To understand the lopsided gerrymandering war that started with Texas’ redistricting scheme last August, you have to go back to 2010. That was the year Republican operatives launched REDMAP, a coordinated $30 million initiative that poured money into local races across 16 states, flooding airwaves with negative and deceptive ads to bolster Republican challengers. As journalist David Daley documented in his 2016 book “Ratf**ked,” the project was a great success — and one that caught the Democratic Party entirely off guard. Republicans ultimately won almost 700 state seats that year and picked up majorities in 10 of the targeted states. With statehouses secured, the GOP provided state legislators with redistricting software that allowed them to draw new congressional maps with unprecedented partisan precision. Two years later, Republicans won a 33-seat majority in the U.S. House despite losing the national popular vote to Democrats by 1.4 million votes . The GOP advantage continued in 2016, when Republicans won up to 22 more House seats than they would have otherwise, padding their majority.
In the 10 months since Texas announced its controversial redistricting plan, more than half a dozen states have joined the race to redraw congressional maps. So far, only a single blue state — California — has been successful, thanks to the majority of voters who approved its own partisan redistricting plan last November (mostly offsetting the expected gains in Texas). All other successful mid-decade gerrymanders have been in Republican-controlled states, giving the party a clear structural advantage ahead of the upcoming midterms.
To fully understand the Democrats ’ current backfooted position, we must look again to the party’s response to the GOP’s 2010s wave of gerrymandering — which is coming back to haunt them in key states. After the elections of the early 2010s, the GOP’s efforts to rig electoral maps spurred a grassroots push for reform from Democrats across the country. These efforts were backed by organizations like the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, founded after the 2016 election under the leadership of former Attorney General Eric Holder. In 2017, Holder put forward the NDRC’s “three-point” strategy: bolster down-ballot Democrats who could play a future role in redistricting (as Republicans had done years earlier promote reforms and legal challenges to gerrymandered maps; and support ballot initiatives to depoliticize mapmaking by establishing independent redistricting commissions. So far, only a single blue state — California — has been successful. In several states where Democrats succeeded in rebuilding majorities, legislators and voters followed Holder’s lead and approved amendments establishing independent redistricting commissions that took mapmaking out of the hands of partisan legislators and placed it with nonpartisan or bipartisan bodies. In states like Colorado, Michigan and Virginia, Democratic voters overwhelmingly backed the proposals.
These amendments were hailed at the time as good government reforms that would finally bring fairness to congressional maps, but some Democrats had a bad feeling that power over maps should be maintained in states they could control. After winning both houses in 2019, for example, one Virginia-based Democratic consultant complained at the time that the Democrats should not even be considering such an amendment. “[Democrats] just don’t seem to have the guts to just go out and go play politics the way Republicans do,” he said. The late Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, meanwhile, lamented that Democrats seemed cursed to “blindness” and “unilaterally disarming” when it came to GOP attacks on democracy.
Nearly a decade later, most Democrats would likely agree that state-level “good government” efforts to stop partisan gerrymandering have failed spectacularly. As a recent report in The New York Times put it, Democrats desperate to redraw district maps to equalize brazen GOP gerrymandering are “finding that their old good-government policies have become bad politics.” Virginia Democrats, in particular, have been hogtied in their attempt to counter the GOP’s redistricting scheme with a gerrymander of their own. Blocked by the amendment passed by their predecessors five years earlier, they tried to get around it with a new amendment that would allow the state Legislature to temporarily redraw districts in response to other states’ gerrymanders. This was ultimately doomed by the state’s constitution and its onerous amendment process . Despite being approved by both legislators and then voters in April’s referendum, the state’s conservative Supreme Court blocked the amendment on procedural grounds last month, effectively striking down a new map that would have netted the party several more seats in the House and limited the GOP’s structural advantage. The court ruling — quickly backed by the U.S. Supreme Court — ensured that the new map will have to wait until at least 2028. Meanwhile, Republicans appear poised to gain up to a dozen more House seats thanks to their court-approved redraws. Will Republican map-rigging be enough to save their paper-thin majority? With Democrats leading generic congressional ballot polling by nearly seven points on average, Republicans are still forecast to lose the House and potentially the Senate, dragged down by a president whose approval rating sits almost 20 points underwater .
But Democrats are still unlikely to win the kind of decisive majority they might have picked up before the GOP’s redistricting blitz. Republicans have come away as victors in the mid-decade redistricting war, thanks in part to a conservative Supreme Court that has consistently backed the GOP’s brazen and discriminatory gerrymanders.
In pursuing their maximalist, norm-shattering strategy, Republicans may have also, at long last, shaken Democrats out of their complacency. Democrats have little choice but to meet the Republicans blow for blow. Unlike the party of 2012, Democrats in 2026 appear willing to fight by GOP rules. This is evident in numerous blue states where Democrats are now considering or actively pursuing amendments to shift redistricting power back into the hands of state legislators. In New York, where an independent redistricting commission was established in 2014, Democrats recently laid out a plan to amend the state’s constitution and redraw maps by 2028, with the potential to add four more Democratic-leaning districts. In Virginia, Democrats are preparing to pass an amendment yet again to establish a new map in time for the 2028 election. Similar discussions are happening in other blue and purple states, where Democrats appear likely to pursue new maps ahead of the next election.
As long as the Supreme Court enables gerrymandering and Congress lacks the votes for reform, Democrats have little choice but to meet the Republicans blow for blow. “If Republicans are going to redraw and gerrymander every one of their states, then unfortunately we have to provide balance,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently. “Until we get to the day when we can all finally agree to put this behind us and pass nonpartisan gerrymandering federally.”
The post Battle Maps appeared first on Truthdig .