GOP House poised for late rebound in redistricting battles

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The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Pixabay)
The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Pixabay)

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]

By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Politics

The tide appears to be turning for Republicans when it comes to the high-stakes battle over re-drawing congressional district lines across the country.

A few weeks ago, election experts gave Democrats an edge in the fierce state-by-state legislative and legal fights over mapping out congressional districts. The partisan clashes across the country shape the results of the upcoming midterm elections by literally determining the playing field. The process, conducted every 10 years after the census, creates the voter demographics of each district, not counting the six states with only one congressional district.

Republicans only need to flip a handful of seats across the country this fall to take over the House and give them the power to stop the White House from passing President Biden’s agenda for the last two years of his term. With the GOP favored to win the House, Democrats are limping toward November but have sought solace in several early redistricting wins.

But any early Democratic advantage – perceived or actual – was threatened last week after a judge threw out New York’s new district lines written by the Democratic-controlled legislature after an independent commission tasked with the job deadlocked last fall. That ruling followed a similar one a week earlier by a Maryland judge who struck down the Democratic-drawn map in that state as unconstitutional. They were the first two maps written by Democrats to be thrown out by the courts this cycle. Judges have previously intervened to block what they deemed to be GOP gerrymanders in North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

“This is a big win for the people, the state of New York,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who co-chairs the GOP redistricting efforts, told reporters Thursday following the judge’s decision. The judge enforced a constitutional amendment New York voters passed in 2014 aimed at preventing partisan district drawing.

“We feel very good about the way so far for us because we’re out there protecting maps that we believe are constitutional,” Christie said about Republicans’ legal wrangling over the maps.

Before the New York judge’s decision, the Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman gave an edge to Democrats in the great gerrymandering sweepstakes of 2022. Wasserman and others cast the flurry of Democratic wins as somewhat surprising given that Republican have complete control of the line-drawing process in 20 states impacting 187 congressional districts. In comparison, Democrats have the same level of influence in just eight states with 75 districts.

Late Thursday, however, the ground started shifting. “Huge stakes here as a ‘neutral’ [New York] map could cost Dems 3-4 seats and erase their nationwide remap gains,” Wasserman tweeted.

Democrats brushed aside the ruling, saying it was expected and is just one step in the process.

“The maps are still in place so the decision means nothing until you get a final appellate ruling on it – and we’re confident that the map is 100% legal,” Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told the Washington Times.

For decades, Democrats and Republicans have traded well-founded accusations of promiscuously gerrymandering the states where they have the most control. Republicans gained big redistricting advantages after the 2000 and 2010 censuses, largely thanks to crushing Democratic losses in the 2010 midterms, forcing the party to play catch-up this cycle. Democrats were at such a structural disadvantage in 2012 that Republicans hung on to a 33-seat advantage, despite losing the overall popular vote for House seats by 1.4 million votes.

Democrats were determined to make up the lost ground this year and began the fundraising and organizational operations it would take back in 2017. Over the last few months, they have racked up a surprising number of redistricting wins, appearing to either reach parity in the number of districts with a Democratic voting advantage or surpass the seats that favor Republicans by a handful. Yet, in the last two weeks, Republicans are positioned to make up for some losses, and the final maps remain up in the air in a couple of key states, including GOP-controlled Florida, with its 28 House seats.

In recent years, voters in many states have tried to stop politicians from drawing districts for partisan advantage and incumbent retention. The public outcry has led eight states to form independent commissions to draw the lines, with another two states using a hybrid system in which the legislatures share redistricting authority with commissions.

But the very high-profile campaigns for a fairer process have largely fizzled because the process is so politically fraught. Membership on supposedly even-handed panels often still ends up with a clear political bias, mainly because politicians play a role in some form or another in selecting who sits on them. When commission members are fairly divided along political lines, the committees have often deadlocked, kicking the process back to the legislatures and governors, and ultimately to the courts to decide.

Democratic gains this year have come in a number of states where they dominate the process, but the party doubled down on gerrymandering to do so.

“Democrats achieved this near-parity mostly through gerrymanders of their own in states such as New York and Illinois,” Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejia write in a FiveThirtyEight.com analysis.

Some Democrats openly reject the idea that their party is relying on the same type of line-rigging they’ve denounced Republicans for using. In Joel Wertheimer’s mind, it isn’t about gaming the system, but writing the maps to reflect existing population growth, as well as accurately representing racial populations.

Wertheimer knows what life is like in a White House post-“shellacking.” He worked as an associate staff secretary for President Obama, managing and organizing executive actions that were becoming increasingly important in 2015 after Republicans increased their margins in the House and retook the Senate.

If Democratic redistricting efforts can make serious inroads, and the party’s luck holds, what this means “for waking up in 2023 is that we’re a lot closer to the country’s popular vote determining who controls the House,” he told RealClearPolitics.

Wertheimer applauds Democrats’ tough redistricting fight and says the process has gone “surprisingly well” for his party, which will inevitably pay dividends at the ballot box.

That’s the topline from his analysis of every state’s expected redistricting outcomes conducted for the left-wing think tank, Data for Progress. It pointed out that more districts in 2022 lean farther to the left of Biden’s national margin over Donald Trump in 2020. Wertheimer believes there’s even a chance “that the median seat will be to the left of the nation as a whole.”

Still, the New York district lines were so obviously contorted to favor Democrats that they drew criticism from the right to the far left. The shape of Rep. Jerry Nadler’s newly crafted district – New York’s 10th  – is downright serpentine, so much so that it was quickly dubbed the “jerrymander.” The new map threatened half of the GOP’s eight Congressional seats in the state, enough to offset expected Republican gains in the rest of the country.

In his Thursday ruling, Judge Patrick F. McAllister, an acting state Supreme Court judge in Steuben County, ordered the legislature to draw new maps “that receive sufficient bipartisan support” by April 11. Democrats are expected to appeal the judge’s Thursday decision and ask for a stay to keep the process in limbo until the lines are determined. New York is holding primary elections June 28, though primaries could be put off until as late as August 23 if the maps cannot be agreed upon quickly.

Now district lines are also in legal limbo in Maryland, where the jettisoned map would have given Democrats an advantage in at least seven of eight districts. Adam Kincaid, the president and executive director of the NRRT, says analysts who gave Democrats an early edge are using the wrong metrics, viewing the dynamics through the Biden-Trump prism from 2020 when Biden had a roughly 4% popular vote advantage. The political climate is far different now than in 2020, he suggested.

Kincaid argues that analysts and pundits predicting that Republicans would continue to dominate the redistricting process were also pushing a hyped narrative.

“The people that five years ago were saying that Democrats were never going to take back the House under the old lines are the same people saying a year ago that Republicans were about to gerrymander their way into permanent majorities,” he told RCP. “Neither prophecy was true.”

“We made it clear from the beginning that we weren’t taking back the House from redistricting alone,” he added.

Republicans were the first to suffer significant court setbacks in the process. In February, a three-judge panel in North Carolina rejected a map passed by the GOP-majority state legislature and established a new interim congressional map far more favorable to Democrats. The U.S. Supreme Court denied an emergency appeal by North Carolina Republicans to overturn the court-drawn map. It did the same in Pennsylvania. With a Democratic majority, the state high court gained control of the line-drawing process after the Democratic governor and Republican majority legislature deadlocked on a map that must eliminate one House seat.

Earlier this year, the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the Republicans’ first redrawing of its 15 congressional districts on the grounds that it violated a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 2018 to ban partisan gerrymandering. Republicans then submitted a new map, but Democrats and voting rights groups deemed it no better. A legal technicality restarted the clock on the congressional map case. The court’s schedule indicates it would not decide until weeks after Ohioans have cast ballots in the state’s May 3 primary.

Meanwhile, Republicans have shored up some incumbents by turning light-red districts into ruby-red safe seats in Texas and a handful of other states. One of the clearest examples is Austin, a city that has grown increasingly Democratic over the last decade. The city and its surrounding suburbs used to be divided into five larger districts – all with slight GOP advantages. But Republicans this year decided to cede one of them to the Democrats by carving out Austin into one district, thereby strengthening the GOP numbers in the surrounding ones. This didn’t threaten or eliminate their own GOP incumbents because the district is one of two new ones awarded to Texas based on a population increase over the past decade.

Democrats are also disheartened about the willingness of the GOP-leaning Supreme Court to take up race-related redistricting cases – and rule against their interests.

The Supreme Court has tried to stay out of most redistricting cases, leaving the process to state discretion. Yet, in recent years, more and more of the case law has addressed whether race is playing an improper role in redistricting and whether the requirements of the Voting Rights Act have been violated, taking their legal cases to state courts.

Liberals have complained about a February Supreme Court decision they say erodes the Voting Rights Act and shows an alarming willingness by the high court to overturn lower courts’ efforts to uphold the law. In late February, the court ruled 5-4 against the creation of a second majority-black congressional district in Alabama. The state currently has seven congressional districts but only one that’s majority black, even though African Americans make up more than one-fourth of the state’s population.

Michael Li, a senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, said the decision could signal a further willingness for the court to “roll back” portions of the Voting Rights Act that would apply not only in Alabama but in Wisconsin, Texas, and other states.

“It’s very clear … that this Supreme Court believes that while it might be appropriate sometimes to form districts on the basis of race or place voters into districts by race, you really have to have a very, very, very good reason for doing so,” Li told RealClearPolitics. “It’s going to be really demanding of your proof. That’s sort of the world we live in.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis may be capitalizing on the high court’s new ethos. Last week, as promised, DeSantis vetoed a new congressional map produced by the GOP-controlled legislature and called for a mid-April special legislative session to craft a new one. The governor argued that the “defective” map violated federal law because it was designed to keep some congressional districts with sizable minority populations but where minority voters do not constitute the overall majority.

If lawmakers quickly change the map to comply with DeSantis’ view, it could give Republicans a chance to produce a few more easily winnable districts as the redistricting process winds down.

Although rearranging the congressional lines may be one effective tactic, it can only do so much. Polls show Republicans have a heavy advantage heading into this fall’s midterms, with rising concerns about inflation and President Biden’s weak poll numbers. Last week an NBC News survey showed the GOP with a 17-point enthusiasm edge. Republican leaders then announced they were expanding the list of target districts into deeply Democratic territory.

While Wertheimer is encouraged by Democrats’ redistricting gains, he still believes Republicans’ advantage in the overall map will be hard to break. “I still think it will end up with a slight Republican lead,” he says, conceding that the 2022 correlations to 2020 aren’t perfect, and far more Democratic seats are in serious danger.

The real benefit of aggressively putting up this redistricting fight, he says, may well be to prevent an outright Democratic hemorrhage. If when redistricting is finished the median seat remains to the left of Biden, then Democrats can lose but still avoid the “shellacking” that shaped Obama’s presidency, he said.

“Even if Democrats lose power this year,” Wertheimer concludes, “the partisan valence of the map may allow them to regain the House in 2024 – unlike in 2012,” he said. Aggressively waging the redistricting battle, as Democrats have done this year, is an attempt to make it more than just wishful thinking.

Philip Wegmann contributed to this report.

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ White House/national political correspondent.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]

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