When Democrat Ralph Northam accused Ed Gillespie, his Republican opponent for governor of Virginia, of being the “architect of gerrymandering throughout this country” at a debate earlier this month, the GOP nominee played it cute. “In my history books,” he replied, “it was Elbridge Gerry who came up with gerrymandering.”
Gillespie’s not only being too modest about his role in aggressively rewiring more than a dozen state legislative chambers this decade and tipping as many as two dozen U.S. House seats toward the Republicans, he’s also off on the history.
As most historians note, Patrick Henry manipulated Virginia’s congressional lines in 1788 to try and keep the hated James Madison out of the very first Congress. This was long before Gerry’s party in Massachusetts drew those fancifully spiraled state senate districts surrounding Boston in 1812.
It’s time we call the gerrymander something else — not simply for historical accuracy, but to stop politicians like Gillespie from brushing aside this toxic and undemocratic practice as simply politics as usual, some impish game both parties have played since our founding.
Today’s extreme partisan gerrymanders are different and far more dangerous than the ones from Gerry and Henry’s era. They’re drawn surgically and precisely with sophisticated GIS mapping software; informed by a cloud’s worth of Big Data from the census, voting records, consumer preferences and even social media likes; and they’re built to endure for a decade, if not longer.
From 1788 until 2001, politicians gerrymandered. But something changed in the last redistricting go-round. We were Gillespie-mandered.
And Ed Gillespie, who could well be elected Virginia governor on Tuesday, is directly responsible for today’s gerrymandering-on-steroids. Gillespie chaired the powerful Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 and helped design, execute and raise tens of millions of dollars for the Redistricting Majority Project. It had the apt acronym of REDMAP. This is a closely divided country, yet all political power in Washington, and in 69 of 99 state legislative chambers, rests with the Republicans. This is not a coincidence, and REDMAP explains why.
The strategy was simple: State legislatures control the drawing of district lines for themselves and for Congress in almost 80 percent of all states, including such crucial battlegrounds as Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin. REDMAP targeted GOP domination of every seat at the table when those lines were drawn in 2011. That required winning, in 2010, 107 key state legislative races in 16 states. Republicans were then able to unilaterally draw new maps for 193 of 435 seats in the House of Representatives. (Democrats owned only 44.) That’s a great head start toward the 218 needed for a majority.
If you think maps don’t matter, as veteran GOP mapmaker Tom Hofeller likes to say, just let me draw them. Well, Gillespie’s REDMAP operation won Hofeller and other Republicans that power in blue and purple states nationwide. The maps have been the GOP firewall. Just look at the results.
* In Michigan, Democrats won more votes for the state house in 2012, 2014 and 2016. They haven’t once won more seats.
* In Wisconsin, Democrats won 174,000 more votes for the state assembly in 2012. Republicans won 60 of 99 seats.
* In North Carolina, Republicans have won fewer votes but managed a supermajority in the state house – and legislators have pushed such a radical agenda that one respected political scientist has put the state’s electoral fairness on par with Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.
* At the congressional level, closely divided states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin (5-3) send a cumulative total of 49 Republicans and 20 Democrats to Washington. Democrats have not turned a single seat in any of those states blue all decade on these GOP-drawn maps. They could not take Congress in 2012, even when they won 1.4 million more votes.
These unchecked legislative majorities – insulated from majorities at the ballot box – have done deep and lasting damage to democracy. The first thing gerrymandered legislatures have done nationwide is attack voting rights. Twenty states have new voting restrictions in place since 2010. All but one of them – Rhode Island – share something in common: One-party Republican control.
Just look at North Carolina, where legislators crafted new roadblocks to minority voting with “surgical precision,” then boasted of their effectiveness in dampening African-American turnout.
Or Wisconsin, where the voter ID requirements instituted by that gerrymandered legislature were designed to keep Democrats from the polls. As one state representative told a reporter: “I think Hillary Clinton is about the weakest candidate the Democrats have ever put up, and now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well.” Indeed, a leading Milwaukee elections official has suggested that the voter ID restrictions may have been enough to tip the state to Donald Trump.
All this ingenious workmanship definitely enriched something: Ed Gillespie’s bank account. According to the RSLC’s IRS filings, the organization paid Gillespie’s firm, Ed Gillespie Strategies, $905,000 in consulting and travel expenses between 2010 and 2015.
Voters hate the toxicity and polarization that Gillespie-mandering has unleashed. A bipartisan poll conducted earlier this year by Democrat Celinda Lake and Republican Ashlee Rich Stephenson found that more than 70 percent of Americans would back new limits on politicians’ ability to rig districts in their favor – even if it meant that their preferred party won fewer seats as a result.
Gillespie released an ad this week doubling down on tactics that make voting more restrictive. He attacked Northam’s boss, current Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, for his program that restores the voting rights of felons. Virginia is among only four states nationwide where convicted felons permanently lose the right to vote.
This governor’s race, however, has stakes for the entire country. If Gillespie wins, he’ll be in office in 2021 when new maps are drawn following the 2020 census. Virginia’s Gillespie-mandered legislature will likely remain under Republican control. His victory would give the GOP its 26th trifecta and a free hand over redistricting. Virginia has gone blue in each of the last three presidential cycles, but until courts forced the redrawing of one racially gerrymandered congressional district last year, sent eight Republicans and three Democrats to Congress. Gillespie-mandering could cost the nation three competitive House seats.
We have spent much of the last year talking about Russia and other outside threats that may have helped nullify the popular vote and elect Donald Trump president. It is long past time to focus on the internal forces inside our own political parties that have consciously conspired over the last decade to gerrymander Congress and state legislatures and undermine the right to vote.
Elbridge Gerry had nothing to do with this. Let’s call it by its proper name: Ed Gillespie’s.
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