The 2020 election will have huge implications for the U.S.
political system and not just due to the presidential race, 2020 is a
census year, meaning in 2021, the U.S.
will have new electoral maps.
Whichever party gains control of state legislatures in 2020 is going to get
to set district maps for a decade, which will decide control of the US
House for a decade.
In 2010, Republicans made huge gains in state legislatures and consequently
redrew the maps. One study showed that about 16 to 17 Republican
congressional seats won in the 2016 election are attributed to the way the
electoral maps were drawn.
You had gone through several cycles where Democrats had actually got more
votes than Republicans nationwide, and yet Republicans had a comfortable
majority.And that was because of gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is the process of manipulating electoral maps for political
gain in about two thirds of the country.
The state legislators who win their elections will draw the political
playing field for the next 10 years.
Gerrymandering is cheating.
It is the act of drawing legislative lines that put yourself in power and
make it harder for the other side to win a majority of seats.
Gerrymandering is the reason that some congressional districts look
downright strange.
Look at these. They make no logical geographical sense.
For 200 years, this has been going on with the legislators draw the
district lines to protect the jobs, the most toxic partizan gerrymandering
that took place after the 2010 census and this most recent cycle.
It occurred in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina,
Pennsylvania, Florida.
This time around, both parties are more focused on this strategy and are
raising hundreds of millions of dollars for down ballot races.
Redistricting has increasingly become this huge war between the parties
because I think both parties now are aware of this and you see a lot of
money flooding into the process.
Both sides of the aisle have used redistricting for their own gain,
especially as technologies improve and automate the process of mapmaking,
leading to gerrymanders based on race, political affiliation and even
prison populations. So how does gerrymandering actually work and what is
being done to fight for fair representation?
The total population results of the decennial census determines how many
congressional seats each state will have after the 2010 census, 32 states
kept the same number of seats, while eight states gained seats and 10
states lost seats.
Once states know how many congressional seats they will have, State
legislators begin redistricting their communities and determine the shapes
of electoral maps. Traditionally, gerrymandered maps have been redrawn
using census and voter registration data to pack as many people from one
party or racial group into a district.
Alternatively, legislators make crack districts part so that certain
populations are divided according to whom they are likely to support.
All of it is effectively vote a dilution.
It makes votes matter less.
Mapmakers have expanded from drawing maps based on census and voter
registration data to include as much data as they can find.
They will use things like voter registration records, but not only voter
registration records, much more sophisticated data about who you are and
what your political preferences are using things like what magazines you
read, what kind of car you drive, all kinds of consumer data, the same
sort of data that companies use to target you, that political campaigns
use to target you. You could develop a very robust profile of who a person
is. And that's the sort of data that enables map makers to strategically
draw maps to favor one party over the other and to make it durable.
In 2010, Republican leadership took a big gamble on down ticket elections
to attempt to influence the map making process.
The Republican State Leadership Committee launched the Redistricting
Majority Project, or Red Map, investing thirty million dollars to flip
state legislative seats.
At the beginning of 2010, Republicans held 44 percent of all state
legislative seats, 28 percent of state legislative chambers and had
control of both state legislative chambers and the governorship in nine
state trifectas.
With that investment, Republicans flipped more than 700 state legislative
districts, giving them 53 percent of seats, a 9 percent increase.
When it came to control of state legislatures, they won 51 percent of them
and had 20 state trifectas, both an increase of 23 percent.
It was the biggest and boldest investment in modern American politics, and
it paid off wildly and successfully.
That shift allowed Republicans to control redistricting in many parts of
the country, some of which led to gerrymanders.
We know from history that both parties are equally willing to gerrymander
if given the opportunity.
It just turned out that the last round of redistricting in 2011 occurred
after the Tea Party election of 2010, in which Republicans did really well
and swept the board in many states but were given a chance.
Democrats will also gerrymander.
Requests for comment from the RSLC were not returned by the date of
publication. But some conservative experts suggest that gerrymandering is
not a matter of politics, but rather geography.
They say while the maps may appear distorted, the district's maps reflect
the population concentrations required in the Voting Rights Act.
For example, in some states, Democrats tend to be more concentrated in
urban areas and Republicans are more spread out.
This cycle, The RSLC is focusing their efforts on 12 state legislatures,
the same number of states the National Democratic Redistricting Committee