Republicans Brought This Upon Themselves
The GOP started the Gerrymander Wars, Democrats will finish it
Gerrymandering has been a thing in American politics for over a century now. The practice of drawing district lines to favor one political party over another is named after former Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, who signed a bill in 1812 that redrew districts in the state to favor his Democratic-Republican Party.
One of the more ridiculously shaped districts was said to have resembled a salamander, leading one journalist to dub it a "Gerry-mander". The name stuck.
The term has been especially present in the headlines recently as voters in Virginia went to the polls Tuesday and passed a congressional map that would give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in US House seats in the state. Republicans, of course, are howling in response, claiming that this is all fundamentally anti-democratic and unfair to Republican voters.
But a look at recent political history shows that Republicans were the party that started this recent clash over redistricting a decade and a half ago. They've built their power on gerrymandering and voter restrictions and used it to crush both Democrats and American Democracy. After years of inaction, Democrats are finally fighting back using the tools that were first refined by Republicans.
Turnabout is fair play, welcome to the finding out portion of the fucking around cycle.
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Katelyn Burns
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Gerrymanders have long been a tool for one party to leverage a state legislative majority into near permanent control of a state and its representation in congress. But over the last decade and a half, the Republican party has taken the practice of gerrymandering into its most extreme form so as to build an election map that heavily favors the red party over the blue.
District lines were, until recently, typically redrawn every 10 years in accordance with the US census, in order to ensure that district lines kept up with area population trends.
The current gerry-mania kicked off in 2011. Barack Obama had been elected president two years earlier and a Democratic congressional and Senate majority passed the Affordable Care Act. But Republicans swept into power in an a nearly unprecedented way during the 2010 midterm elections.
It's almost too difficult to quantify just how sweeping the Republican victory that year was. Most importantly for this story, the party took control of 20 state legislative chambers away from Democrats, winning 680 state leg seats in total.
Even more importantly, 2010 was a census year, which meant that all of these newly flipped Republican state legislatures would be responsible for redrawing districts in those states.
Enter Project REDMAP.
This project was a centralized effort within the Republican party to draw the most extreme possible gerrymanders possible that favored the party across dozens of states. It was the first time that a party used sophisticated computer software to finely tune election maps for maximum results.
Towns were sometimes split into three or four different districts. Sometimes districts would, in places, be no wider than one street wide in order to connect with another neighborhood further away. Sometimes district lines ran along property lines to single out a single household on a street to go into a district separate than their neighbors if moving that household would help Republicans.
Several states, like Wisconsin and North Carolina are still under the thumb of that original gerrymander, even as the practice has gotten more and more extreme and more refined over time.
A 2021 study published by Cambridge University Press found that in over two dozen states, Republicans can expect to win 20% more seats than Democrats if the total statewide vote total is close. In general, in the average state legislature, Republicans can expect to win 9% more seats than Democrats if their vote share is between 45% and 55%.
This map advantage within the electorate has been the vehicle with which the Republican party has driven our politics further and further to the extreme. When you don't have to worry about a threat in the general election, but are always vulnerable to a primary challenge from the right, there is nothing to check the near constant rightward drift the GOP has undergone over the last 16 years.
Republicans have only made their gerrymanders more and more extreme over the years. After the 2020 census, they cranked the electoral map even further to the right. And facing possible obliteration in the upcoming midterm elections, Republicans in Missouri, Texas and other places have attempted a mid-census redraw that would let them eke a few more US House seats in a clear blue wave election year.
Last year, the Republican controlled Supreme Court issued a shadow docket ruling allowing an extreme gerrymander in Texas. In return, California and Virginia set out to work on redistricting projects of their own, this time favoring the blue side of the aisle.
(Notice the long arms of the 8th, 1st, 7th, 11th, and 10th disctricts reaching into the greater DC area in northern Virginia. That's gerrymandering at work)
We didn't arrive in this moment lightly. For years Democrats attempted to implement fair redistricting practices that took control out of the hands of legislators who are only looking to cement their own power. Several solutions, like a non-partisan electoral board responsible for drawing a state's districts, have been floated and Republicans have fought them every step of the way.
Having exhausted the compromise options, Democrats have hit the point of no return. The only way to stop the constant GOP gerrymanders and the resulting power they bequeath is to create Democratic gerrymanders of their own. There were several points along the way in Virginia for which Republicans could have argued their case against the new map and they failed in all of them.
I have no sympathy for them. My dad used to say, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes." That's what happened to Republicans in their national gerrymandering scheme.
Today they are crying over fairness. It rings hollow to me. They had years to work out a fair solution to this, now it's time to reap the whirlwind.
Thank you so much for reading and for all of your support last week with the loss of my beloved Samwise. Just as a reminder, you can get half off an annual subscription to Burns Notice here ($20 for the year). It feels nice to be writing again. I'll be back tomorrow with the new episode of Cancel Me, Daddy (it's really good so keep an eye out on it).
