One of the political facts of life in today’s America is the distance between popular opinion and electoral results. Polls and academic surveys consistently show support for policies that are inconsistent with–and loudly rejected by–candidates who win elections. That is especially true for those who are elected to the House of Representatives.
For as long as I’ve been writing these daily meditations (okay, rants), I’ve attributed that state of affairs to gerrymandering–the partisan redistricting that I am increasingly convinced lies at the very heart of America’s political dysfunctions.
Partisan redistricting–the drawing of congressional districts by legislators who are choosing their voters, rather than the other way around–subverts democracy by enabling minority rule. The practice was dubbed “gerrymandering” to “honor” Elbridge Gerry, who was responsible for drawing districts in Massachusetts that one publication said “looked like salamanders.” Gerry was born in 1744, so the practice of manipulating district lines is nothing new. What is relatively new is the precision in that line drawing that can now be accomplished with the aid of computers.
In states where one party controls redistricting, legislators can carve out districts with majorities of their voters, and cram the opposing party’s voters into a remaining few.
If you wonder where looney-tune officeholders like Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert come from, that’s the explanation.
The New York Times has just figured that out–and documented it.
A New York Times analysis of the nearly 6,000 congressional and state legislative elections in November shows just how few races were true races. Nearly all either were dominated by an incumbent or played out in a district drawn to favor one party overwhelmingly. The result was a blizzard of blowouts, even in a country that is narrowly divided on politics.
Just 8 percent of congressional races (36 of 435) and 7 percent of state legislative races (400 of 5,465) were decided by fewer than five percentage points, according to The Times’s analysis.
Consequences from the death of competition are readily apparent. Roughly 90 percent of races are now decided not by general-election voters in November but by the partisans who tend to vote in primaries months earlier. That favors candidates who appeal to ideological voters and lawmakers who are less likely to compromise. It exacerbates the polarization that has led to deadlock in Congress and in statehouses.
The result of this practice is the wide gulf between voters’ actual policy preferences and the ideologues who emerge victorious. And–as the Times grudgingly acknowledged–although both parties engage in the practice, Republicans overwhelmingly do most of it.
The Times noted that demographic shifts and “political sorting” — the tendency of like-minded citizens to live in the same community–also have played a role, but the study confirmed the pre-eminent role of redistricting in creating unrepresentative Representatives.
While it is easy to focus on the candidates, the money, the message or the economy, increasingly it is the maps that determine the outcome. In North Carolina, they may have decided control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Only one of the state’s 14 congressional districts was decided by fewer than five points. A Republican won the state’s next closest race — by 14 points.
In 2022, the State Supreme Court ordered a more competitive map, but it was tossed out after midterm elections shook up the balance of the court. The replacement, which was drawn by the Republican-led Legislature, gave three Democratic seats to the G.O.P. while making nearly every district safer for the party that held it.
It is impossible to know how elections held under the first map would have turned out. But, according to Justin Levitt, a redistricting law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, “had every seat stayed the same as in 2022, those three seats would have made the difference, and Democrats would have had a one-seat majority” in Congress.
The Times article focused on several states where partisan line-drawing has produced results incompatible with the will of a majority of that state’s voters.
Even before Trump’s justices corrupted the Supreme Court, that body refused to put an end to the practice, calling partisan gerrymanders a “political problem” outside federal courts’ jurisdiction. Thanks to that unconscionable evasion, citizens in states which, like Indiana, lack referenda or initiatives, are helpless to correct the situation. Only the legislature–filled with “representatives” who benefit from the practice–can overturn it.
The only hope for Hoosiers is Democratic control of the U.S. House and Senate, and passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
Our first chance is 2026, when–hopefully–Trump will have infuriated enough voters to spur turnout.
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