Tag Archives: gerrymandering

An Intriguing New Non-Party

I’ve frequently posted about the multiple negative effects of Indiana’s extreme gerrymandering. One of the most pernicious of those effects has been voter suppression–the tendency of Democrats and Independents who live in “safe” Republican districts to stay home on election day. If you think the result is foreordained, why bother?

In Indiana, the Democrats’ decision not to bother running candidates in many of those “safe” districts has only increased that disengagement. When there is no competition, we shouldn’t be surprised when there is minimal turnout. And Indiana has long had depressingly low voter turnout–last time I looked, we were near the bottom of all states.

This situation has produced a depressingly widespread opinion that progressive candidates (even moderately progressive, as in not committed crazies or Christian Nationalists) have no chance in Indiana. Donors who support Democrats send their dollars elsewhere; discouraged Democrats don’t bother casting ballots.  (Worse still, in many rural districts, many faithful longtime Republican voters who are unhappy with incumbent officials nevertheless cannot bring themselves to vote for a Democrat.)

A new organization has decided that the basic problem in the Hoosier State is that lack of competition. 

The folks who have organized Independent Indiana looked at the data, and discovered that during the last couple of election cycles, over 200 candidates had run for offices in Indiana as Independents. Of that number, 52% won their races, an astonishing percentage. (In contrast, Democrats won 36% of theirs…)

The goal of Independent Indiana is to encourage and support Independent candidates–and to give voters in those gerrymandered districts a choice. 

The organization recently held an informational meeting, and I attended. After introductory remarks from Nathan Gotsch, the Executive Director, and the introduction of board members and a recent operations hire, Nathan introduced a panel consisting of three mayors who had won their elections as Independents. Their comments were enlightening. 

Tom Saunders had formerly been a Republican state representative; he is now an independent on the Lewisville Town Council. As he explained,
“I felt like my party was leaving me, and I wasn’t happy…Toward the end, my conscience wasn’t agreeing with me. I wasn’t sleeping at night, and it was time to come home.” (Many former Republicans can underscore his discomfort…) As he said, “I think I could have run as an independent and gotten elected to the legislature, but my advisors and the people who gave me money said no.” 

Saunders ran for his city council and won. He also had some harsh words for Republicans who are proposing a mid-cycle gerrymander.

“The worst thing that’s happened to the state is the supermajority where we don’t hear the other side’s concerns.”

“If redistricting happens, I think it does open it up [for independents]. If I was 20 years younger, I would [run for a larger office as an independent. My wife might divorce me, but I would.”

“Republicans need to go back 30 years and look what happened the last time they tried this. Democrats walked out, the plan backfired, and Republicans lost seats. I think it’s a mistake.”

Richard Strick, another panelist, is an Independent who has been mayor of the Republican stronghold of Huntington since 2020. As he told the gathering, “We don’t just need independent candidates. We need independent thinking in both parties — left and right officials who know when to put party aside to do what’s needed. At the end of the day, especially at the local level, it’s about delivering and getting results. People will give you a chance if they think you’re sincere and have their best interest at heart.” He enumerated the benefits of independence, noting “you don’t have to be married to an ideology. I’m 100% responsible for what I say and do.”

The third panelist was Shawna Girgis, who served as the Independent mayor of Bedford from 2008 to 2019. She pointed out that the first time she’d run, Republicans quietly told her they were glad she was in the race. “By my second and third campaigns, people were open about supporting me because they saw the results.” She also noted that running against extremists and ideologues can be a bonus: “Sometimes having people work against you is the best thing that can happen. They’re the wrong people with the wrong message, doing the wrong things consistently. That only helps you.”

You can see a video of the entire event here.

As the new Operations director noted, Independent candidates do best in states where there’s no competition–where there’s one party rule. Even people in the dominant party feel unrepresented. 

That sure describes Indiana, where polls reflect that even most Republican voters are unhappy with the Christian Nationalists and culture warriors who currently dominate our government.

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Is The GOP Outsmarting Itself?

I know…”smart” isn’t a word that applies to today’s Republican Party, so “outsmarting” may be a misnomer. And while I don’t know the situation in Texas, there are reasons to think that efforts to further redistrict–further gerrymander–Indiana might well fall into the category of “be careful what you wish for.”

In Indiana’s last, highly partisan redistricting, it was notable that the GOP super-majority did not increase the number of presumably safe seats. In a conversation with a political science colleague, he explained that he saw that decision as a consequence of the fact that the pickings in rural Indiana are getting thin. Like many states, Indiana’s rural precincts are emptying out, so there just weren’t as many reliable Republican voters to constitute safe margins if additional districts were carved out.

The most important effect of gerrymandering, as I have frequently noted, is voter suppression. People in districts that are presumed safe for either party are less likely to vote. They are especially unlikely to cast a ballot if they favor the “loser” party, and more especially if the loser party fails to run a candidate. (There is actually data suggesting that, if turnout were more robust, many supposedly safe districts wouldn’t be safe.)

Trump’s approval ratings are abysmal–even his base of MAGA morons is showing signs of splintering. There is overwhelming data showing that, in midterms, when a President isn’t on the ballot, partisan True Believers are significantly less likely to vote. Even if Indiana simply keeps its current, extremely gerrymandered map, a decent turnout could deliver an unwelcome surprise to the Republican pooh-bas who think the state owes them their electoral positions.

The challenge to Hoosier Democrats is clear: boost turnout. Put every resource you can muster into GOTV–getting out the vote. That means running a candidate in every district, so that people have someone to vote for, and focusing messaging on the fact that a large number of so-called “safe” districts are only safe when Democrats and disaffected Republicans stay home.

And start now.

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Being An American

I recently happened on a post I wrote in the run-up to the 2000 election, addressing a question that had been posed to me during a speaking event. The question was “What does it mean to be an American, and how will the answer to that question matter in the 2020 election?

I argued that being American requires understanding, supporting and protecting what I have frequently referred to as “The American Idea”– the essential elements of our country’s version of liberal democracy: majority rule and the libertarian brake on that majority rule, aka the Bill of Rights. American identity isn’t based upon race or religion or country of origin–it is based upon support of the American Idea.

I also argued that, in order to protect the legitimacy of U.S. government, we needed to address the escalating assaults on majority rule– gerrymandering (the practice whereby legislators choose their voters, rather than the other way around); the growth of vote suppression tactics (everything from voter ID laws to the spread of disinformation); the disproportionate influence of rural voters thanks to the operation of the Electoral College; the growing (mis)use of the filibuster, which now requires a Senate supermajority to pass anything; and the enormous influence of money in politics, especially in the wake of Citizens United.

Those assaults on democratic legitimacy were troubling enough in 2020. They clearly enabled the further assault on American democracy that we are experiencing under a mentally-ill would-be autocrat and his MAGA cult in 2025.

Trump hasn’t limited his efforts to the assault on majority rule. He has also taken Musk’s chainsaw to the individual liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, refusing to recognize–let alone honor– fundamental rights to due process, free speech and (above all) civic equality.

Individual liberty in the United States is protected by the constraints on majority rule required by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Those provisions–those protections–mirror the libertarian principle that animated the nation’s Founders: the right of all people to live as they see fit, so long as they do not thereby harm the person or property of others, and so long as they are willing to grant an equal liberty to others. That “live and let live” principle doesn’t just  require limitations on government overreach; it requires that we combat official sanctions of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, Islamophobia…all of the “isms” that deprive some citizens of equal civic status and that operate to deny them their individual liberties.

It’s one thing to understand Trump himself: he’s obviously damaged– needy, massively ignorant, intellectually limited, declining into dementia. The harder question is, what explains the MAGA cult? What leads millions of presumably sane Americans to cheer on Trump’s defiantly anti-American efforts?

Part of the answer is civic ignorance; understanding and protecting both majority rule and individual rights requires an informed citizenry–something we don’t have, as mountains of data clearly show. When people don’t know how their government is supposed to work, they are less likely to recognize assaults on its governing philosophy. But civic illiteracy doesn’t explain MAGA, although it undoubtedly feeds it.

Racism, White Christian Nationalism and other associated bigotries are at the root of MAGA and Trumpism. America has never been able to overcome the periodic emergence of primal hatreds that motivated the Confederacy and the KKK, despite the fact that those hatreds are contrary to everything that defines Americanism.

Back in that 2020 talk, I said I was convinced that our civic challenge was about America’s structural and systemic distortions—that (assuming a Biden victory) our first order of business should be to confront the misuses of power that make fair and productive political debate about substantive issues impossible–that these failures of American governance needed to be addressed before any of the policymakers we might elect would be able to discuss, let alone pass, rational, evidence-based policies.

The need to address those systemic distortions has become more imperative, as we watch Trump take advantage of them to turn America into a very different country. As I said in 2020, you can’t drive a car if it’s lost its wheels, and you can’t govern if your institutions have lost their legitimacy.

Unless the systems are fair, unless we can rely on obedience to the rule of law by those in office, no minority of any sort–political, religious, racial, economic–is safe.

Assuming we emerge from this lawless and destructive administration more or less intact, we have our work cut out for us.

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We’re Not In Kansas Anymore, Toto…

Apologies for inundating your inboxes yesterday. The extra post was sent in error.

A large number of older Americans (I’m one) reached adulthood before what I like to call the “digital age.” Unlike our grandchildren, use of email, texting and instant access to a universe of information was not–and is not–intuitive to us. Most of us have learned to “make do”–we have our smartphones, use our computers, increasingly rely upon google–but I think we can be forgiven for not recognizing how dramatically technology is constantly changing the world we inhabit.

Or the ways that technology can be–and is being– employed to threaten the very foundations of our individual liberties.

Donald Trump doesn’t understand that process–but Elon Musk does. Trump is merely an ignorant and self-engrossed buffoon; Musk comes from that “intuitive” generation, and despite his clear mental and moral defects, does understand the various ways our emerging information environment can be employed–weaponized, to use a phrase popular these days–to amass power at the expense of us “little people.”

I’ve previously posted on the hugely negative effects of Trump’s erasures of factual information from government websites, but that is only one aspect of the threat we face.

In a recent “Letter from an American,” Heather Cox Richardson illuminated that threat. In her closing paragraphs, she described how technology was used to skew the 2016 election.

The story of how Cambridge Analytica used information harvested from about 87 million Facebook users to target political ads in 2016 is well known, but the misuse of data was back in the news earlier this month when Corey G. Johnson and Byard Duncan of ProPublica reported that the gun industry also shared data with Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 election.

Johnson and Duncan reported that after a spate of gun violence, including the attempted assassination of then-representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the mass shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, had increased public pressure for commonsense gun safety legislation, the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, worked with gun makers and retailers to collect data on gun owners without their knowledge or consent. That data included names, ages, addresses, income, debts, religious affiliations, and even details like which charities people supported, shopping habits, and “whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.”

Analysts ran that information through an algorithm that created a psychological profile of an individual to enable precise targeting of potential voters. Ads based on these profiles reached almost 378 million views on social media and sent more than 60 million visitors to the National Shooting Sports Foundation website. When Trump won in 2016, the NSSF took partial credit for the results. Not only was Trump in office, it reported, but also, “thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate.”

That was ten years ago–before the “flowering” of AI. As I write this, Musk’s techie nerds are gaining access to the private information of millions of Americans, and anyone who thinks they’re looking for “fraud and waste” is smoking something.

Checks and balances were designed to prevent any one branch of government from wielding unbounded power. They should prevent the Executive Branch from employing the ever-increasing sophistication of digital technology to target/mislead unsuspecting citizens or punish those who are unwilling to bend the knee. But right now, one branch–Congress–has been neutered. Thanks to the nation-wide gerrymandering that the GOP perfected with RedMap in 2010, the House has devolved into a clown show of radicals, ignoramuses, Christian Nationalists and performative egomaniacs. Vote suppression, civic ignorance and digitally-sophisticated targeting have allowed MAGA to gain (slim) control of the Senate.

Thus far, the courts are doing their duty, but there are increasing signs that our would-be monarchs will simply defy them. The so-called “legacy media” warns that such defiance “would be” a constitutional crisis, ignoring the fact that we are already experiencing a constitutional crisis.

As empowering as having a lot of money has been (and still is), possession of information is even more so. Just as computerization allowed gerrymandering to become ever more precise, ever-expanding digital tools can enable those with access to citizens’ information to gain–and keep–unprecedented control over huge segments of the population.

Those of us who are beginning to understand the dimensions of the threat we face need to take to the streets. Peacefully, but in huge numbers.

We aren’t in Kansas anymore.

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The New York Times Finally Figured It Out

One of the political facts of life in today’s America is the distance between popular opinion and electoral results. Polls and academic surveys consistently show support for policies that are inconsistent with–and loudly rejected by–candidates who win elections. That is especially true for those who are elected to the House of Representatives.

For as long as I’ve been writing these daily meditations (okay, rants), I’ve attributed that state of affairs to gerrymandering–the partisan redistricting that I am increasingly convinced lies at the very heart of America’s political dysfunctions.

Partisan redistricting–the drawing of congressional districts by legislators who are choosing their voters, rather than the other way around–subverts democracy by enabling minority rule. The practice was dubbed “gerrymandering” to “honor” Elbridge Gerry, who was responsible for drawing districts in Massachusetts that one publication said “looked like salamanders.”  Gerry was born in 1744, so the practice of manipulating district lines is nothing new. What is relatively new is the precision in that line drawing that can now be accomplished with the aid of computers.

In states where one party controls redistricting, legislators can carve out districts with majorities of their voters, and cram the opposing party’s voters into a remaining few.

If you wonder where looney-tune officeholders like Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert come from, that’s the explanation.

The New York Times has just figured that out–and documented it.

A New York Times analysis of the nearly 6,000 congressional and state legislative elections in November shows just how few races were true races. Nearly all either were dominated by an incumbent or played out in a district drawn to favor one party overwhelmingly. The result was a blizzard of blowouts, even in a country that is narrowly divided on politics.

Just 8 percent of congressional races (36 of 435) and 7 percent of state legislative races (400 of 5,465) were decided by fewer than five percentage points, according to The Times’s analysis.

Consequences from the death of competition are readily apparent. Roughly 90 percent of races are now decided not by general-election voters in November but by the partisans who tend to vote in primaries months earlier. That favors candidates who appeal to ideological voters and lawmakers who are less likely to compromise. It exacerbates the polarization that has led to deadlock in Congress and in statehouses.

The result of this practice is the wide gulf between voters’ actual policy preferences and the ideologues who emerge victorious. And–as the Times grudgingly acknowledged–although both parties engage in the practice, Republicans overwhelmingly do most of it.

The Times noted that demographic shifts and “political sorting” — the tendency of like-minded citizens to live in the same community–also have played a role, but the study confirmed the pre-eminent role of redistricting in creating  unrepresentative Representatives.

While it is easy to focus on the candidates, the money, the message or the economy, increasingly it is the maps that determine the outcome. In North Carolina, they may have decided control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Only one of the state’s 14 congressional districts was decided by fewer than five points. A Republican won the state’s next closest race — by 14 points.

In 2022, the State Supreme Court ordered a more competitive map, but it was tossed out after midterm elections shook up the balance of the court. The replacement, which was drawn by the Republican-led Legislature, gave three Democratic seats to the G.O.P. while making nearly every district safer for the party that held it.

It is impossible to know how elections held under the first map would have turned out. But, according to Justin Levitt, a redistricting law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, “had every seat stayed the same as in 2022, those three seats would have made the difference, and Democrats would have had a one-seat majority” in Congress.

The Times article focused on several states where partisan line-drawing has produced results incompatible with the will of a majority of that state’s voters.

Even before Trump’s justices corrupted the Supreme Court, that body refused to put an end to the practice, calling partisan gerrymanders a “political problem” outside federal courts’ jurisdiction. Thanks to that unconscionable evasion, citizens in states which, like Indiana, lack referenda or initiatives, are helpless to correct the situation. Only the legislature–filled with “representatives” who benefit from the practice–can overturn it.

The only hope for Hoosiers is Democratic control of the U.S. House and Senate, and passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Our first chance is 2026, when–hopefully–Trump will have infuriated enough voters to spur turnout.

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