Gerrymander, O Gerrymander! Wherefore Art Thou, My Gerrymander?

Go ahead, call me cheap and petty, but God!, I love it every once in a forever when I actually nail one to the wall. After all, I don’t have alphabet soup after my name, I’m just a slob who loves politics, so it’s always nice to nail that jumper at the buzzer once in a while.

Twice last year, I wrote about gerrymandering, and external events that can alter its effectiveness. Anyone who watches politics knows that the first two cycles following redistricting are the strongest ones. After that, population migration, along with other factors weaken the effects of the new borders.

When gerrymandering, the concept is simple. There are three concentric  rings, urban, solidly Democratic, suburban/exurban, generally GOP, and rural, reliably GOP. The secret is to use the nearby cow counties, with just enough reliable GOP votes from the suburbs, to burn up as many Democratic urban votes as possible, maximizing the number of seats you can control. That’s why you see district maps that look like salamanders, barbells, and a 4 year old’s etch-a-sketch.

Now the time for redistricting is almost upon us. The census is completed, the numbers have been crunched, and in a matter of weeks, the numbers will be released to the state legislatures and other agencies that actually do the redistricting. But from several districting experts and political scientists, in the GOP legislature controlled states, there is trouble in Paradise. In fact some are predicting that in order to maintain their majority in the House, they may actually have to draw maps that cede seats to Democrats, cutting into their majority.

There appear to be several reasons for this, and to be as accurate as possible, I have researched as best as my eyes will allow. In some cases they’re actually rather germane. Even in GOP controlled states, the state Supreme Court has stepped in to but the speed brakes on the madness. But here are some that are actually pretty specific, and here they are.

Gentrification – Especially in New South states like Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the hard earned influx of new companies, many tech and data driven has led to a surge of new, younger, better educated, better paid employees, normally Democrats. And it turns out that a lot of them like living close to work.

So greedy developers are swooping into what were normally lower and lower middle class neighborhoods, rehabbing the buildings, and then selling or renting the units to their new, higher income clientele. Which means that the urban areas are still stuffed full of liberals, but it’s forcing the lower and lower middle income Democrats out into the nearest suburbs, where they can still afford the housing, and having at least a tolerable commute to work in the city. Which has the ultimate effect of weakening the GOP voting strength of those suburbs. It also has the collateral effect of forcing some more panicked GOP suburbanites into fleeing into safer suburbs a little further out. Which weakens the GOP voting advantage of the suburb even more. The second one may surprise you.

Donald John Trump – It turns out that traditionally GOP voting white suburban soccer moms absolutely hate Donald Trump. They can’t even tolerate the thought of him. His toxic presence in the White House caused them, along with presumably some of their husbands, to turn the House over to the Democrats in a tsunami. And in 2020, enough of them approved of the job that their Democratic representatives had done to stick around and give the Democrats a slim majority in the House.

Now, I am not even suggesting that these white suburban women are the new Democratic power brokers, because they aren’t. But you know what? They don’t have to be! The critical issue in gerrymandering is knowing in advance that everybody you draw within those lines will vote exactly as you expect them to. And as long as the GOP continues kissing Trump’s ass, and parodying nonsense that intelligent women find ridiculous, the map mavens can’t count on them. Which means that they have to draw the lines through the suburbs wider, which means fewer safe GOP seats, and even some risky GOP seats. This happened when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court redrew an overtly gerrymandered map a few years ago. But there’s one more.

Rural Dilution – This is one that almost nobody is even talking about, much less thinking of, but it could be critical. By far and away, the rural cow counties are the strongest GOP counties in almost every state. But the problem is that there are so damn few of them. These are farmers, ranchers, miners, by the nature of their circumstances they are spread hell and gone all over the place. And that’s why the GOP has to marry them up with Suburban GOP voters to maximize their value. But there may be frigging in the rigging.

Especially in the New South, as better paid and educated liberals move in, at least some of them come in with the perk of being able to work from home full time. And some of them want the benefit of that. As long as they don’t have a commute, they’re pushing farther out, away from the suburbs and actually into the rural areas. Have some space. Maybe a stream running through their property. Maybe be able to have a couple of horses to ride on the weekend. And in a sparsely populated district, enough of this can make a difference.

No, I am not saying that there will be enough of them to flip a red rural district. Most of these people don’t want to be cut off, so they will converge on rural areas with easy access to cities. But the GOP requires a massive GOP turnout in these cow counties to combine with suburban voters to offset the Democratic strength in the urban areas. And every Democratic vote that comes out of these nearer in rural counties is one less GOP vote that the GOP can count on to offset Democratic urban strength. Which makes drawing the map that much harder.

So, there you have it. Redistricting is an art, and the GOP has mastered it. But this time around, there are outside forces at play that at least appear to make the game more difficult and dangerous. And in a year when the House figures to so closely contested as this one, every former GOP seat lost to the Democrats in redistricting may just make the difference in the control of the House. And because it is subjective, there is never a guarantee about how a particular map will play out in an actual election. Don’t touch that dial.

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