Ask South Vietnam
by Tom Sullivan
The GOP’s 2011 gerrymandering of North Carolina’s congressional districts flipped me from NC-11 into NC-10. Subsequent court rulings forced new maps, not only for congressional seats, but for some state House and Senate districts as well. It meant that in the March 2016 primary, I voted in NC-10, but by Election Day 2016, I’d been whipsawed back into NC-11. That map is still under challenge. There’s no telling where — without ever moving — I’ll be voting this November.
But time has all but run out for another congressional district redraw before November 2018. Meaning, similar to how Senate Republicans ran out the clock on Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, Republican legislators in North Carolina will have held onto their gerrymandered congressional map for almost the full ten-year cycle.
North Carolina is hardly alone.
Axios provides a summary of where various gerrymandering challenges stand across the country:
Wisconsin
The latest: The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case this spring.
The backdrop: Wisconsin Republicans appealed a lower-court ruling that struck down the legislative map drawn in 2011 citing that it was unconstitutional because it’s heavily skewed in their favor. The court later ordered the state to draw a new map by Nov. 2017, a request the U.S. Supreme Court blocked when it agreed to hear the case last year.
Why it matters: If the justices uphold a lower court ruling challenging the State Assembly Districts, this would be the first time the Supreme Court strikes down a voting map on the grounds of partisan gerrymandering.
Maryland
The latest: The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a partisan gerrymandering case on March 28. A decision is expected by June.
The backdrop: The case centers on the 6th congressional district, which was redrawn in 2011 to include parts of the heavily Democratic Montgomery County. While Republican voters argue that the Democratic-controlled legislature is unfairly drawn, three judges ruled against the plaintiffs’ request to discontinue the use of the current map ahead of the 2018 midterm election.
Why it matters: This is the only redistricting legal battle filed against Democrats. Republicans there said the current map has diluted their votes and cost an incumbent his seat.
The Axios post goes on. It’s shocking to see the cases all lined up in one place. Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Michigan. With the exception of Maryland (noted above), all the cases stem from the Republicans’ successful REDMAP effort in 2010 to gain control of state legislatures and the post-2010 census redistricting (emphasis mine):
The idea behind redmap was to hit the Democrats at their weakest point. In several state legislatures, Democratic majorities were thin. If the Republicans commissioned polls, brought in high-powered consultants, and flooded out-of-the-way districts with ads, it might be possible to flip enough seats to take charge of them. Then, when it came time to draw the new lines, the G.O.P. would be in control.
David Levdansky expected another “picnics-and-handshakes” campaign in 2010. Instead, outside groups flooded his Pennsylvania House of Representatives district south of Pittsburgh with inflammatory and false flyers attacking him for “increasing taxes by a billion dollars” and alleging he voted “to waste $600 million taxpayer dollars and build an Arlen Specter library.”
Rebutting the cascade of lies was fruitless. The thirteen-term Democrat lost by 151 votes.
NC state Senator John Snow, a Democrat in the far western mountains of North Carolina, faced a blizzard of mailers from three groups backed by Art Pope. One of them, Jane Mayer recounted for The New Yorker, was “reminiscent of the Willie Horton ad that became notorious during the 1988 Presidential campaign.”
Snow saw $800,000 from outside groups flung his way and lost by 161 votes in a district spanning eight counties.
After gaining control of state legislatures in the 2010 elections, Republicans began furiously packing and cracking.
UC Irvine’s Rick Hasen (Election Law Blog) called the North Carolina gerrymander “the most brazen and egregious” case in the country, with Republican legislators admitting what they’d done and arguing it was legal. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court agreeing to hear both the Wisconsin (Gill v. Whitford) and Maryland (Benisek v. Lamone) cases first is significant. “It could also be that Gill finds partisan gerrymandering claims justiciable,” Hasen wrote in December, “but leaves certain issues open, issues which the Court then must resolve in Benisek.” Or else (a reader suggested) “they want to hear a challenge to a Democratic gerrymander in addition to the Wisconsin Republican gerrymander.” That might appeal to Chief Justice John Roberts.
Should the court find partisan gerrymanders unconstitutional, Republican legislative majorities will have to look for new ways rig elections in their favor, and they will.
For readers who have followed this post every morning, the point is that mid-term elections matter. Local (even rural) state-level elections matter, to Republicans if not to citified progressive activists. Democrats across the country were caught napping in 2010 and the rest is history. They relied too long on coattails from higher-profile national and statewide races to elect their candidates in rural and/or marginal districts outside their bright-blue urban strongholds, and allowed opponents free rein in the countryside. Ask South Vietnam how well that worked.
If on the other hand Democrats believe an advanced ground game might have scraped together a couple of hundred votes among eight under-resourced counties, and if they want to win back state legislatures by 2020, there is a link below worth following.
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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.