovation as Republican members remain seated during U.S. President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in Washington, January 12, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst