Republican State legislative gains are important

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Think the current map of congressional districts is ridiculously gerrymandered in a way that gives Republicans unfair favor? Brace yourselves. It’s about to get worse.

But it’s the state legislatures where The D.C. Brief returns today because, in most states, these are the local officials who actually draw the district maps for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Every 10 years, after the Census, states redraw the boundaries of each of the 435 Congressional districts in the country. The underlying idea is that every district should have roughly the same number of people in it, so this way larger states with greater populations can offset their disadvantages in the Senate, where every state regardless of size has two votes. In most states, whatever party has control of the legislature will have control over the redistricting pen — and the future composition of the House.

At the hyper-local level of state legislatures, where wins can be decided by dozens of votes, Democrats fared poorly. Facing an electoral shut-out last week, they now have zero say in how Texas, North Carolina and Florida draw the borders of battleground districts. Democrats fought hard to hold their control of chambers in Colorado, Minnesota and Maine, blocked a super-majority in Wisconsin and picked up super majorities of their own in Delaware and Connecticut. But both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature flipped to Republican hands. Efforts to flip Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas all seem to have failed. In Arizona, Republicans appear to be on a path to keep their majority, too.

Final tallies are still coming in, so the full picture of Democrats’ drubbing isn’t yet clear. But after millions of dollars — and unprecedented attention — to get back in control of redistricting, the outcome is clearly disappointing to a party that started at a disadvantage. In terms of raw numbers, Democrats had only 5% fewer seats in state legislatures than Republicans. But those 384 seats were in the right spots that allowed Republicans to control 55 of the 99 state legislative chambers in the country.

Looking ahead, this disadvantage is set to continue. One study suggests, when all the results are in, Democrats will be able to unilaterally draw the boundaries of just 76 districts, while Republicans will be able to unilaterally draw 181.

Why does any of this matter? Aside from determining the future composition of the House, if you hate partisan posturing, it’s likely to get worse. Gerrymandered districts aren’t just annoying in that they are explicitly designed to keep one party from winning. They reward the worst partisan impulses. If a district is drawn to be deeply Democratic, any Democrat who tries to find compromise with a Republican is vulnerable to retribution from the left for betraying the party. It’s how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to run to the left of a New York Democrat who may have been the next Speaker of the House — and oust him. It’s also what the Republican Party faced in the early part of this decade as the Tea Party ran primaries against less-than-ideologically pure figures on the right.