Democrats claim that the once-a-decade process of redrawing electoral maps should not be a partisan match. They’ve advocated for independent commissions to balance population changes in congressional districts.
They are about to feel the effects of their focus on fairness.
In Democratic-controlled Colorado, Virginia and Oregon, new congressional maps drawn by commissions or bipartisan power-sharing agreements are unlikely to give the party the sort of political advantages it could have otherwise enjoyed.
Republicans have not given up on their power and control the process in 20 US states including Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Texas.
This imbalance could have serious consequences. The House of Representatives is currently controlled by Democrats by just eight seats. Democrats could lose the House if they don’t seize redistricting advantages.
“There should be concern within the Democratic Party that we may have been too quick to seek reform without really looking at the long-term implications,” said Rick Ridder, a Democratic strategist in Denver.
The commissions will draw 95 seats in Congress this year that would otherwise have been drawn only by Democrats, and only 13 by Republicans.
It is true that not all Democratic states have given up power in favor of reform. Democratic-controlled states like Illinois and Maryland are heavily gerrymandered. And Democratic-controlled state legislatures can overrule commissions in New Mexico and especially New York, where the party could erase several GOP House seats if it controls the map.
The narrow margins mean that the states of the commission are important. The nonpartisan Commission released Friday’s preliminary map for Colorado, where President Joe Biden won 13 percentage points. This could allow the parties to evenly divide the eight congressional seats. Some Democratic maps were split 6-2 in favor of the Democrats. This difference is equal to half of the Democratic margin in Congress.
Virginia is a state where Democrats hold the governor’s post and control the legislature. Party leaders worry that the bipartisan commission might become ineffective, leaving redistricting control to the state Supreme Court. This court is dominated by GOP-appointed members. It is likely that the court will hire experts to draw maps to determine the political composition of each state’s 11 congressional districts as well as its state legislative seats.
The Democrats in Oregon, which is a blue state, are gaining a seat in the House of Representatives. They have agreed to split their redistricting committee evenly between Republicans and Democrats.
The two parties released their respective maps for the state on Friday. The Democratic map protects one swing district, represented by Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio. It also draws in more voters from his party and creates a safe Democratic District west of Portland for Oregon’s sixth and newest congressional district. Both districts are competitive with the Republican version. Deadlocks send the process to the Democratic secretary-of-state.
Good government advocates have long argued for nonpartisan commissions to oversee redistricting to end gerrymandering, the centuries-old practice of drawing districts designed to pack opponents’ voters into one place, or scatter them across districts to minimize their voting power. The practice shrinks the number of competitive districts, hardening partisan polarization, and can blunt the political power of some racial and ethnic groups.
Republicans argue that both parties gerrymander. Democratic worries about the Colorado and Virginia commissions expose the party’s hypocrisy, said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which oversees line-drawing for the GOP. “It’s as if they see these commissions as an extension of the Democratic Party and not as the fair-minded independent bodies they say they are.”
Kincaid’s Democratic counterpart, Kelly Ward Burton of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, fired back that Democrats have truly pushed redistricting reforms, unlike the GOP.
“Republicans know they are out of step with where this country is going and growing, which is why they have to manipulate the maps and the voting laws in order to win,” Burton said. “Trusting the voters and supporting maps that fairly and accurately represent the communities of this country is a sign of strength, not a sign of weakness.”
Democrats have proposed requiring nonpartisan commissions to draw lines in every state as part of a sweeping federal election bill, which is stalled in the Senate due to unanimous Republican opposition.
Currently, 10 states have redistricting commissions that draw lines for congressional districts, including reliably Republican Montana and swing state Arizona, where the GOP would otherwise control the process.
However, six of the commission states are ones whose governments are controlled by Democrats, including the nation’s biggest state, California, with its 52 congressional seats. That’s part of the reason the GOP controls the redistricting process in states representing 187 congressional seats, and Democrats in ones with only 75 seats.
Often, nonpartisan commissions are pushed by the party out of power. California, for example, cannot be gerrymandered by Democrats because its last Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, passed a 2008 ballot measure creating a nonpartisan commission.
In Michigan, where Republicans aggressively gerrymandered when they had full control of state government in 2010, groups with ties to Democrats in 2018 pushed a ballot measure taking the pen from the GOP legislature and giving it to a nonpartisan commission.
When Republicans controlled Virginia’s state legislature in 2019, Democrats voted to place a commission measure on their ballot. After Democrats gained control of the legislature the following year, not all Democrats were able to cast the second vote necessary for the measure to be placed before the voters. This was due to the enthusiastic support of out-of-power Republicans.
The initiative passed overwhelmingly in November of 2020, as voters handed Biden a 10 percentage point win.
The state legislatures make up half of the 16 members of this commission. If the commission formally deadlocks, the state Supreme Court draws the maps, a prospect that alarms Democrats given its lack of progress so far.
“We have made a mistake,” said Lashrecse Aird, a Democratic delegate who voted against the measure both times it came up in the state legislature.
In Colorado, Democrats in 2018 backed a ballot measure to hand control of redistricting to a nonpartisan commission that does not include legislators. The initiative was first proposed by a wealthy businessman and former Republican. Some Democrats signed on enthusiastically, others grudgingly, but eventually the party threw its full backing behind it.
The commission’s maps are not exactly what Democrats lobbied for but they still leave the state looking a bit shaky. The latest version would preserve the state’s 4-3 split and create a new seat in Denver’s northern suburbs, which includes an area that voted Democratic only by 1.9 percentage points in 2020. The seat could easily be lost to Republicans in a bad election cycle, as they might face next year, according to strategists.
“This looks like a 4-3-1 map in a state that went for Biden by 13.5,” said Craig Hughes, a veteran Colorado Democratic strategist. “That’s not a good result for Democrats.”
Some Democrats are expressing dismay at the party’s support for the commission.
“I give Republicans a lot of credit — they play a ball game and if they lose they change the rules,” said Wellington Webb, a former Denver mayor who has objected to using the commission. “Democrats, we normally always fall on the category of let’s be fair.”
Republicans disagree with some maps but would be delighted if the House districts remained fairly evenly split.
“As Republicans, we will look at that as a gift from the gods,” Greg Brophy, a former GOP state lawmaker involved in a group lobbying the commission, said, “because we didn’t deserve this.”
