In this week’s New Yorker (subscription required), Jane Mayer has written about the profound impact of gerrymandering on our politics. She focuses mainly on Ohio, which is now in thrall to extremism because of the GOP’s capture a decade ago of supermajorities in the state legislature. After twice voting for Obama, Ohio delivered twice for Trump, by substantial eight point margins in both 2016 and 2020. Its Republican governor, Mike DeWine, won election in 2018 by four points. So, it has certainly leaned red in recent years.
But as Mayer shows, on hot button issues, like abortion and gun control, Ohio public opinion can fairly be described as “moderate.” For example, polling shows that a substantial majority of Ohioans favor stricter gun safety laws, including those targeting sales of AR-15s, imposing longer wait times for purchasing guns and raising the minimum age to buy semi-automatic weapons. The legislature, however, which one study found to be the second most right-wing in the country, passed legislation after Uvalde to *loosen* gun safety, essentially allowing for a firearms free-for-all in the state. As Mayer describes it, the legislation was so extreme that it was denounced by Ohio’s largest police organization.
On abortion, Ohio has become notorious because of its near total ban, which infamously forced a ten year old rape victim to flee to Indiana to receive an abortion. That ban does not reflect voters’ preferences on the issue. A 2020 survey found that just 14 percent of voters supported bans that didn’t include exceptions for rape or incest. Ohio’s unaccountable legislative super-majorities have also, quite predictably, descended into egregious corruption, including scandals that have forced two House speakers in the state to resign in the past five years. (Power corrupts. Absolute power…)
The genesis of this recent period of radically unrepresentative state legislatures, evident, notably in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio, was the 2010 elections. Republicans won sweeping victories that year at the national and state levels. In the aftermath, the GOP invested tens of millions of dollars in its Project REDMAP, which used sophisticated computer software as part of a coordinated effort to redraw maps to advantage Republicans. Mayer profiles David Pepper, a long-time Democratic politician in Ohio and now a professor, who has been shouting from the rooftops for years that Democrats fell asleep at the wheel after 2008, while Republicans mobilized to capture state legislatures and reconfigure American politics. Project REDMAP, which received substantial backing from the Koch brothers, was the tip of the spear of that campaign.
There has been a decades-long debate in political science about how to define gerrymandering and, more to the point, to tease out its significance. The practice itself is two centuries old, but became a focus of sustained interest among scholars following a series of “one person, one vote” Supreme Court cases in the 1960s. That jurisprudence required states to use new census data every decade to reevaluate legislative maps for state legislatures and for the House of Representatives. Until the turn of the new century, the conclusion of much of the political science literature was that gerrymandering had relatively little impact on partisan advantage either way.
To take one example of how public perceptions of the issue have sometimes been in conflict with scholarly assessments, critics of gerrymandering will sometimes point to oddly shaped legislative districts to claim that foul play was responsible (and an odd shape is what led to the coinage of the word gerrymandering in the first place). But there’s no inherently correct relationship of geometry to political geography, no inherently correct shape of a legislative district. And when it comes to why there could be some disconnect between the aggregate number of votes one party receives and the number of seats it wins, that can be explained by benign, that is to say, not expressly political factors, including natural residential patterns, where likeminded people are concentrated in particular areas.
But events since 2010 have fundamentally altered these debates. Politicians have leveraged better technology to aggressively lock in partisan advantage in ways that legal advocates argue clearly violates the rights of voters in the out party (this has mostly been a Republican affair, but the Democratic majority in Maryland has done likewise). The result is that the gap between the electorate on the one hand and the locus of political power on the other has become egregiously out of balance, with basic implications for representative democracy.
To get a concrete picture of what some of this looks like, take North Carolina, which has been a battleground state for years now. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since Jimmy Carter, in 1976. He won by a razor thin margin, less than half of one percent. In 2020, Donald Trump won the state by three percentage points. It has a now two-term Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, but two Republican Senators, including Thom Tillis, who has twice won by less than two percent. In sum, it’s a close-fought state. But the 2010 election changed fundamentally the nature of power in North Carolina. Republicans took over the state legislature in 2010 and moved aggressively to lock in their advantage after that year’s census. The consequences for the state legislature itself have been profound, but for ease of presentation, I’ll focus on the US House of Representatives. As of 2010, North Carolina had thirteen representatives in the House, seven Democrats and six Republicans. By 2016, after the GOP rewrote the maps, North Carolina sent ten Republicans and three Democrats to the House in spite of the fact that, statewide that year, Republicans won about 52% of all votes cast in House races, and Democrats won 46%. Republicans drew maps to ensure that as many likely Democratic voters would be packed into as few districts as possible. The results were stark. The three House Democrats elected in 2016, G.K. Butterfield, David Price and Alma Adams, won their respective races by 40, 37 and 34 points. Republicans typically won theirs by closer to 15 or 20 points.
Litigants challenged these maps (and state courts did eventually throw them out), but the conservative Supreme Court majority has essentially green-lighted this behavior. As described by the eminent election law professor, Rick Hasen, in a 2019 case about the NC maps, Rucho v. Common Cause, plaintiffs showed that the legislature was handed data for 3,000 computer simulations based on all relevant criteria for determining a proper apportionment of electoral districts. One and only one of those 3,000 simulations yielded a ten to three split for Republicans. Lo and behold, that was the map the legislature adopted.
Back to Mayer - the result of these machinations is the prospect of self-perpetuating and unaccountable political power. One result is that legislatures like Ohio’s are passing laws that the majority does not approve of. Indeed, that’s putting the matter too blandly. A perfect storm of concentrated political power in an era of normalized and widespread hostility to the very idea of political accountability, all egged on by nihilists like Trump and the many extremists he’s spawned is creating a toxic brew. Laws that increasingly punish the vulnerable and lock in the prerogatives of the powerful are becoming the norm in states like Ohio. And there’s not much the voters of those states can do about it, absent a massive political mobilization (which voter suppression laws aim to undermine), or unless a large number of people make coordinated decisions to relocate themselves consistent with prevailing electoral maps (which, to be clear, is not a serious plan). Principles other than majority rule bear on whether a particular political outcome is just, of course. But there’s no principled defense of the current status quo in places like Ohio, except that the political system is now dominated by an unaccountable minority for which might makes right.
Great explanation , thank you!!