It is Easier to Blame Gerrymandering Than Persuade Voters
Speakers at the State Democratic Party Convention this past weekend had a lot to say about how Republican gerrymandering in 2011 got them control of the legislature.
Not much was said about how much the Democratic vote has shrunk and how much the Republican vote has grown in the 68 Wisconsin counties that are not Dane (Madison). Milwaukee, Waukesha or Ozaukee.
We are left with the impression that “fair maps” would turn the legislature Democratic. In my last blog I argued that voters not maps are the challenge for the Party. More readers than usual wrote comments.
The Republican bias of the districts drawn here in Wisconsin in 2011 is evident. The overall political impact is not so evident. In 2010, before the gerrymander, Republicans elected 19 Senators and 60 Assembly members. Last year, Republicans elected 21 Senators and 61 Assembly members. After 10 years, what some Democrats called the “worst gerrymandering in the country” Republicans added just two Senate seats and one Assembly seat to their majorities.
What feels like the effects of gerrymandering is more the result of the large Republican shift in voting patterns across the State outside of Dane and the suburban counties of Waukesha and Ozaukee. Leaders tout Democratic gains in those three counties, and rightfully so. Comparing vote totals in 2020 when Biden won, to vote totals in 2012 when Obama won his second term, turnout in those three counties increased by 70,000 and the Democratic vote increased by 76,000.
Outside of those three plus Milwaukee, the story is much different. The shift to Republicans has been substantial and presents a much greater challenge for Democrats than how maps are drawn.
Comparing those same two elections, 2020 and 2012, turnout increased in the other 68 counties by 195,000; the Republican vote increased by 230,000. That change built on smaller but similar changes in the 2016 election and the 2012 recall election. Across most of the State in recent elections, Republicans are motivating new voters and switching some Democrats. Those 68 counties are the parts of the state where voters tend to be more evenly divided between the two parties and where relatively small shifts in voting behavior can change who wins and who loses in a legislative district. That is where Democrats are losing legislative races.
Back in 2010, Karl Rove, Republican advisor to President Bush among others, led a well-funded national Republican effort focused on flipping rural state legislative seats and giving Republicans control of state legislatures ahead of the 2011 redistricting. He was not shy about what he was doing, laying out the plan in a piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in March, eight months before the election.
His targeting was clear. “Some of the most important contests this fall will be way down the ballot in communities like Portsmouth, Ohio and West Lafayette, Ind., and neighborhoods like Brushy Creek in Round Rock, Texas, and Murrysville Township in Westmoreland County, Pa.”
I remember the negative ads that year funded by a committee out of Virginia attacking Kathleen in her re-election race for the Senate in the 31st District. They were slick and effective. She won by a slim 400 vote margin, but many of the other Democratic legislators elected in 2006 and 2008 from Western and Central Wisconsin districts lost in 2010, some just barely. Nationwide in that election, 680 state legislative seats switched from Democrat to Republican. The political effects are still playing out.
A common theme in the discussion about gerrymandering is that the makeup of the legislature should reflect the overall voting population of the state. If it doesn’t there is something wrong. The system is rigged. That thought was expressed this way in one comment on my last blog. “When we win statewide races and lose the legislature, that is about how the lines are drawn.”
Partly. But more importantly it is about where people live. The underlying strategy in any partisan redistricting is to pack as many voters of the other party as you can into a few districts, conceding those districts to the opposition, and spreading your own votes across all of the other districts in a way that gives you a majority in each.
Where Democrats live does most of the work for Republican map drawers. Some 35 percent of Democratic voters live in Madison and Milwaukee. All those votes count in statewide races, but none can get spread out to legislative races across the state. Voters who live in Madison can’t offset a vote for a legislative candidate in Rhinelander.
Unless of course, you do an extreme Democratic gerrymandering, but even that would fall short. One reader shared the blog with a lawyer who has litigated against gerrymandering. Part of the lawyer’s comment was this. “No one that I know who is arguing for truly fair (meaning representative) maps thinks that getting them will give the Dems a majority in the Legislature. In fact, we know that neutral maps will still result in a GOP majority. Even if you try to draw the most extreme Dem gerrymander you can with 2010 census data, you can’t do any better for Dems than about a 1% or 2% advantage on a partisan symmetry scale.”
I agree, for a variety of reasons, that a non-partisan map is better than a partisan map. We have to keep in mind, however, that every line, no matter where it is drawn, or who draws it, has partisan implications. Every squiggle will favor either the Democrats or the Republicans. There are no neutral lines.
The important point I want to make, however, is this. Our obsession with gerrymandering is diverting our attention away from the much bigger challenge. Republicans are building legislative majorities by motivating a lot of new voters across most of the State, and converting some Democrats.
Complaining about what the Republicans did in 2011 is easy. It also won’t get the job done. Engaging new voters and changing people’s minds is much more difficult.
With so much of any winning Democratic statewide vote coming from Madison and Milwaukee, the Party has become increasingly urban and liberal and has not focused on improving its vote in rural areas where attitudes and values may be different. But winning in the more rural areas of the State is the only path to winning legislative majorities. Majorities necessary to breathe life into any Democratic initiative.
The challenge for all Party members is to find a way to embrace a wider spectrum of ideas. And identify with the aspirations of the broad variety of voters in the state.
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
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