Redistricting Snafus
by David Atkins
It looks as if the expected redistricting massacre after the 2010 elections isn’t going as well as Republicans might have hoped:
he Republican Party’s favorite political tactic of late – tilting the rules of American elections to its benefit – has not been going as well as expected in the biggest political fight of all: redrawing the boundaries of electoral districts that will last for the next decade.
Regardless of how miserable the 2010 election was for Democrats – losing a US House majority and the GOP gaining 63 seats, as well as winning majorities in 20 state legislative chambers and 16 governor’s races – it does not appear that the GOP will be able to draw enough new political lines to lock down Democrats for a decade, as many party activist had hoped.
The handful of scorecards and Web sites doing the best job of tracking the all-important process of redistricting suggest that the GOP may gain a dozen House seats or more by redrawing lines, prompting Democratic stalwarts like Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., not to seek reelection.
But the GOP cannot erase the fact that the country has millions of citizens who are Democrats or independents. Thus, even as Republicans have a “national ability to draw about four times as many House districts as Democrats,” according to the Washington Post, it appears they are doing more to protect incumbents than to eliminate Democratic prospects or other challengers. According to the Post’s scorecard, which does not list every state, the GOP stands to gain only seven or eight House seats nationally. That figure is remarkably low, considering that the GOP’s gains in 2010, up and down the political ladder, broke records that had lasted for decades.
There is only so far that deceit and manipulation can take a conservative movement that is radically at odds with what the majority of the American people want. Luntz’ counterproductive new talking points are an example of that, as are the hostile reactions to the policies of Republican governors nationwide, as are the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Democrats made the mistake of believing in 2006 and 2008 that the electorate was endorsing the Democratic policies of the last 20 years, rather than rejecting the conservative/neoliberal status quo represented by Bush and the Democrats who enabled him. When voters didn’t see the change they had hoped for and voted for out of President Obama, they stayed home in 2010, leading to conservative routs. It wasn’t just that progressives stayed home–in fact, hardcore Dem base voters actually did turn out. It was that while Obama had won independents in 2008 handily, of the independents who turned out in 2010, 8% more of them had voted McCain in 2008 than voted Obama.
So conservatives believed that 2010 represented a rejection of liberalism and an embrace of the beliefs of Ayn Rand.
The conservative movement is starting to wake up to the fact that the country as it actually exists doesn’t really like them. No matter how they try to slice and swindle the electorate, they can only hide that for so long, especially with demographic changes that make the lay of the land even more hostile to them.
That’s why the current plan for the Republicans is simply to stop poor and young people from voting at all. It’s a lot easier to remove people from the voting pie entirely, than to try to slice them up in increasingly deceptive and creative ways.
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