When a house is on fire, more fire won’t help
W
hen Texas Republicans unveiled yet another contorted congressional map last week – one that would all but erase Austin’s Latino-led seat and increase the Republican party’s federal House tally by up to five seats in total – the outcry from Democrats was immediate and justified. But beyond the Democratic state legislators’ brave effort to stymie the proposal by boycotting the vote, a different refrain has also been heard by leading Democrats in other states: if they do it, why can’t we?
Governor Gavin Newsom of California has vowed to “fight fire with fire”, advancing a proposal that would redraw California’s own congressional map to offset Republican gains in Texas. New York’s Kathy Hochul has also embraced the prospect of aggressive gerrymandering in Democratic-controlled states, sidestepping the independent commissions that Democrats themselves had once championed and successfully implemented in both California and New York.
It is an understandable impulse, but it is the wrong one – for both strategic and principled reasons. To begin with, Democrats are destined to lose a gerrymandering arms race. They control fewer state legislatures and the very nature of electoral map engineering currently favors Republican power-grabbing, since most Democratic voters live in densely populated urban areas, which makes it easier to concentrate them in fewer electoral districts.
