California should return to good old-fashioned gerrymandering — for democracy’s sake

Like a groggy grizzly stumbling out of hibernation, the California Citizens Redistricting Commission is having its decennial moment in the sun. Having advanced the dubious propositions that the territorial integrity of San Joaquin County must be maintained at all costs and metropolitan Sacramento might need a small crowd of congressional representatives, the commission has already provided reason to be grateful that it emerges rarely.

But the commission’s members are mere bystanders to their most ominous potential consequence: hastening our national drift toward authoritarianism.

How did we get here? In the great tradition of California’s Republican governors proposing superficially appealing reforms with unanticipated multi-generational consequences. (See also: Hiram Johnson.)

When then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made it a priority to take redistricting out of the hands of California’s Democratic-dominated Legislature, which had an impressive record of bare-knuckle gerrymandering to protect its own, he had found a project in his obvious political interest as well as the apparent public interest. It also gave liberal-leaning good-government groups and editorial boards an opportunity to display their even-handedness by aligning with a Republican.

The independent redistricting commission thereby created had the virtue of curing the worst manifestations of the politically cancerous practice of allowing elected officials to pick their voters rather than the other way around. Independent, apolitical redistricting is a public-spirited innovation that all the states should adopt.

The problem is that they didn’t.

Despite Schwarzenegger’s more recent efforts to “terminate gerrymandering” nationwide, the U.S. Supreme Court has continued to take a pass, and Congress remains characteristically idle. More than a decade after California began its grand experiment in above-board redistricting in 2010, a not-so-grand total of seven other states have relinquished redistricting to independent commissions. The rest can still gerrymander like it’s 2009.

The other states that opted out of this raw exercise of partisan power also skew blue or at least purple. The only truly red state in the reformed bunch is Idaho, which claims fewer members of Congress than Sacramento County.

The result is unilateral partisan disarmament. The draft map released by California’s redistricting commission, for instance, is less favorable to Democrats than the current arrangement and triples the number of highly competitive congressional districts to six, according to an analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight. By contrast, Texas enacted a map with just one competitive seat in which the median congressional district is 12 percentage points more favorable to Republicans than the state as a whole — about four times the corresponding advantage for California Democrats.

It’s not that the GOP possesses a monopoly on gerrymandering. Take Maryland, where Democratic lawmakers have already reduced Republicans to one of eight congressional districts and are threatening to shut them out entirely. (Not coincidentally, that blue state’s Republican governor is also pushing for an independent redistricting commission.)

But it would take a lot of Marylands to offset the Republicans’ likely gerrymandering gains. Ohio, hardly a ruby-red state, could reduce Democrats to just two of its 15 House seats. Democrats in North Carolina, another perpetually purple state, could end up with three of 14.

Republicans hold the gerrymandering advantage for a few reasons, including Democratic-leaning voters’ tendency to congregate in cities and suburbs, the one-sided truce on political manipulation in California and a few other key Democratic states, and Republican domination of statehouses — which is, in turn, partly thanks to gerrymandering. Even before the current round of redistricting, the GOP’s built-in advantage in Congress had reached a historic high.

Republican redistricters already appear to have engineered their way into the five-seat gain they need to take the House next year, putting them much closer to completing the sort of coup they only attempted in January.

One wonders how much of the Republicans’ ill-gotten gains could be undone with Ohio-style gerrymandering in California alone, a Democratic bastion that nevertheless stands to host more than a dozen Republican-leaning or competitive seats.

Schwarzenegger only time-travels in the movies, so he probably didn’t foresee these consequences. Nor does he appear to welcome them; he did, after all, compare Jan. 6 to Kristallnacht. But his pro-democratic, anti-Democrat reform threatens to play a pivotal and ironic role in hastening the end of American democracy.

Ideally, of course, we could do away with partisan gerrymandering altogether. In March, House Democrats — led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, once a prominent opponent of her home state’s move to independent redistricting — passed a bill requiring such commissions across the country. It was blocked in the Senate, naturally, by a Republican filibuster.

The only coherent approach to dispatching the gerrymander is to do so nationwide. The continued failure of Congress and the courts on that score amounts to a powerful argument for California to resurrect the monster for the sake of American democracy.

This story was originally published November 21, 2021 at 5:00 AM.