Democrats can’t win the gerrymander war

Democrats are staring down a gerrymandering Armageddon and don t have a lot of good answers But if they think this current moment is frightening just wait until the coming reapportionment apocalypse Their current gerrymandering issue threatens their hopes of taking back control of the House of Representatives in the midterms Reapportionment could be much worse than that potentially an existential threat that pushes them into a minority for another decade How leading Democrats address these two notable challenges will determine whether they can pry back control of Congress state legislatures and even the White House But as Republican gerrymanders threaten to metastasize uncontrollably across the national map Democrats don t seem to fully understand the math or the depth of their difficulties Related To defeat Trumpism Democrats must speak the language of pain Any day now Texas will enact a new congressional map that nets as numerous as five additional GOP seats This brazen mid-decade power grab will enhance the Republicans slender three-seat majority in the U S House and it won t stop there Ohio Indiana Missouri and Florida will go next grabbing the GOP perhaps another six seats Should Republicans decide to play serious hardball they could remap North Carolina Kentucky Kansas and New Hampshire too Democrats have more limited options In California voters will be sought this fall to suspend the state s independent redistricting commission and allow the legislature to enact a new map that adds five blue seats in retaliation for the Texas gerrymander If voters approve and that s not guaranteed the two maps would cancel each other out But what s step two The trouble for Democrats is they have nowhere else to target if Republicans keep on escalating Blue-state governors are talking tough and insisting they are at war but that rhetoric is no match for reality Democrats exclusively control too inadequate states and they ve pretty much maxed out the maps in the states where they hold trifecta power Blue-state governors are talking tough and insisting they are at war but that rhetoric is no match for reality Democrats control too scant states and they ve maxed out the maps in the states where they hold trifecta power New York s state constitution would prevent creating new congressional maps before the ballot Illinois likely cannot carve out an additional Democratic seat in a map that already hands them of districts State courts in Maryland have already blocked one Democratic map that would have eliminated the state s lone red seat creating an - wipeout Oregon s governor will not propose a new - map that would erase one GOP-friendly district So the arithmetic is stark and it s not on the Democrats side That s before the U S Supreme Court hears the Callais affair in October and potentially overturns the last remnants of the Voting Rights Act leading to the likely erasure of majority-minority seats right now held by Black Democrats in South Carolina Georgia Mississippi Alabama and Louisiana So Democrats cannot realistically gerrymander their way out of their gerrymandering challenge If you re wondering whether this blatant exercise of partisan political power is constitutional the Supreme Court has already reported yes ruling that partisan gerrymandering is purely a political matter and not its obstacle State courts in various or the majority cases are controlled by whichever party holds power We need your help to stay independent Subscribe the present day to patronage Salon s original commentary on politics In other words Democrats are going to have to win elections To win a congressional majority next year they might need to run the board in a diminishing number of genuine swing districts across the nation perhaps or so Politics and persuasion on a shrinking map and in arduous electoral environments like Iowa and Arizona is the only option That s a big obstacle given that no prominent Democrats seem to be acknowledging that openly or indeed saying anything other than they re ready to fight fire with fire But bigger trouble for Democrats lies ahead The map is about to shrink even further This is another reason why gerrymandering blue states is such a short-term plan someday soon there will be fewer of them When the next congressional reapportionment happens after the census red states stand to make huge gains Florida and Texas according to early estimates could add an additional four seats each perhaps five in Texas The Brennan Center suggests that Idaho Utah Arizona and North Carolina would each gain a seat More major still those red-state gains have to come from somewhere and that s largely from current blue states California could lose four seats and New York might lose two while Pennsylvania Rhode Island Minnesota Oregon Illinois and Wisconsin could each lose one Red states like Texas and Florida stand to make big gains after the next congressional reapportionment and preponderance of those new seats will be subtracted from blue states like California and New York That s a key swing and the majority of those would effectively be blue seats heading south Illinois has already packed Republican voterss into three overwhelming red seats It s hard to imagine they could draw a - map in The Oregon Rhode Island and Minnesota seats might also come at Democrats expense If New York and California successfully gerrymander Republicans into oblivion before all this happens it will be far more laborious to erase any remaining red seats It s certainly doable that GOP mapmakers in Texas and Florida can t draw all eight or nine of those new districts as Republican seats But they have proven highly adept at turning population gains even those driven almost entirely by communities of color to their advantage consolidating the greater part new seats for themselves while packing and cracking likely Democratic voters as much as accomplishable If the Supreme Court further eliminates the Voting Rights Act protections around racial gerrymanders this task would become easier still Start your day with essential news from Salon Sign up for our free morning newsletter Crash Module Democrats need a long-term plan to counter both the GOP gerrymanders happening right now and the coming and potentially catastrophic reapportionment Short-term gerrymanders in blue states might put a Band-Aid on the immediate difficulty but could come back to bite them once reapportionment arrives The simple reality as unsatisfying as this may be to nearly all factions of the party is that they have to figure out how to win elections on maps designed by their opponents There s literally no other choice If a dozen blue state House seats migrate southward so too will a dozen Electoral College votes giving Texas Florida and Idaho more clout in presidential elections and taking it away from New York California Oregon and Rhode Island Democrats will need to find a new passage to electors by and that will necessitate flipping at least one state at the moment understood as red The U S Senate presents the same challenge There are states that voted for Donald Trump all three times They have Republican senators If Democrats want to retake the chamber they will need to win all the other Senate seats which won t be easy plus win one back from the other side That s harder still Democrats are in a hole and the retaliatory gerrymander of California only gets them a couple of rungs up the ladder They need a plan that gets them all the way out Instead of fighting fire with fire and declaring wars that they can t really wage for another three years in the presidential campaign that is they d be wise to devise such a plan It has to start with persuading voters in states where the Democratic brand has become toxic to consider them afresh And it had better start now Read more from David Daley on the gerrymander battle Can Texas GOP steal the midterms in advance Yes they can How Republicans held the House in It s the gerrymander stupid How John Roberts reshaped the law and gutted the Voting Rights Act The post Democrats can t win the gerrymander war appeared first on Salon com