Tinkering around under the hood of American politics
Reformers kick around ideas to improve American elections
Across the country reformers have plans to remake America’s elections. Some want a multi-party system like Europe. Others want to force open primaries to allow independents to help choose more moderate candidates. That’s the same idea behind final five in which voters narrow down a broad field of candidates to produce a more centrist slate for a second round of voting. Or maybe the fix is using independent commissions to draw fairer maps. In our next two episodes of “Lost in the Middle,” we are spending some time in the political science garage tightening this bolt, and changing that clamp.
Let’s start with the idea of ending rigged election maps to protect incumbents, a process called gerrymandering. Under the U.S. Constitution state legislatures redraw the maps every ten years after the census. And I hate to turn you cynical, but the idea has always been to keep the ruling party in power.
“People will say that having a legislature doing it is self-serving, and that they have only their best interest at heart, because what redistricting is all about, no matter which side you're on, is power,” says one time Wisconsin State GOP Chairman Brandon Scholz.
The League of Woman Voters in Iowa began a campaign in the 1950’s to take maps out of the hands of the politicians and force competition and end gerrymandering.
Everyone knows what gerrymandering means, but I doubt you realize the practice dates from the early days of the country when James Madison ran against James Monroe for Congress in a district that was described as having “1,000 eccentric angles” to make it easier for Madison to win.
In fact, it was another founding father who gave us the term gerrymandering. In the early 1800’s, the Governor of Massachusetts. Elbridge Gary was crafting sweetheart districts. “One of the offending districts kind of looked like a salamander, and so some newspaper called it Gary's Salamander, and that became Gary Mander/Jerry Mander,” says Harvard Professor Nick Stephanopoulos.
After a 25-year battle reformers in Iowa were finally able to push through the legislature the first creation of a non-partisan commission staffed by technocrats to draw its maps.
Jim Nussle and I were first elected to Congress in 1990 knowing that a new map was about to drop from the sky in 1992. I was lucky. In Wisconsin it was an old-fashioned incumbent protection plan.
But Jim was from northeast Iowa, and he said waiting for his new map drawn by the Commission was like waiting for the results of cat scan.
“I’m breaking out hives now just thinking about it. I can remember, and this dates me, but I a remember the paper rolling out from the fax machine with a printed copy of the map,” he says. The process threw him in a district with a senior Democrat. He survived, as he did ten years later with another new map.
“I felt that the Iowa process was abundantly fair. It was really unassailable. In its fairness it was difficult to find any chink in the armor.”
While Iowa is now held up as a national model, the reality is that it is an anomaly. The state itself is a square with a very small population and is 97 per cent white. Many states end up with bizarre maps trying to create minority-majority districts as a result of voting rights requirements.
Recent years didn’t produce a salamander shaped district, but it did produce a snake.
“I guess the most infamous was North Carolina's twelfth district,” says Stephanopoulos. This was a like a snake-like district that basically went through all of North Carolina cities in the center of the state picking up the heavily black neighborhoods.”
Today 21 states have independent commissions assigned to draw fair maps but there is no guarantee of purity.
In 1983 Washington state was the third state to set up a commission with two Republican legislators, two Democratic legislators and a neutral chair. Through several redistricting cycles, Washington’s commission worked smoothly, praised as a national model for how to fix the process of drawing lines for congressional and state legislative districts. Bu in November of 2021 it all went to hell.
The commission had argued for weeks without agreeing on a fair map. With five hours to go to meet a hard legal deadline, they gathered for a public meeting with live streamed updates.
When the meeting began the commission’s new logo filled the screen It boldly proclaimed, “Draw your WASHINGTON.” The chairwoman Sarah Augustine immediately announced the four other members – two Democrats and two Republicans members - wanted to caucus privately. She promised regular updates. Now on screen a new slide slid into prominence “meeting on break” it flashed.
Augustine, who got the job because she had a master’s degree in conflict resolution perhaps should have taken a crapload of more classes. Every half-hour, a staffer briefly came on camera to inform viewers that caucuses continued. An interpreter even signed for deaf viewers.
It was all a charade.
The Republicans and Democrats weren’t even in the building. They were in a hotel 40 minutes away, cutting a deal the old fashioned way: each talking to their own leadership who had one goal: commission or no commission, protect the incumbents.
National columnist Bill Kristol who is a familiar face on national talk shows, agrees that the commissions are an improvement but given the level of rancor in Congress doesn’t think it has solved the underlying partisanship.
“I think most of the lack of competition in Congressional districts is not the fault of maps drawn by politicians but is due to the social economic trends that have separated the parties so much and put people in safe districts. It’s the sorting of red and blue America,” he said. “I mean Iowa has, and other states have, nonpartisan redistricting. In some cases, the courts do it, or independent bodies but in the end I don’t know if their politics are much healthier”
But Jim Nussle, even with his head on the chopping block twice, buys in.
“I like it because we are desperately seeking an opportunity to provide more political fairness. The two parties are holding on to power with a death grip, and they are trying frantically to rig the system and expand their power,” he says.
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