People can at times support positive public policy proposals for the wrong reasons.
While it’s a good idea to welcome their support, it’s also fair to point out that the policy they advocate is not likely to achieve their goals.
Take, for example, the issue of redistricting reform. A bipartisan group in the N.C. House is working on a bill to make reform a reality.
The John Locke Foundation welcomes additional discussion of redistricting reform. This organization has spent more than two decades pushing to change the way North Carolina draws maps for legislative and congressional elections.
Reform makes sense. Our system of representative government requires that voters retain ultimate sovereignty. In other words, voters must choose their elected representatives. Elected representatives shouldn’t choose which voters can cast ballots for and against them.
But that’s precisely the system we have in place now. N.C. House and Senate leaders draw election maps for their respective chambers, then team up to draw congressional maps.
One should work to change that process for the same reason one opposes a legislator steering government contracts to his private business. It’s a matter of placing the public interest over self-dealing.
Longtime advocates of redistricting reform recognize this concept. But some recent converts to the cause point to other reasons for redistricting reform. To the extent that these reasons are misguided, they frustrate the effort to build support among those who can be persuaded.
The rest of this column will address four common misperceptions about redistricting reform.
First, some advocates believe redistricting reform will solve a problem of recent vintage. But the name assigned to the problem — gerrymandering — suggests otherwise. As Dan McLaughlin points out in the Feb. 20 edition of National Review, gerrymandering takes its name from Elbridge Gerry, “who signed the Declaration of Independence, was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, served in the first Congress, helped write the Bill of Rights, and was our fifth vice president.”
In other words, gerrymandering has been with us since the earliest days of the American constitutional republic. It’s been an important factor in North Carolina politics at least since Republicans started to challenge one-party Democratic dominance in the last few decades of the 20th century.
Parties with political power want to keep power. Parties out of power want to take power. Redistricting reform cannot change those facts. A well-designed reform can limit the extent to which those in power can punish those out of power, but it can’t extinguish a fundamental feature of competitive politics.
Meanwhile, some advocates believe redistricting reform is necessary to do away with crazy-looking election districts inspired by gerrymandering. This is our second ill-informed reason for reform.
One look at the maps drawn specifically for North Carolina’s 2016 congressional elections should help refute that argument.
Yes, federal judges struck down the bizarre-looking 1st and 12th Congressional Districts drawn in 2011. Opponents called those two districts clear examples of unconstitutional gerrymandering.
Left out of that discussion was the fact that both districts originally date from the 1990s, when gerrymandering Democrats wanted to craft districts that would comply with then-recent interpretations of the federal Voting Rights Act while also giving Democrats the chance to win as many of the rest of the state’s congressional contests as possible.
Republicans drawing election maps for the first time in 2011 retained the kooky 1st and 12th Districts largely because state and federal courts had sanctioned both districts for more than two decades.
Once those districts were struck down, GOP lawmakers responded with a much more visually appealing set of maps for the 2016 elections. That’s despite the fact that those lawmakers actively pursued the partisan goal of electing 10 Republicans within the 13-member congressional delegation.
One can gerrymander and still produce relatively compact, contiguous election maps. Redistricting reform is not necessary to address that goal.
The third wrong reason to support redistricting reform, popular only among those on the political left, is the belief that Republicans control North Carolina’s General Assembly only because of gerrymandering.
That’s unlikely. Republicans won 55 percent of all votes cast in N.C. Senate elections statewide in 2016. They won 52 percent of House votes. And that’s no aberration. The GOP has won a majority of statewide House votes in every election since 2000, except for the Democratic wave year of 2008. Democrats have fared better on the Senate side, though Republicans won the most statewide votes in 2002, 2004, and every election since 2010.
Gerrymandering is likely to have influenced the size of Republican majorities in both chambers. But any fair set of election districts is likely to have given Republicans control of the legislature throughout this decade. (Fair districts in the 2000s, the last period of Democratic gerrymandering, would have given Republicans control of at least one chamber — if not both — in every election except 2008.)
The fourth misconception about redistricting reform is one that crops up frequently, and not solely among recent converts to the cause. Some argue that gerrymandering has led to a hardened ideological divide between the two major parties. This divide makes bipartisan compromises less likely.
To the extent that Republican legislative supermajorities make compromise less necessary, reform advocates have a point. But it’s important not to take that argument too far.
The two parties have been engaged in a decades-long shakeup on ideological grounds. It started long before Republicans ventured anywhere close to N.C. election maps.
Nationwide, it’s harder to find liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats today than it was 20 years ago. McLaughlin’s article suggests that political scientists “have concluded that polarization has little to do with gerrymandering, noting the increased polarization of swing-district representatives and senators mirrors that of safe-district House members.”
None of this discussion is designed to discourage people from joining the redistricting reform team. But those who believe reform will discourage political parties from pursuing power, remove the likelihood of any odd-looking districts, swing control of the General Assembly back toward Democrats, or make elected leaders less ideological are bound to be disappointed.
Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.