After the long-anticipated 2022 midterms, Republicans appear prone to emerge with the narrowest of majorities within the U.S. House. If the GOP’s current advantage holds, they’ll have partisan gerrymandering to thank.
The day after midterm balloting, NBC News projected that Republicans will win 220 seats. The Recent York Times needle, at 224, was barely more bullish. If the ultimate number falls somewhere inside that range, it’ll mean that between three and 7 seats will make the difference.
The Recent York Times and the know-it-all campaign savants on the Times-branded political site the Upshot declared this decade’s maps the fairest in years—and far of the media mainstream followed their lead. However the apostles of this confident appraisal remained blind to the best way state after state dismantled competitive seats, diluted minority voters (with an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court), and allowed lawmakers drawing district lines to declare the winners. Consequently, the maps ultimately produced a photograph finish that only highlighted the immense power of gerrymandering.
An aggressive—and certain unconstitutional—partisan and racial gerrymander demanded by Gov. Ron DeSantis helped provide Republicans with 4 of those seats from Florida alone. Maps that likely violated Voting Rights Act protections against racial gerrymanders were allowed to proceed in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. A conservative district court in Texas endorsed a blatantly discriminatory congressional map there that reduced the political power of Latinos at the same time as they drove 95 percent of the state’s population growth during the last decade.
Wisconsin’s conservative court mediated a redistricting deadlock between the Republican-controlled legislature and Democratic governor by mandating a recent map that made the fewest possible changes to the present one—meaning that the previous decade’s toxic GOP gerrymander was locked in place for an additional 10 years. In Ohio, meanwhile, the state supreme court twice rejected congressional maps drawn by GOP lawmakers as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. A bipartisan majority of justices declared these maps wildly out of line with a 2018 statewide initiative backed by greater than 70 percent of voters mandating that districts be drawn up with lines that didn’t favor or disfavor any political party, to raised bring them into alignment with the state’s partisan balance. Lawless GOP officials used the maps anyway. They ignored the courts, ran out the clock, and – won 10 out of 15 House seats—two-thirds of the delegation—in a state where J.D. Vance only defeated Tim Ryan 53.3 percent to 46.7 percent for the U.S. Senate.
Pretty soon, these gift-wrapped seats begin so as to add up, especially when the national voting margins appear to be tight. 4 seats in Florida, three across the deep South, one other handful from Texas and Ohio, one in Wisconsin, a pickup in Iowa won from playing hardball with the state’s independent commission, one in Arizona from hijacking that state’s “independent” in name-only commission, one other gain in Tennessee by cracking Nashville in half: Greater than a dozen newly Republican seats got here not from ousting Democratic incumbents but by redrawing districts to their advantage.
Florida provided the most important windfall. After GOP lawmakers passed a largely established order map, DeSantis pushed back and overruled the legislature. A ProPublica investigation found that his administration worked closely with national GOP lawyers and operatives to attract a recent array of gerrymandered districts. Your complete effort likely violates the Florida state structure, which voters amended in 2010, with overwhelming majorities, to ban partisan gerrymandering.
But just like the leaders of the Ohio Republican Party, DeSantis brushed aside the people, his state structure, and the courts. His map-rigging team was determined to push a 16-11 GOP edge all of the technique to 20-8. They completed this by dismantling Florida’s fifth district, a majority-minority seat held by Democrat Al Lawson, cracking it into 4 smaller pieces, and attaching each to an overwhelmingly white Republican district. Florida’s Supreme Court defended the state’s structure and overturned last decade’s map, finding that the GOP had engaged in a conspiracy to conduct a hidden, parallel map-making process alongside the one first approved by the legislature. But Florida’s current court, filled with DeSantis cronies, allowed the rigged map to face.
It worked as expected: Republicans netted those 4 seats Tuesday, handing the GOP 70 percent of the House delegation in a state Donald Trump carried in 2020 with 51.3 percent (and that DeSantis won in 2018 with just 49.6 percent).
This week, right after elections were held using these gerrymandered maps, a three-judge panel allowed litigation against them to proceed to discovery. But that is a protracted process; litigation against Florida’s 2011 maps proved successful in 2015 and led to recent maps ahead of 2016. Inconveniently for cheated Democrats, that ruling got here with no time-machine provision to rerun the 2012 and 2014 elections. Nor did Barack Obama get a redo on his second term with the Democratic U.S. House that voters tried to elect by mobilizing 1.4 million more votes than Republicans did, only to be stymied by GOP maps. Stalling is the complete point. Steal a cycle, perhaps two. After which let conservative courts handle the remaining.
In Alabama, meanwhile, where seven congressional districts and a 27 percent Black population must have opened the door to 2 districts for Black voters to elect a candidate of their selecting, GOP lawmakers as an alternative packed most Blacks into one tentacle-shape district, after which diluted the remaining across the remaining House maps. It was such a textbook violation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that even a federal three-judge panel crammed with Trump appointees demanded a recent map. But when the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal, the conservative majority blocked that ruling – over the objections even of Chief Justice John Roberts–hardly a friend of the Voting Rights Act). In his dissent, Roberts wrote that existing law and longstanding precedent had been accurately applied.
That call, in turn, pushed still one other federal judge to OK Georgia’s racial gerrymander, despite the fact that the judge believed that it also violated the VRA. Later in the summertime, the U.S. Supreme Court would place its thumb on the size again, reinstating a congressional map in Louisiana that a federal judge had blocked as a racial gerrymander. Black voters and others across southern states now deprived of the preclearance protections of the VRA’s Section 5, effectively led to the Shelby County v Holder case in 2013, suddenly found themselves stripped of any safety net by any means.
The high court had already decided in 2019’s Rucho v Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering was a nonjusticiable political issue beyond the purview of federal courts. And on this recent set of rulings, the court’s emboldened conservative majority enacted a separate and unequal playing field for the redistricting cycle that led on to this midterm election. State courts might step in and declare these sorts of partisan gerrymanders unconstitutional. But that might provide little comfort in states akin to Florida, Texas and Georgia, where state courts were way back annexed by the suitable. (State supreme courts in North Carolina and Ohio flipped over to conservative majorities within the 2022 midterms, all but ensuring that Republican lawmakers in each states will rework maps mid-decade into airtight gerrymanders.)
To get a clearer sense of our near-term future, just compare Recent York—where Democrats sought to elude reforms passed by voters so as to enact an extreme gerrymander of their very own—with Florida. Florida’s courts worked to undermine reforms won by voters via constitutional amendment—as they did two years earlier, when voters ended the state’s longstanding felon disenfranchisement efforts, only to have the court effectively reinstate them, this time with a modern-day poll tax. But Recent York’s state supreme court, properly, refused to permit the legislature’s chicanery to face. The court, finding that the legislature couldn’t be trusted to attract a constitutional map, handed the responsibility as an alternative to a respected and independent special master— who drew a responsive and balanced map on which Republicans could make a few of their biggest gains outside Florida. The Recent York Democrats who enacted this losing and anti-democratic effort ought to be out of labor; they helped cost their party control of Congress. Yet there have been no similar consequences when Republicans ran the identical play and defied the courts.
It’s a judicial game of heads I win, tails you lose: Win on fair maps elsewhere, and entrench secure Republican districts within the states the GOP controls. There isn’t any rule of law when one side listens to the courts, and the opposite packs them with relatives of state elected officials—and, if a choice doesn’t go their way, ignores the choice like Stalin scoffing over the dimensions of the Pope’s army.
Tuesday did bring some excellent news: State legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania flipped for the primary time in many years and multiple cycles, respectively, as recent maps drawn by a commission or with court assistance proved conscious of the need of the people. It’s good that a few of the overall GOP bias within the maps has been erased; it’s less appealing—and a reminder of the inherent bias with any system of winner-takes-all, single-member districts—to recall that much of that’s on account of Supreme Court-sanctioned maximal gerrymanders all over the place.
But overall, this election—and the likely near-miss for preserving the Democrats’ majority within the House—only reinforces the facility of gerrymandering to find out results. Republicans drew many more districts than Democrats this time around, as they did after 2010. And in a good battle for control of Congress, that edge proved decisive. Democrats, after all, aren’t blameless here, especially Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema: They might have used complete control of Washington to place an end to partisan gerrymandering, but never brought any real urgency to the problem and failed.
Things will only get harder in 2024. It’s possible you’ll not examine in The Upshot, but it surely’s entirely likely that Ohio and North Carolina might be the Florida of 2024, with recent, mid-decade congressional redraws that add one other 5 or 6 secure red seats to the already steep hill Democrats must surmount. All this legally sanctioned ballot chicanery will work to further entrench the anti-majoritarian lean of essentially the most representative arm of the national legislature and speed up our turn toward one-party minority rule.