Over the year in which Democrats controlled all the levers of government in Washington, the party has behaved as though its time in power would be painfully short. Gone is the bravado of the Obama years, when Democratic arrogance was buttressed by the party’s belief in the prohibitive generational power of their coalition. Now, the name of the game is to take what you can while you can.
That explains why Democrats spent the better part of eight months scrambling to cram 40 years of progressive reforms into one legislative package that was all but doomed from the outset. It catalyzed internecine conflict over an ultimately failed effort to amend the Senate’s rules so something—anything—that could be called progressive legislation would become law. And it apparently compelled White House staff to push a Supreme Court justice out to pasture prematurely. But nowhere have Democrats gone for broke as they have at the legislative level around the country, where the scramble to gerrymander a Democratic firewall into existence ahead of the 2022 Midterms is progressing at a fevered pace.
In late December, Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman observed, “on the current trajectory, there will actually be a few more Biden-won congressional districts after redistricting than there are now.” At the time, Democrat-led states like Colorado, Washington, and Virginia had already redrawn their congressional maps to protect Democratic incumbents at the expense of electoral competitiveness. In California, Democrats were pushing an audacious gerrymander—one drawn up by the state’s ostensibly independent redistricting commission—that would likely take three Republicans off the board. In the weeks since, state-level Democrats have grown only more brazen.
Maryland’s new congressional map has been drawn in such a way that it likely creates at least seven safe Democratic seats while making the state’s only GOP-leaning district more competitive. The Democratic map was adopted only after the party rejected an alternative provided by the governor’s “citizen advisory commission” that would have been more competitive and had received an “A” grade from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project (the Democrats’ map earned an “F”).
In Illinois, the political cartography Democrats approved renders the GOP competitive in just three of the state’s 17 seats even though the party won 41 percent of the popular vote in the 2020 elections. Another so-called independent commission in New Jersey sacrificed one Democratic representative of a swing district, making his seat vastly more Republican, only to reduce the competitiveness of three other Democrat-held seats. The map, which was approved on the principle that it was Democrats’ turn (yes, seriously), has been criticized by anti-gerrymandering groups and is currently being subjected to the scrutiny of the courts.
New York’s gerrymander may, however, be the most egregious of them all. Last September, Gov. Kathy Hochul signaled a willingness to “wrestle control of the redistricting process away from a bipartisan commission,” and, boy, did she deliver. The Empire State’s new map is expected to eliminate half of the Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation. It, too, is likely to get an unfavorable reception when it is challenged in court.
Yes, legislative-level Republicans have also appealed to the process of decennial reapportionment to shore up their members—sometimes in a fashion that so flouts the rules governing compactness and impartiality that they, too, have run afoul of the courts. But Democrats, we were told by Democrats, were supposed to be better. They alone were committed to decoupling redistricting from partisan politics. What changed?
For more than a decade now, Democrats have labored diligently to convince themselves of a myth. It was a simple tale involving good guys and bad guys; the bad guys, Republicans, gerrymandered, and the good guys, Democrats, did not. This self-flattering lie has contributed to the Democrats’ apparent resolve to abandon what its members argued for years was the nobler way because the nobler way resulted in unilateral disarmament amid an existential conflict.
It’s no coincidence that Democrats found themselves up in arms over the evils of reapportionment only after Republicans began to disproportionately control that process. “Why your vote for Congress might not matter,” one 2011 CNN headline read ahead of the network’s special presentation, “Gerry-Rigged.” Voters could easily be disenfranchised when redistricting was put in the hands of elected representatives, “especially Republicans,” who “cling to power” only via redrawn maps, according to a 2013 op-ed by Princeton University Professor Sam Wang. After all, as Daily Kos election analyst Stephen Wolf wrote, Republicans only managed to preserve their House majority in 2012 because the GOP’s nefarious maps had disenfranchised millions of Democratic voters.
Wang’s prescription, independent commissions that produce apolitical maps, has since been adopted in some form by 21 states. But as pugilism supplanted and replaced egalitarianism as a guiding principle within progressive ranks, the tone of the conversation around gerrymandering grew ever more revanchist.
A popular 2016 book that received glowing coverage in legacy-media outlets—Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal Democracy—alleged that a dark money-fueled Republican conspiracy culminated in “stacked” statehouses that would give the GOP “a full Chamber of Congress for a decade, for less than the price of a losing Senate race in a small state.” That the GOP lost control of Congress just two years later didn’t alter the emerging liberal consensus. Even today, the left is working itself into a lather over the prospect of dirty Republican dealing. Democrats must respond by playing even dirtier.
The Guardian’s Sam Levin described the GOP’s gerrymanders as efforts to “rig” the 2022 elections. “And make no mistake,” Mother Jones’s Ari Berman agreed, “if Republicans prevail in rigging the 2022 election, they’ll be even more emboldened in 2024, especially if Trump is on the ballot.” If Democrats lose the House next year, it’s only because progressives are so ill-advisedly committed to “good government,” per University of Denver professor Seth Masket. He wrote that “embracing nonpartisan redistricting will cost [Democrats] some seats and quite possibly control of the House and several state legislatures,” which is an intolerable abdication given the threat the GOP presents to democracy itself. The headline gracing the Atlantic’s foray into this debate says it all: “Why Democrats Might Need to Play Dirty to Win.”
With that, the left made gerrymandering great again. The party has muted its attachment to non-partisan redistricting, and its members are at long last aggressively pursuing their own advantage, writes Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman. Indeed, drawing nakedly partisan maps may be the only way that Democrats can make good on their pledge to eliminate nakedly partisan maps. Over at the New York Times, a chin-stroking analysis of some of the nation’s more obscenely tortured districts—abominable chimeras that the left used to gesture at to make their case against gerrymandering—makes the case that “some crazy contortions” are actually fairer than more compact alternatives.
This intellectual groundwork has led Democrats to behave like cornered animals. They are acting out their insecurities for all to see. In the process, they’re undermining the decade-old case they’ve made for themselves.
