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The Future of Gerrymandering Teach-Out

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University of Michigan

The Future of Gerrymandering Teach-Out

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One of the biggest challenges facing our democracy today occurs when congressional district lines that are drawn by elected officials to give one political party an unfair advantage over another. This is called "gerrymandering.” This Teach-Out explores the topic of gerrymandering, considering everything from its history of the original gerrymander, to past, present and future United States Supreme Court cases. You will hear from leading experts on gerrymandering as well as citizen groups who are on the front lines of redistricting debate. This Teach-Out originally ran in June of 2018, before the United States Supreme Court decided on the Gill v. Whitford case coming out of Wisconsin and while various ballot initiatives around redistricting reform were evolving. What’s new? This updated version contains all original content, plus updates from returning faculty instructors Nancy Wang and John Chamberlin, who examine the current status of the Gill v. Whitford case as well as other redistricting reform efforts (i.e. ballot initiatives, congressional action) from across the United States. If you previously participated in this Teach-Out, feel free to skip directly to the new update segment. The fundamental driving questions from the original Teach-Out remain the same for this updated version, have a look here: What is gerrymandering? What is happening now? Why is this such an important issue today and what does it mean for you? Why did the United States Supreme Court take up the gerrymandering case (Gill v. Whitford)? How has technology impacted the gerrymandering debate? What are states doing to address the issue? How can you implement change? A Teach-Out is: -an event – it takes place over a fixed, short period of time -an opportunity – it is open for free participation to everyone around the world -a community – it will be joined by a large number of diverse individuals -a conversation – an opportunity to give and take ideas and information from people The University of Michigan Teach-Out Series provides just-in-time community learning events for participants around the world to come together in conversation with the U-M campus community, including faculty experts. The U-M Teach-Out Series is part of our deep commitment to engage the public in exploring and understanding the problems, events, and phenomena most important to society. Teach-Outs are short learning experiences, each focused on a specific current issue. Attendees will come together over a few days not only to learn about a subject or event but also to gain skills. Teach-Outs are open to the world and are designed to bring together individuals with wide-ranging perspectives in respectful and deep conversation. These events are an opportunity for diverse learners and a multitude of experts to come together to ask questions of one another and explore new solutions to the pressing concerns of our global community. Come, join the conversation! Find new opportunities at Teach-Out.org.

À partir de la leçon

Introduction

Why should you care? How does this affect your life?6:54

What is Happening Now?22:15

Court Cases in 201822:42

Gill v. Whitford Case8:48

North Carolina Case6:12

Rencontrer les enseignants

John Chamberlin
Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Public Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
Nancy Wang
Clinical Assistant Professor and the Director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School
Lija Hogan
Intermittent Lecturer in Information, School of Information, University of Michigan

Hi, this morning we have the opportunity to talk with Michael Li of the Brennan Center.

Michael is a Senior Counsel with

the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School.

The Brennan Center has produced independent research on what causes gerrymandering,

where it's happening, how to measure it,

and what its impact is on our political system.

Thank you so much for joining us Michael.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks. I'd like to talk about what you found with your research on the 2010 maps,

since we're getting ready for the 2020 cycle.

I was especially interested in the research that you did in producing your report,

the Extreme Maps from 2017.

Do you mind just walking us briefly

through the research that you did to produce that report?

Sure so, gerrymandering, first,

a little bit about what gerrymandering is and what it

isn't and more importantly what it is

because it's a big catch-all term that we use in the United States to describe

political manipulation of maps and that includes

a lot of things that includes drawing a seat,

so your brother-in-law can win election to Congress.

It means drawing a map,

so that you can punish your opponent or somebody who you don't want to win office.

It also can mean grabbing a disproportionately large share of seats and locking in

that advantage in it's that latter one

that has been at the heart of litigation over gerrymandering,

the last few years.

The allegation to put it in more simple terms is that

a party and it's almost always

something that occurs when one party has control of all the levers of power.

When a party decides that it's going to draw the map,

so that it gets an unfair share of seats

given the statewide vote and what you normally would expect with fairly drawn maps,

and then designs the districts in a way that they never

become competitive and that a party,

even if it wins significantly more votes,

it doesn't win more seats.

So, that's the sort of extreme gerrymandering that we looked at

in our report called Extreme Maps.

What we did is we looked at the map that we're drawn after

the 2010 census using

three different metrics and there are additional metrics that you could use,

but we use three of the most common and widely cited ones

and what we found was that it's really a handful list.

There is significant bias in the maps,

but it's really a handful of states that are driving the bias on the maps and that's

really in states that you might not expect

in some ways because they are states that are the battleground states,

states like Michigan, or Pennsylvania, or North Carolina,

states that are fairly close to 50-50 and yet

have outsized advantages for one party or another.

So, for example in Michigan,

it's a Republicans have nine out of the 14 of the seats and it's even worse in

North Carolina where Republicans currently hold 10 out

of the 13 seats in a state that has very much 50-50.

Pennsylvania used to have a 13-5 advantage,

the maps where we redrawn as a result of court litigation which we'll talk about later.

But, up in the first three elections of this decade,

it's been 13-5 advantage for

Republicans and what we found is that regardless of the measure that you've

used and there's a lot of sort of debate about which measure is better or worse

or which one better captures the problem,

the reality is that they also tend to point

in the same direction at the same handful of states.

Thanks. So, what about the response that well,

these maps, they could sort of happened by chance?

Well, that's a common argument that you get or I should say used to get.

I think you're seeing it used less frequently now but oftentimes,

people will say won't just because Democrats live in places like Detroit,

or like New York City,

and the reality is that if you look at the states that have the worst bias,

sort of the most durable bias,

it states again that are very much 50-50 states Pennsylvania,

Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina,

these are states that if you looked at a precinct level map or a census block level map,

you would see a lot of light pink and a lot of light blue across the map.

These are not states in other words that are like Nebraska

where it other than a few pockets of blue,

it's dark red, right?

If all of these states were sort of dark red across,

you wouldn't really have to during that because he would just,

any district no matter what shape, or what configuration,

or whether you drew to the East or West,

would be exactly the same because they're so dark red.

But, that's not the case in states like Michigan or North Carolina,

where you see a lot of ink in blues sprinkled in

among each other which indicates that they're even outside of the big cities,

there's a lot of people,

there's a lot of mixed partisanship,

people Democrats living close to Republicans and in those instances,

how you slice and dice and recombine voters actually makes

a huge degree of difference in the way that the maps perform.

Again, just the fact that these are 50-50 states at every level,

they're competitive for judicial races.

They're competitive for governor's races.

They're competitive for president,

and yet they produce these outlaw sized advantages over one party or the other,

that suggests that it's not something that is accidental.

That's not to say that geography in what people call sorting doesn't have an impact.

Clearly, you wouldn't expect in any of these states,

the maps will be 50-50 despite the fact these are 50-50 states.

Democrats do tend to cluster in the big urban centers.

So, you wouldn't necessarily expect North Carolina, for example,

to be seven-six, but you don't also expect it to be 10-three.

Right. So, what is happening to produce these maps?

Well, so, gerrymandering is something that we've

long had a problem with in our country but the term dates to the

early 1800's and a map of that governor Elbridge Gerry of

Massachusetts signed into law and that's where we get

the term gerrymander because the argument is that,

well at the time,

people thought that one of the districts look like a salamander,

so they called it a gerrymander,

and hence we have the term gerrymandering.

Now, of course he pronounces his last name Gerry,

so I'm not sure why it's not gerrymandering,

but that's an issue for another day.

But, it's something that's long existed in our country.

So, even goes back before Elbridge Gerry to Patrick Henry.

Patrick Henry is famous for "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death",

but at the same time, he was a politician.

He was a member of the Virginia legislature

at the time that they had to draw their first congressional map.

He hated a man named James Madison and he tried to

draw the map in a way that James Madison couldn't win election to Congress.

Now, he was unsuccessful but even the framers engaged in political manipulation of maps.

What has changed in recent years and why it's getting worse is frankly two things.

One is sort of data and technology and the fact that

we have become a more polarized society.

It used to be people who long tried to do these sort of

extreme gerrymandering or they get an extra large share of seats,

they lock it in, but they weren't very successful at it.

This was really common in the 19th century

but the maps would last for maybe an election or two.

Then, people would move around or their allegiances would shift

or they would have drawn the districts in a way that really didn't enable them to stick.

Now we have data about voters that we didn't have in the past and so,

we know things at the block level about how likely it is that

every individual voter in the precinct or block is going to vote.

It used to be in the old days that you would know that

a precinct voted 50 percent Republican or 50 percent Democrat.

But, you wouldn't know where the Democrats and Republicans were unless you

had on the ground knowledge about where they were.

But, now because of things based on your Google searches,

based on what kind of car you drive,

based on your credit score,

based on what you buy on Amazon,

we have a lot more data about people and

in the same way that political campaigns and marketers

use that data to create profiles of people and have a good sense of who you are,

gerrymanderers also are able to use that.

So, they are able to know how likely it is that you are a Democrat or a Republican,

how strong a Democrat or Republican you are.

Likewise, how likely it is you are to vote in presidential years and

midterm years and how likely you are to switch and what your issues are,

whether you're a voter who cares a lot about abortion rights or

a voter who cares a lot about the owning as many guns as you can.

There's lots of information that we have now and that makes it possible for people to

slice and dice at sort of a micro level and

create districts that not only created advantage for party,

but also stick in the sense of

no district sort of change on the map and so that's really completely anathema to

what the framers would have wanted because they thought

that the House should be and legislature should be

places where the mood of the people

changed the composition of the legislature would change and that we would always

have a House where it was

an exact miniature portrait of the people as

a whole to use a phrase that John Adams used,

and that's not the case now.

In fact, the House is in a lot of ways more

predictable in your average year than the Senate is.

So, there's more competition on the Senate than there is in the House because

the House is so designed to lock in exactly what you have.

Right. So, the political check is gone, right?

That's right.

Yeah. I'm really interested in this idea of these biases being very durable.

Can you talk a little bit more about what you found, for example,

going into the midterm elections of 2018 how gerrymandered maps might prevent

any changes from happening despite

so-called blue wave or very different results in voting.

Yeah. So, we did another a follow-up report to

our extreme maps report called extreme gerrymandering, the 2018 midterm,

in which we tried to gauge how much of a structural barrier Democrats have to being able

to win majority in the US House in

2018 and we found that it was really crazy significant.

Democrats would have to win the national popular vote by something North of

10 percent to be favored in a normal year to win the House.

Now, 2018 of course,

in many ways is not a normal year.

It's a year where there seems to be extraordinary enthusiasm on

the Democratic side and likewise Democratic candidates are doing well in fundraising.

Democrats are getting all the people they want to run and there's a lot of volunteering.

As you've seen in the special elections,

really high turnout among Democrats.

So, 2018 may be be sort of an exceptional year and Democrats could win

potentially a majority with less than a 10 plus point win;

but that's only one year, right?

So, if 2020 proves to be a more normal year,

even a pretty good democratic year,

but a more normal good democratic year,

then those gerrymanders could snap back with

a vengeance and Democrats could end up losing a lot of seats that they

might win in 2018 because it's

an extraordinary year and so that really is the lesson of it.

More than anything else is that, these gerrymanders,

they may not hold for an election but they will

hold for the majority of the decade and that is truly undermining our democracy.

Yeah. I saw a spot that you posted on your website featuring Alexis Farmer,

one of your research and program associates.

Who is from Michigan.

That's right, and can you,

where she was talking about how this plays out in,

I think it was two states: North Carolina and Maryland for example,

and so we've been talking a lot about Republican gerrymanders,

but can you just walk us through the example of Maryland and how

the gerrymandered maps there will kind of lock and buy us for elections to come.

Sure. There's no question and this is important to get out.

I've talked a lot about how Republicans have

an advantage and that's really because in 2010,

there was a wave election.

Republicans won a huge number of seats,

63 in total, and took control of the House and they won a bunch of seats.

They weren't normally expected to win and that really was sort of surprise wins,

but what happened is that redistricting a place the next year, 2011,

and so Republicans were able to walk in

an advantage because they controlled redistricting in more states than Democrats.

Which is not to say the Democrats given the opportunity wouldn't do the same thing.

Democrats historically have been equally aggressive gerrymanders and in this decade,

in a state like Maryland,

they also were very aggressive.

Maryland is a fairly democratic state.

It has eight congressional districts.

Historically, six of those were Democratic and two were

Republican in part because they didn't control many states.

Democrats decided, "We're going to maximize our potential and take seven

out of the eight congressional seats and only leave one for Republicans."

In fact, they actually toyed around with trying to take all eight of them,

but they thought that would stretch them a little too thin.

A fair map in Maryland probably is something closer to 5-3.

It's a very democratic state but it's not sort of a 7-1 state.

Five-three is probably more natural.

Five-three also would probably allow election of more people of color

and more people who represent their nor the choice of communities of color,

but what Democrats did is they took a district

in the western part of Maryland and swapped out about half the voters.

Took half the voters out and put them in other districts and moved in

another equivalent to half the population of the district from elsewhere.

So, what they did is they took out

more rural areas that were Republican voting and they put in suburbs of

Washington DC which are very affluent and created a safe Democratic district.

It's sort of really a strange district in a lot of ways because the areas that they

added in the Washington DC area are among the most affluent in the country.

The median income is well north of 190,000 or 200,000.

It's just very high,

and the areas they left in are places where the median income is more like 50,000, right?

It's sort of these are fairly divergent places that have very little in common

and it was done solely to maximize

Democratic advantage and to give Democrats an extra seat.

Recognizing as national Democrats did in 2011, that they,

in places like Texas and Michigan and Pennsylvania,

they weren't going to have a lot of ability

to maximize seats because they didn't control the process.

Thanks Michael. In our next segment,

we're going to talk about things that

are being done to challenge these kinds of practices.

But just to wrap up this segment,

seeing what you've seen and having

really analyze the maps that exists right now from the 2010 cycle,

what kind of changeover or turnover are you expecting from the 2018 elections?

Well, that's a really interesting question because it tells you a lot about how

these gerrymanders get done because when

you gerrymander to try to grab a large share of seats,

you have sort of an extra large seat bonus,

what you don't do is you don't draw districts that your party wins by 80 percent,

because if you do that you're using your voters very inefficiently.

Instead, rather than drawing 80 percent districts,

what you want to do is you want to spread your voters out as much as possible so

that your party wins as many seats as possible.

So, you're drawing a bunch of 53,47 districts,

even 52, 48 districts if you can get away with it.

You try to do it so artfully,

again knowing a lot about the voters who are in

the districts and so that they whole, right?

That it may look competitive at 52,

48 but it really isn't because you still

carefully picked the voters that it never ellipse.

The danger of course in doing that is you build a wall to protect for

a 100 year or even a 200 year flood but you're not

protecting against 500 or 1,000 year flood,

and 2018 could be sort of the equivalent,

the electoral equivalent of a 500 year or 1,000 year flood.

If that happens, then the water rushes over the dikes and

the dams and you end up losing a bunch of seats.

So, that is something I think that a lot of people are wondering if

that's going to happen in a lot of states just because again,

you drew these districts and they might be perfectly

safe in a normal year but 2018 isn't going to be a normal year.

Having said that, the lesson is that these gerrymanders can pop

back the next cycle because Democrats really to hold onto whatever gains have in 2018,

would need another 2018 equivalent year in 2020 to hold on to that,

and that may happen.

It certainly could happen, but it may not,

and if that happens then you would expect Democrats to lose a bunch of seats.

That's exactly what ordinarily would have happened to Republicans in 2012.

In 2010, they won 63 seats,

including some really unexpected pickups that you normally would

expect there to be some adjustment in 2012 which is a more pro-democratic year.

That the only reason that didn't happen is because in 2011,

you had redistricting and a lot of gerrymandering that went on

and that's the lesson but redistricting this time doesn't take place until 2021,

and so the Democrats could end up losing whatever they pick up in 2018.

Interesting. So, as a scholar in this area,

what states are you going to be looking to see whether there is

going to be kind of the these effects from gerrymandered maps?

What states are you focused on?

So, we look at two sets of states.

One, we look at these battleground states that seem like they should be

really sort of very robustly

competitive at the congressional level but haven't been thus far.

So, states like Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina,

are prime among the states and we look at also Texas,

Pennsylvania; we used to look at a lot,

but Pennsylvania's map was redrawn by court order and it has a much fairer map.

The other states that we look at would include Pennsylvania now with its new map,

but also states like California where the map was drawn by a redistricting commission.

What we found is that,

when you have maps that are drawn by courts or maps that are drawn by commissions,

is that they're much more responsive electorally.

As a party wins more votes,

it wins more seats and that's true for Democrats,

it's true for Republicans and that's really

sort of what you would think that democracy should look like, right?

If you get together with people who share your political beliefs and you organize,

you may not be able to win every single district.

There are places I live in Brooklyn,

New York where a state assembly district that Barack Obama won by 98 percent and

that Hillary Clinton won by 96 percent and where

Donald Trump was actually the third place finisher behind Jill Stein,

so you're not going to have a competitive district in Central Brooklyn, right?

But if I'm a Democrat,

I should be able to look at a map in New York

and say get together with my other Democrats and say,

"Well, gosh, where could we win a seat in

the Hudson Valley or on Long Island or wherever?"

Likewise, Republicans should be able to say, "Okay,

we're not going to win these seats in New York City but where can we win a seat,

say, in Upstate, New York or something like that that we don't currently hold?"

So, that's the whole purpose as legally the idea is that you get together with

other like-minded people when you sort of form

an association and you try to go out and win elections.

What happens, because of gerrymandering,

is that that association is rendered

effectively useless and the election results are locked in.

In places like California and Minnesota and places where you've had court drawn maps,

California had a commission drawn map,

that vision of people winning more seats as they win

more votes is preserved and that's not been the case in Michigan.

It's not been the case in Ohio.

It's not been the case in North Carolina.

So, we're going to watch those states to see whether the gerrymander's collapse,

but we also want to look at sort of how responsive,

the better maps, are in places where you have had a fair amount drawing process.

Great. Well, thank you so much Michael.

We'll follow along and see how it plays out.

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