Death to the Gerrymander
24th April 2017
It has become painfully clear in recent years that partisan gerrymandering is one of American democracy’s worst illnesses.
Painfully clear, perhaps, to people who write for Slate on ‘law and LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ issues’, but for rational adults, the worst illness is democracy itself — a system of government in which, as the classical definition has it, ‘51% of the population can pee in the soup of the other 49%’. The key characteristic of American democracy is that it is constrained, viz. there are barriers in place to keep The Majority, no matter how overwhelming, from doing the dirty to minorities. This doesn’t always work well — ask Japanese-Americans who their favorite Democrat President is — but in normal times works much better than an unconstrained democracy might.
Although the Supreme Court held decades ago that the purpose of redistricting was to ensure “fair and effective representation for all citizens,” legislators often use the process to lock the minority party out of power.
Democracy itself locks the minority party out of power. (Funny how this complaint never surfaces when Democrats are in charge. Look at any big city and count how many Republicans are on the city council and try to say with a straight face that the minority party has any power.) For the ‘minority party’ to have any power directly undermines the essential nature of democracy.
Both Democrats and Republicans deploy partisan gerrymandering to dilute votes for their opponents, creating one-party rule and, arguably, greater polarization.
I just love that phrase, ‘dilute votes’, as if you can just add water to minority voters and watch them dissolve like dirt in the laundry. Whenever you see the phrase ‘dilute’ it indicates somebody trying to get power for a ‘minority’ that is greater than they would have under a strict democracy. Almost always this is a Democrat (the oxymoron party) complaining that Democrats don’t get to run things even when they lose elections. And if you want polarization, well, listen to a speech by Chuck Schumer or Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warran or any BlackLives Matter demagogue and you’ll see where the polarization is coming from.
I won’t bother fisking the rest of this article (remember, they actually paid somebody to write this stuff), but just move on to discuss ‘gerrymandering’ in light of what one might call ‘democratic theory’. Most arguments against ‘gerrymandering’ take the form of ‘but it makes districts less competitive!’, as if this were some sort of electoral Olympics in which the horse-race aspect of an election has some special virtue. In truth, it does not. ‘Effective representation’ (see Supreme Court reference above) is all about having representatives who believe the same way as the person voting, and the less ‘competitive’ a district is, the more actual ‘effective representation’ that voter has. It is obvious to the most casual observer who doesn’t live in his parents’ basement that if a Representative gets 75% of the vote the voters of that district who are on the winning side (and that’s what democracy cares about, remember) are more effectively represented than in a district where the Representative only gets 51% of the vote.
Think about it. I’ll wait.
The more ‘competitive’ the election, the greater the proportion of voters whose ‘representation’ isn’t effective. That’s the bottom line. From the point of view of DEMOCRACY, the more ‘uncompetitive’ districts one has, the more ‘effective representation’ one gets.
Sure, it’s possible to construct an academic exercise where one way of redistricting an area gives the ‘minority party’ less power than they would have under a different way of redistricting, but if you look closely, these claims (like claims for global warming) always depend for their validity on the truth of some very strong assumptions about voter behavior (typically that all Republicans vote the same way and all Democrats vote the same way), assumptions that have no necessary connection to real-life voter behavior. And no one (that I’ve seen) has yet come up with an actual redistricting scheme that precisely fits that strong-assumption exercise.
The reason why you hear all of the DemLegHump media jaw on about ‘gerrymandering’ is because ‘noncompetitive’ districts are boring. Without a ‘horse race’, they have nothing on which to report. People who went to journalism school because they wanted to Make A Difference get really frustrated when everything they do to Make A Difference doesn’t matter, because the election is only going to go one way. That’s the real reason they don’t like ‘gerrymandering’.