On Redistricting, It's Time for Republicans to Stop Whining and Start Negotiating

Gerrymandered maps are rationally approved by majorities at the state level. Only a new set of federal rules can rein in gerrymandering.

Dear readers,

Virginia voters have narrowly approved a proposal to follow California’s lead and redraw their congressional district map to advantage Democrats, responding to a trend that kicked off with the Trump White House pushing for Texas and other Republican-controlled states to redraw their maps to add Republican seats. Nationally, the whole episode has drawn a lot of effort and expense but looks set to produce roughly a wash in terms of the overall partisan lean of the national congressional district map. Stupid games, stupid prizes, etc.

One strange aspect of the referendum fight over redistricting in Virginia has been that, while Virginia is a blue state overall, it’s disproportionately the home state of the national professional Republican class. Operatives and journalists and other influential members of Washington’s right-of-center elite tend to settle in Virginia, which, unlike Maryland and the District of Columbia, tends to have more conservative public policies¹ and was recently politically competitive. But now, the state’s Democratic partisan lean is pronounced, and people who are Republican for a living are suffering the indignity of being rendered powerless in the state they call home.

And boy, have they been pissed about Democrats’ successful effort to redraw the map.

I get it — when you’re in the minority party in a state, it sucks to have the maps redrawn so your share of legislative seats falls far below your share of the vote. At the same time, it’s rational for voters in the majority party to want to maximize the odds that the policy outcomes they support actually get enacted in Washington. This is why gerrymanders pass, not just in blue states but also in red ones: the median voter in Texas votes Republican, and the new Texas gerrymander increases the odds that Congress will do what that voter wants. So, too, in Virginia, where the map increases the odds that Congress will have the Democratic majority the average Virginia voter prefers.

The only way to stop this race to the bottom is with a federal law that requires states to draw congressional districts to some uniform standard of fairness, however defined, even where it would serve the interest of each individual state’s political majority to draw its own map differently. But the Virginia-resident professional Republican operative class isn’t interested in a resolution like this, despite the fact that they keep losing these fights to Democrats. They just whine a lot, and if you point out to them that Democrats are acting rationally in response to gerrymandering in red states, the responses you get are variations on not-my-job, not-my-problem. It’s because they would like a policy that protects their interests at home in Virginia, thank you very much; why should they have to think about Texas, when we have a federal system, and they don’t live in Texas?

The Constitution (Article I, Section 4) grants Congress the authority to tell states how to choose their representatives in Congress. The federal government has used these powers in ways that go well beyond the Voting Rights Act — for example, since 1967, federal law has required states to use single-member districts for the House of Representatives — so the idea that the federal government would tell states what to do here isn’t a breach of our federal system; it’s been contemplated in the Constitution since the founding. And there’s also no alternative — Democrats are not going to unilaterally disarm in blue states in response to Republican complaints. The only legislative body where a positive-sum compromise could possibly be reached is Congress, where there’s no obvious national advantage for either party to exploit by refusing to make a deal to end gerrymandering.

I actually think it’s a sign of progress that we’ve started to see Virginia-based Republicans make specific complaints about specific Democratic proposals to restrict gerrymandering. It’s true that defining a “fair” map is hard, and that it can also be hard to make sure a policy intended to produce a certain kind of map actually produces them in practice. I don’t expect Republicans to simply pick up a Democratic piece of voting legislation and pass it wholesale, but this would be a great thing to hash out in a legislative negotiation. There are a lot of state-level models to consider — including independent redistricting commissions in Arizona and Colorado that produced maps relatively congenial to Republicans this cycle — when designing a national compromise system.

Or, we can do nothing. Gerrymandering reform became a priority for Democrats because we went through a decade-plus period where the national congressional map was tilted toward Republicans, and both parties thought that situation was durable. But it hasn’t been durable — the national House map became more fair in part due to shifts in the political coalitions, party control of the state lawmaking process is now pretty evenly divided for redistricting purposes, and Democrats have recently shown that they can play hardball in redistricting fights better than Republicans can. The main groups that now stand to benefit from redistricting reform are members of minority parties in lopsided states² — a group that now includes most of the national GOP operative class. I’d suggest they push their party to move now, while Democrats still have the reflexive impulse to want a national rule to rein in gerrymandering.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. For example, Virginia is still a right-to-work state.

2. I do also believe non-partisan map drawing plausibly benefits the whole electorate. For one thing, I think it would be good if lawmakers spent less time fighting over district-drawing so they could focus on making substantive public policy. I also believe letting representatives choose their voters is bad for accountability, and the construction of maps with few competitive districts is also bad for accountability. But it’s also possible to draw maps that are “fair” in the sense of producing a division of seats that reflects the division of voters without actually making districts competitive — a map evenly split between safe red and blue seats will produce proportionate outcomes in an evenly divided state, for example. On the flip side of that, while newly gerrymandered maps have meant major changes for party advantage, they haven’t necessarily reduced seat competitiveness: the new Virginia map substantially increases the likely number of seats Democrats would win in most elections in the state, but it actually increases the number of seats likely to produce competitive general elections from four to five. I’d like to see seat competitiveness be one of the factors that gets emphasized in any national law about district-drawing, along with proportionality and compactness, but how to weigh those map-drawing objectives is a matter for lawmakers to get to discussing.