Impelled no doubt by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s gerrymandering decision, Sean Trende has an excellent post at RealClearPolitics on the ins and outs of drawing districts. He doubts that Penn’s SC’s decision will have much actual impact:
Who knows what mapmakers will come up with in a week or two dedicated to nothing but this question. My goal here isn’t to be exhaustive. Rather, it is just to emphasize that the court didn’t mandate fair districts, but rather ordered compact ones, and that these are two very different things. Moreover, there are important implications to this distinction, and they don’t necessarily work in Democrats’ favor in every environment.
One of the many problems with gerrymandering, even for defensible purposes, is that neighborhoods change faster than incumbents do. Take the Illinois 4th Congressional District. It was draw with more or less its present boundaries almost 30 years ago to ensure that a Hispanic Congressman would be elected from Chicago. It gerrymandered the two Chicago neighborhoods in which most Hispanics lived at the time to achieve that goal. Luis Gutierrez has held the seat ever since.
But Chicago and its Hispanic population has changed over that period. There are many more Hispanics, they live all over the city, and, importantly, there are many more Hispanic voters than there used to be and fewer blacks. IL-4’s boundaries protect Luis Guitierrez but they dilute Hispanic voting power in the city. There might actually be more Hispanic Congressmen in Chicago if the IL-4 weren’t so gerrymandered.
Hard to believe they could draw it much worse. The GOP won 54% of the votes for Congress, but have 72% of the seats. Throw in the attempts to keep people from voting and the GOP has a winning strategy for them. However, people may eventually get a bit pissy when they realize they are not being represented. (So all of those rural, non-elite people claiming they weren’t being represented and that was why they voted for Trump? Nah, they are over-represented, it is just that their representatives don’t act on their behalf, much like Trump won’t either.)
Steve
I’m not sure Trende appreciates the SCOTUS case now pending. While the PA case is based on state law, if the SCOTUS decides that the U.S. Constitution requires use of efficiency gap, that requirement is superior to any state law requirement. Depending on the procedural posture of challenges available to the map-to-be-drawn, it may be subject to challenge in the federal courts if SCOTUS invalidates the Wisconsin map. (Unlike Trende, I don’t think an efficiency test is a natural compliment to a compactness requirement that can simply be feathered in)
Which leaves me wondering how much time in advance of an election is needed to run a proper election. Legally, probably very little for Congress because one doesn’t have to live in the district; whoever is running for Congress now will be on the ballot even if strangers. But I would personally create a high burden to challenge maps more than a year after they were created.
@steve, I think I would restate Trende’s argument as a remap may provide Republicans an opportunity for strategic retreat. Electoral maps decay over time, and use of packing and cracking techniques exposes the majority party to the risk of spreading votes to thin and suffering major losses in a down election.
Not to defend the American system; but looking at the results of 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014 and potentially 2018, it seems gerrymandering never prevents the electorate from changing or enlarging the Congressional majority as it wills.
The biggest problem with assuming gerrymandering is the root all of evil is it assumes people don’t change their minds.
It creates the fallacy of trying to draw and redraw boundaries instead of changing policies, candidates, messaging.
The equal population requirement makes partisan gerrymanders very unstable.