Ken Lawler worked as an executive and consultant at IBM for nearly 40 years until he decided he’d had enough. Lawler realized that most of the political issues that frustrated him resulted from structural flaws in our government — in particular, unfair legislative districts. “I was frustrated with the direction of the country in general, and I looked around and said… whether it’s immigration or fair taxes or whatever, you can never solve these problems,” Lawler said in an interview with The Politic. Dissatisfaction with dysfunctional and ineffective government motivated him to join the fight against the often-unfair districts that determined his elected officials. “I decided that it wasn’t the problem of the people we elected,” he said. “You have to fix the system before you can fix the policies the system promulgates.”
Inspired by this desire for structural change, Lawler joined Fair Districts Georgia in 2021. The group pushes for reforms to the redistricting process that would make maps less favorable to partisan interests and more representative of constituents. Lawler hopes that this work will fix some of the broken rules of politics. “Until you get a fair government, it’s hard to get fair policies,” he said. “The problem is, the structure of the rules allow bad actors to subvert the process.”
Lawler’s explanation of how politicians can use the rules of government institutions to guarantee a lock on power was far from theoretical. A decade earlier, Republican operatives had an idea that represented the very subversion of the process that Lawler warned against.
“He who controls redistricting can control Congress,” declared Republican operative Karl Rove in a March 2010 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Rove’s piece outlined a path to ensure the GOP’s political domination: By winning local legislative races in the coming November’s midterm elections, Republicans would be granted authority to draw the boundaries of the legislative districts that would be used in elections for the next decade. Through gerrymandering — or purposefully manipulating electoral district boundaries for political gain — the GOP could rearrange voting constituencies and distort maps to ensure they would win seats. Their plan to win state legislatures and draft red-leaning maps “could end up costing Democrats congressional seats for a decade to come,” he predicted.
Gerrymandering was not invented by the GOP; it’s a tactic as old as American government itself. The unique name was coined in 1812 after Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, signed off on maps of distorted legislative districts. Since then, generations of politicians have exercised their power over determining district boundaries to protect themselves and their party from electoral defeat. But never before had gerrymandering become such a central part of an entire party’s campaign strategy. The Republicans in 2010 had suddenly elevated gerrymandering from a long-used political tool into an explicit power grab.
Twelve years later, Democrats seem to have caught onto Rove’s strategy. Legislative leaders in some blue states have used their ability to draw maps to gerrymander districts in Democrats’ favor. The partisan leanings of the redrawn seats will have long-term implications, determining who controls the House of Representatives after this fall’s midterm elections and in elections for the next decade. This will undoubtedly influence the Biden administration’s ability to pass key legislative priorities and affect the two parties’ grips on power for years to come. The push by some Democrats to create blue-favoring districts this cycle is a reflection of the fierce war over redistricting battle that has been waged over the last decade, ever since the GOP’s record wins in state legislative races enabled widespread gerrymandering by Republicans and reminded Democrats of the political benefit that comes with drawing maps.
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Even before Rove’s opinion piece was published, Republicans had begun building a campaign to guarantee their monopoly over the redistricting process in key states. Journalist David Daley, the author of the 2016 book Ratf**ked, said in an interview with The Politic that the GOP’s pursuit of partisan gerrymandering was inspired by concern over the future of politics. After the 2008 presidential election, Daley explained, “there’s all this talk that the multiracial coalition that elected Obama was going to be the driving force in American politics for generations to come. And what Republicans realized was that they had to have a plan to counter that.”
Their solution was a strategy called the Redistricting Majority Project (REDMAP), which targeted 107 state legislative races in 16 states. Local races that were normally ignored or uncontested found themselves surrounded by intense media campaigns orchestrated by well-funded Republican challengers supported by REDMAP. Gubernatorial races also became the subject of vicious political crusades, with Republicans outspending Democrats by over $300 million in 2010’s races. The GOP aimed to win control of state legislative chambers and governor’s mansions, in order to ensure their control over drawing the maps for electoral districts for the next decade. This goal was not secret: REDMAP’s own website described the group as “dedicated to winning state legislative seats that will have a critical impact on congressional redistricting in 2011.”
The plan was massively successful: Republicans won nearly 700 state legislative seats in the 2010 elections, and gained a trifecta — meaning one-party control of both houses of the state legislature and governor’s mansion — in 11 states. As a result, the GOP found itself with complete control of the redistricting process in 40% of congressional districts, versus Democrats’ controlling just 10%. Increased representation gave the GOP the power to draw the maps for 213 congressional districts, enabling Republicans to guarantee sustained control of many House seats through the use of distorted maps.
Republicans did not shy away from using this power to aggressively gerrymander red districts. Across the country, Republicans drew congressional districts that heavily favored the GOP. Seven swing states that had been targeted under REDMAP were especially crucial: Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. All these states elected Obama in 2008, and all but North Carolina re-elected him in 2012. But their districts’ new boundaries were completely at odds with these results: in Ohio, seats were split 12-4 for the GOP; in North Carolina, 9-4; in Pennsylvania, 13-5. This unrepresentative outcome was dubbed “the Great Gerrymander” by Princeton professor Samuel Wang.
Part of the Republicans’ success was because Democrats had not prepared for REDMAP’s all-out assault on local state legislative races. “Democrats fell asleep at the wheel, and didn’t understand how drastic the consequences would be,” said Daley. The Democratic Party had little counter-strategy and expended less resources on state legislative races. As a result, legislative chambers across the country flipped to the GOP. Once these new Republican legislators took office, their efforts to gerrymander red-leaning districts was an entirely different beast from the partisan redistricting of the past. New technology and advanced algorithms enabled politicians to simulate thousands of possible maps to carefully determine which would be the most electorally advantageous. With computerized mapping, Republicans who found themselves in control of state legislatures after the 2010 elections could intricately distort electoral seats to favor the GOP. “This was data-driven, computerized gerrymandering,” Daley stated. “It allowed mapmakers to be more precise and certain than they ever had before.”
The effects of Republicans’ targeted efforts to unilaterally control the redistricting process have reverberated ever since. As a result of this offensive effort, Democratic congressional candidates won 1.4 million more votes than Republicans did in the 2012 midterm elections, but still found themselves stuck in the minority in the House of Representatives, controlling 201 seats to the GOP’s 234. Even in blue landslides — like the 2018 midterm elections — Republicans have disproportionately won more seats than their share of the popular vote would predict. In North Carolina in 2018, Democratic candidates for Congress won 48.5% of the vote, but the state sent ten Republicans and 3 Democrats to D.C. the following January in its congressional delegation. An analysis by the Associated Press concluded that in the 2018 midterms, the GOP won about 16 more seats in the House than their average vote share in congressional districts would have predicted. The gerrymandering conducted by Republicans after sweeping victories in the 2010 elections enabled the GOP to institute a system of minoritarian rule in the House, allowing the party to maintain political power in a manner that was at odds with the will of the people.
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After Democrats won trifecta control of the federal government for the first time in a decade in 2020 and 2021, they quickly pushed for reforms to American democracy. The House of Representatives passed H.R.1, the For the People Act in March 2021, which would take responsibility for redrawing districts out of legislators’ hands and grant it to independent, nonpartisan commissions instead. When the bill reached the Senate, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) renegotiated a version of the bill deemed the Freedom to Vote Act. Manchin’s version does not require states to use independent redistricting commissions, but would limit partisan gerrymandering by automatically blocking any congressional map that grants a party significantly more House seats than the average vote share in recent elections would predict.
The bill has languished on the floor of the Senate. Although it has the support of President Biden and many top Democrats, its passage requires 60 votes, and all Republican senators stand opposed. As 2020’s redistricting process began in 2021, this inaction on gerrymandering reform loomed large in the minds of Democrats, who were aware that their party was beginning the 2020 redistricting cycle with a structural disadvantage.
Partially as a result of REDMAP’s lasting effects, Republicans control the redistricting of 187 congressional seats for the 2020 cycle, whereas Democrats have power over just 75. Democrats were also disadvantaged because Democratic states disproportionately give independent commissions the power for redistricting. Of the four states that give non-politician commissions absolute power to redraw congressional districts, all voted for Joe Biden in November 2020, and three have Democratic governors (Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, is the outlier). Dave Wasserman, Senior Editor of the Cook Political Report, predicted that in California alone, the nonpartisan nature of redistricting would cost Democrats six or seven potential House seats, since legislators could have otherwise engineered these into reliably blue districts.
Thus, many pundits predicted in the wake of the release of the 2020 Census that Republicans would emerge with an even stronger grip on America’s political institutions by conducting another round of aggressive gerrymandering. The New York Times wrote in November 2021 that the Republican party could have “a nearly insurmountable advantage in the 2022 midterm elections and the next decade of House races.”
But Democrats have attempted to overcome this disadvantage by resorting to the very gerrymandering their democracy reform bill aims to abolish. In the 11 states where Democratic state legislatures control redistricting, officials have pushed for bluer districts that give the party a chance at holding the House in the 2022 midterms, or at least a stronger chance in elections later this decade. In Illinois, for example, Democratic legislators redrew the map so that the state’s current 13-5 Democratic delegation is likely to be 14-3 after November’s elections. In New Mexico, the sole Republican seat was transformed into a blue-tinted competitive district, with a D+5 partisan lean. The tiebreaking member of New Jersey’s bipartisan redistricting commission opted to vote for the districts drawn by Democratic legislators, explaining that his decision was because “the last redistricting map was drawn by the Republicans.” The new map is likely to give Democrats ten seats in the state’s congressional delegation, and Republicans just two.
Overall, the efforts by Democratic politicians to secure more favorable congressional districts before the 2022 midterms have led many political commentators to declare this redistricting cycle a relative win for liberals, rather than conservatives. One comment by Sean Maloney, representative of New York’s 18th congressional district and chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, demonstrates the relief shared by many Democrats: “We’re doing a hell of a lot better than we thought we would,” he declared.
Republicans have not been innocent victims in the 2020 redistricting cycle. They have also gerrymandered favorable districts in states across the nation, like Texas, Alabama, and Indiana. Some of the GOP’s gerrymandering has faced trouble in the courts, though: In both North Carolina and Ohio, state courts overturned new maps, agreeing with plaintiffs arguing they unfairly helped Republicans. These legal battles are still playing out, but at least temporarily, the courts have put a wrench in the plan of Republicans hoping to use gerrymandering to increase their chances of winning back the House in 2022.
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Both parties have claimed that their maps are not gerrymandered at all — that they are simply accurate reflections of population changes over the last decade. And both parties have nevertheless continued to criticize the other for their maps. But the Republican critique of Democratic gerrymandering has a unique dimension to it: The GOP has accused Democrats of hypocrisy, arguing that liberal legislators’ attempts to pass blue-leaning maps contradict the party’s national stand against gerrymandering.
“It’s wrong when Democrats do [gerrymandering] in New York, and it’s wrong when Republicans do it across the country,” declared Tom Reed, Democratic representative of New York’s 23rd congressional district. He concluded, “It’s the hypocrisy of the party on full display.” When Ohio legislators approved their intensely GOP-favoring maps last November, Republican state representative Bill Seitz defended that the new districts “followed the Constitution” and claimed that Democrats’ opposition to them was solely political. “There’s been enough hypocrisy around this issue to fill a Texas-sized outhouse,” Seitz said.
The argument posited by some Republicans that all gerrymandering is bad — and particularly when it is done by Democrats who claim to oppose it — has transformed the debate over redistricting. No longer just a fight over which neighborhoods are broken up by a new map, the fight over gerrymandering has become another chapter in the war between Democrats and Republicans over the need for reforms to America’s democracy.
Democrats who defend the gerrymandered maps passed in blue states, while railing against the larger harms that gerrymandering inflicts on American democracy, are aware that their stances seem to indicate cognitive dissonance. But they justify this contradiction by positing that unilateral disarmament on gerrymandering would cripple Democrats’ political prospects and further disadvantage them in a political system that already skews heavily Republican. “When you have a system that says we’re going to have purity in California and skulduggery in Texas, you end up with an unrepresentative [House] chamber,” said Representative Brad Sherman, of California’s 30th congressional district. “We want to live in a system where neither party gets screwed. But worst of all is a system where only one party gets screwed,” Sherman said to the Los Angeles Times.
Many other liberals have echoed Sherman’s argument — that Democrats cannot back down from gerrymandering and risk losing political power, when Republicans refuse to do the same. One Democratic state legislator in Colorado, where a nonpartisan commission draws new district boundaries, anonymously spoke to the Colorado Sun about his fears that by making redistricting an independent process, Democrats were giving up a crucial chance to protect their political prospects. “We’re f**king idiots,” the lawmaker said. “Should Democrats remain pure in this process, knowing that, unfortunately, political adversaries are not acting in good faith? No, we should not,” said Yvette Clarke, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, in an interview with Spectrum News.
Rather than shy away from the contradictions of their partisan redistricting efforts, some Democrats have attempted to label Republicans as the real hypocrites, using the fight over gerrymandering to emphasize that politicians who hate partisan redistricting should pass Manchin’s voting bill. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, griped to NBC News in February that Republican support would enable the Senate to easily pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which Blumenthal cosponsors. “We have to play by the rules that exist, even as we want to change the rules,” stated Blumenthal. “Unilateral disarmament really doesn’t work.” Blumenthal’s explanation for gerrymandering demonstrates how Democrats have responded to claims of hypocrisy by arguing that they are the only party attempting to take action on the issue that Republicans claim is a grave evil.
Democrats have also framed their defense of partisan gerrymandering in this cycle as protecting American democracy, rather than undermining it. “I can’t say that I’m excited about gerrymandering, whether it’s done by Democrats or Republicans,” stated Colin Allred, a Democratic Representative from Texas, to The Daily Beast. But, he explained, this gerrymandering is not just any gerrymandering. Instead, Allred argued, it is gerrymandering done to save America, “to try and preserve our democracy against some forces that I think are very literally trying to take it in a different direction.” After Maloney was asked about the GOP accusing Democrats of contradicting themselves, he fired back by emphasizing that Republicans had no basis to claim hypocrisy: “I’d ask them why every one of them voted against H.R. 1, which would have banned gerrymandering.” Allred’s and Maloney’s comments reveal how Democrats have justified their partisan redistricting as necessary to protect the union from destructive, minoritarian forces that have refused to work with them on finding a solution.
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Maloney’s comments are especially significant not just because he is the chair of the committee that works to send Democrats to Congress, but also because he represents New York in the House of Representatives. Maloney’s state — a crucial blue bastion for Democrats hoping to gerrymander favorable House seats — has found itself at the center of the debate over partisan redistricting, and its experiences demonstrate the hostile politics of gerrymandering and the difficulties of fixing partisan redistricting.
The 2020 redistricting cycle presented a bold opportunity for New Yorkers hopeful that the decades of partisan fighting characterizing the state’s map-drawing process in the past would come to an end. This was the first cycle where the boundaries of the state’s legislative and congressional districts would be drawn by an independent redistricting commission, proposed by former Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2012 and approved by voters in a state referendum in 2014. “This agreement will permanently reform the redistricting process in New York to once and for all end self-interested and partisan gerrymandering,” Cuomo declared when announcing the plan in 2021.
A decade later, Cuomo’s prediction that the redistricting process in New York would be forever fixed by his plan has proven wholly untrue. Once again, the state is in the midst of heated debate over its congressional districts’ boundaries. Unlike 2010, though, the gerrymanderers are the Democrats — and the cause of the debate lies in the very structure of the reforms that Cuomo championed.
Although Cuomo and other supporters of the commission advertised it as “independent,” it had virtually no separation from the influence of the state legislature. Jeffrey Wice, a professor of law at New York Law School and an expert on redistricting, explained in an interview with The Politic that the commission is made up of ten members, eight of whom are selected by the leaders of New York’s state legislative chambers. The Senate Majority and Minority Leaders and the Assembly Majority and Minority Leaders appoint two members each, with the other two appointees selected by the first eight members. The commission for the 2020 cycle had five Democratic-appointed-or-affiliated members, and five Republican ones.
Although the group is empowered with drafting maps for state legislative and congressional districts, the responsibility immediately falls to state legislators if both chambers of the legislature vote against the commission’s proposal, or if the commission fails to come to a proposal at all. The possibility of the latter was made more likely by Cuomo’s decision to make the council ten members, inviting stalemates between equally empowered Democratic and Republican members. “The commission did not have a very workable construct,” Wice stated.
When Cuomo’s commission was first proposed in 2012, many advocates for voting rights and improvements to the redistricting process labeled the commission as fraudulent and inadequate. “We have time between now and 2022 to set up a good system through statute or a constitutional amendment,” Susan Lerner, the executive director of the election reform group Common Cause New York warned in 2014. “If we settle for the crumbs that the Legislature is willing to give us, then we don’t actually get reform.”
Lerner’s warning ultimately proved correct. In January 2022, the commission announced that it was unable to come to a decision on maps for the state’s legislative and congressional districts. Republican and Democratic members both accused appointees of the other political party as being to blame for the commission’s abdication of its duty. In February, state senator Michael Gianaris expressed disappointment, but not shock, at the results of the commission. “People are right when they say this process was designed to fail,” he stated.
As Cuomo’s plan demanded, the state legislature took over the responsibility for drawing maps after the commission failed to agree on new boundaries. Legislators soon approved new districts that created three new Democratic-leaning congressional seats and eliminated three Republican-leaning ones. The new maps also made the GOP-held 1st and 22nd congressional districts within reach for Democrats, and endangered the re-election prospects of GOP congresswomen Nicole Malliotakis and Claudia Tenney, in the 11th and 22nd congressional districts, respectively. New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the legislature’s maps into law just a month after the commission had admitted defeat.
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The failure of the commission in New York reflects the hollow nature of many attempts to reform gerrymandering. In a November 2021 investigation, the New York Times explained that the commissions established in a handful of states were billed as a transformative solution to partisan redistricting, but that the groups have been plagued by “political trench warfare.” Faulty organization, political pressures, and intense lobbying by both parties for more favorable maps have led many commissions to end in polarization or disagreement, as in New York, and force the responsibility for redistricting to be reassigned to the courts or state legislature.
The failures of commissions are highly dependent on their structure: There are independent commissions, where members are not chosen directly by politicians (usually by an agency or the state supreme court instead). There are commissions exclusively made up of politicians, and there are bipartisan commissions where politicians of both parties directly select members (this is New York’s commission’s structure, even though Cuomo named the group “independent”). And finally, there are advisory commissions that have no actual sway over the process but provide guidance and recommend potential maps to the state legislature.
In a January 2022 analysis, FiveThirtyEight concluded that the structure that resulted in the fairest maps and had the least contentious negotiating processes this cycle were the truly independent commissions, since members are “insulated as much as possible from the pressures of partisanship.” But only four states — Arizona, California, Colorado, and Michigan — have this form of commission. Seventeen states have some other form of commission, many with groups whose power can be easily superseded by the state legislature or governor. Connecticut, Ohio, and Virginia, for example, all have politician commissions; during this redistricting cycle, all three commissions eventually deadlocked and sent the responsibility for drawing maps to the state supreme courts (in CT and VA) or legislature (in OH). In Utah, the Republican-controlled state legislature totally ignored the maps proposed by the state’s independent commission, and instead approved its own, gerrymandered boundaries.
Even the states that have truly independent commissions have seen party loyalists attempt to influence members’ opinions and convince them to push for gerrymandered maps, leading one of the Republican commissioners in Colorado to declare, “you can’t take the politics out of redistricting.”
New York’s commission demonstrates the problems with redistricting reform. Cuomo repeatedly cited the commission’s creation as an example of his administration’s commitment to democratic and electoral improvements. “New York is now a leader among the growing number of states that have reformed their redistricting process in an effort to stop such gerrymandering,” he said in a 2012 speech. But in 2022, as in 2012, the task of redrawing congressional districts was the job of the state legislature. Little changed, and the ugly fight that ensued over the state’s redistricting was a reflection of the worst aspects of today’s politics, a process replete with name-calling, hyperpolarization, and an inability to reach a consensus on any issue.
Americans have repeatedly expressed that they want an end to gerrymandering — a real end, not another round of hollow reforms that empower politicians to control commissions. That’s why so many states have approved these commissions through referenda, which are billed to voters as legitimate and meaningful changes that will prevent politics from influencing which district their home falls into. Public opinion polling confirms the appetite for reform: In an August 2021 poll, nearly 90% of respondents expressed opposition to drawing districts to benefit a certain political party. Independent commissions are a particularly popular reform: Another recent poll found that over 60%of respondents (and 60% of Republicans) would prefer a commission to control redistricting, rather than elected officials. These reforms are popular, but the chaos of the 2020 redistricting cycle — particularly in New York — indicates that there must be a better way to institute them.
The results of the 2020 redistricting cycle will influence the nation’s political landscape for years to come. Their most immediate impact will be felt in the November midterm elections, but the long-lasting effects of Republicans’ REDMAP strategy speaks to how these gerrymandered districts can remain reliable seats for either political party for years. The fight over redistricting is more vicious than ever before, as Democrats frame their partisan redistricting as necessary to protect the union from destructive, minoritarian forces.
And this fight will not stop anytime soon. “We realize we’re in this for the long haul,” Lawler said. He remains defiant, and eager for what opportunities for change the next redistricting cycle will bring. “You can’t give up! You can’t give up.”