Democrats Need to Play Dirty
The party is trying to ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, but aggressively redrawing districts in blue states like New York might be the only way to preserve its House majority.
To hear democratic leaders decry gerrymandering as part of their current bid to enact landmark voting-rights legislation, you’d think the centuries-old practice was a mortal threat to the republic. But political necessity could soon demand that Democrats drop their purity act. To keep their narrow House majority, they might have to deploy the tactic everywhere they can, and every bit as aggressively as Republicans do.
Nowhere are the stakes higher for Democrats than in New York. The party there has its largest legislative majorities in a century and more sway over more seats than anywhere else in the country. A cutthroat approach to redistricting in New York could eliminate or substantially alter as many as five GOP-held seats—a number equivalent to the Democrats’ entire edge in the House.
The early maneuvering by New York Democrats is already revealing the party’s shaky commitment to its national anti-gerrymandering push, one that has long been rooted less in principle than the Democrats’ passionate message would suggest. What could impede the Democratic effort to make the most of its dominance in New York is not the fear of hypocrisy but the party’s internal politics.
Nationwide, the challenge for Democrats is formidable: The shuffling of House seats as a result of the decennial census is expected to shift power from mostly Democratic states like California, New York, and Illinois to states like Texas, Florida, and North Carolina—all of which will have legislatures controlled by Republicans who will be in charge of drawing new districts. “The bottom line is: If this becomes an arms race, and both parties maximize their advantage in the states that they control, Republicans will come out ahead,” David Wasserman, an analyst for the nonpartisan newsletter The Cook Political Report, told me. The GOP needs to flip just five Democratic seats to recapture the House majority in 2022, and conceivably, the party could gain all of those seats through gerrymandering alone. Wasserman projects that Republicans could net anywhere from zero to 10 seats from redistricting.
That gerrymandering poses a danger to America is a relatively recent discovery for Democrats. Only after Republicans routed them in state and congressional elections in 2010 and redrew hundreds of districts in their own favor did Democrats express outrage, which reached a fever pitch when they won the nationwide vote in the next election but saw the GOP secure its second-largest House majority in 60 years. The ensuing Democratic campaign against gerrymandering pushed states like Colorado and Virginia to adopt independent redistricting commissions aimed at preventing politicians from choosing their own constituents. None of this stopped Democrats elsewhere from gerrymandering themselves. After the 2010 census, they drew a notoriously skewed congressional map in Maryland that left Republicans with just a single seat in the eight-member delegation.
Now Democratic groups that for years have criticized the practice are urging their party not to create unfair maps in blue states like Illinois and New York. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Kelly Ward Burton, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, told me. The group was launched in 2017 with the backing of former President Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder to reform redistricting. Burton, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), argues that Democrats don’t need to gerrymander to keep the House majority. “We want maps that reflect the will of the voters and reflect the actual makeup of the state.” If that occurs, she said, “then the House stays competitive, and we can win.”
That’s a bet many Democrats aren’t willing to make.
Republicans have never had qualms about acknowledging the partisan aim of their gerrymandering efforts. None of the Democrats I talked with, however, would admit—on the record, at least—that they needed to draw maps with the same ruthless precision as the GOP. “The redistricting process in New York has been so rigged in favor of Republicans for so long that mere fairness would yield Democratic gains,” State Senator Michael Gianaris, the deputy majority leader and a co-chair of the reapportionment task force, told me.