Given everything else going on in the United States right now, it might seem odd to focus on redistricting. But as our guest this week argues, how the lines are drawn could shape the tone of our politics for the next decade.
Despite ongoing threats of violence, the wheels of democracy continue to turn, and in 2021, that means redistricting. States will draw new electoral maps this year using data from the 2020 Census.
Our guest this week has spent the past decade covering attempts by politicians to draw those maps to their advantage in a practice known as gerrymandering. He's also covered the groups of citizens across the country who pushed back against them to win some major reforms that will make the process look different now than it did in 2010.
David Daley is a journalist and author of Unrigged: How Citizens are Battling Back to Save Democracy. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, the Washington Post, and New York magazine. He is a senior fellow at FairVote, the former editor of Salon, and lives in Massachusetts.
Unrigged: How Americans are Battling Back to Save Democracy
Fair Districts PA on judicial gerrymandering
One state's fight for fair maps
Next-generation democracy: An interview with high school student Kyle Hynes, who won Pennsylvania's citizen mapmaking contest.
Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. And that this week, we are going to be talking about redistricting. And our guest is David Daley, who is the author of the book on rigged how Americans are battling back to save democracy. And it might seem a little odd to be talking about redistricting in the midst of everything else that is going on in our politics right now. But as I think you'll hear in the interview, there is actually a connection between gerrymandering and some of the bigger questions about the future of our politics and what type of politicians will have,
Chris Beem
Yeah, even in a normal political environment, this would be what everybody would be talking about, right? Because this is kind of the next big thing coming down the pike.
Candis Watts Smith
So just to also reiterate the kind of chaos that we are all experiencing, I think one of the things that's going to be really important about David Daly's book is that it really helps us to orient it orient us both towards the states, which is where a lot of the voting power comes from, and rules and laws. And it also orient us to the possible that there are people who are working every day tirelessly to do something about the things that they think are wrong with our democracy, and who gets the vote and who want to try to expand the franchise, sometimes up against their own representatives, who are often trying to exclude more people, exclude more Americans.
Chris Beem
Yeah, I think that's a good point. I also think it helps us to see that these issues, these separations, these points of contention, go pretty far down. And they're not limited to what you hear on your average cable TV talk show. So we've talked about gerrymandering on this podcast before, and I don't want to get into too much detail. But just to set a little bit of a table for why we're talking about this now, every 10 years, we have a census we just completed one actually haven't got the results back. But the census itself is done. It's in the constitution that we have to do this every 10 years. And the results of that census, determine which states get how many representatives. But then the other thing that happens after the census is that every state has to redraw its districts, both for the congressional districts and also for the state legislature, and usually Senate and Assembly. And so how they do that the 10 year census results if then the right now the only opportunity to do that.
Candis Watts Smith
So the thing about the census hears is every 10 years, it's not just important for the census, but it also makes the elections that occur at the 2010 2020 2030 makes them especially important, because the party that wins the state houses are the ones who are going to have the greatest say on redistricting. So in the case of the 2020 election, it was good for Republicans who weren't Trump and it was not good for Democrats at the state level,
Chris Beem
Because the republicans are in charge of either the legislature's of the governor and in many cases both and so therefore, there's no nobody contesting the lines they draw and they're going to Draw lines just like any politician, would that benefit their party. Right. So because there's no contested power, they're able to do basically what they want. And that's why David talks about going outside the legislative process and through referenda, or through citizens initiative to try to come up with some better system than the fox literally guarding the henhouse. But one thing he says that I think is absolutely right, is that it is simply not possible for any state, any legislative body to do this in the dark of night. Or to do this without people paying attention. In 2010, it was struck, it's considered to be a very arcane, confusing, who cares, draw maps, whatever. And so, Republicans took advantage of new software, new data, and really do some very sophisticated maps. And it was only ex post facto that people realize what had actually happened. And so this is a different from what goes back all the way to elbridge Gerry when the term was coined, and I think 1805, or whatever it was, but those days are gone, people are aware of it, and they're waiting to see what happens. And so at minimum, they're not going to be able to get away with it without being called on it.
Candis Watts Smith
There are recourses, it's not really apparent in some places, in some ways. So for example, the Shelby case out of the Supreme Court basically kind of struck down the preclearance clause, I guess you could say, of the Voting Rights Act. And so there at least, you know, there are some places where if you want it to make changes, you had to go through the DOJ before you made major changes, and, and that's gone. And so on the one hand, I do think that it's really important that people are going to be paying more attention to these redistricting and voting rule changes over the course of the next several years. But we also have to keep in mind that it's going to be important. And now I'm talking on the other side of my mouth, because I'm usually like local, local local, to see what Congress does about whether they are willing to implement a new voting rights act that could potentially prevent some of these really egregious forms of voter dilution.
Jenna Spinelle
There are some interesting dynamics here between people and politicians between states and the federal government in the courts. So let's go to the interview with Dave daily.
Jenna Spinelle
Dave Daley, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks so much for joining us.
David Daley
Thanks for having me, Jenna,
Jenna Spinelle
Excited to talk with you about your book on rigged and all the work you've been doing, chronicling grassroots politics over the past couple of years. And one thing that we have coming up in 2021, that will be easy to forget about is redistricting. You have spent a lot of of your time with grassroots organizers throughout the country that were working to end the practice of gerrymandering. And at a basic level, I guess I'm wondering how they did.
David Daley
I think that the redistricting that happens in 2021 is going to be much more transparent. And the public is going to be much more aware of how important it is. One of the things that has really happened over the last few years is that gerrymandering has become a hot topic. It's become something that everybody understands the importance of the centrality to our politics for a decade. And when I wrote my first book on this, the publisher made me give it a vulgar name because they said you can't possibly use the most boring word in the world gerrymandering on a book on that topic. And now, you can talk about gerrymandering everywhere, right? It's on john oliver. It's on The Daily Show. It's all over the place. So mapmakers are not going to be able to get away with doing this in private, and in smoke filled rooms and in bunkers the way that they did 10 years ago. I also think that the technology behind mapmaking the same software that makes it possible for lawmakers to gerrymander is going to be in the hands of the people and it's going to allow us to see through what they've done. There have also been amazing citizen redistricting efforts and I chronicle the ones in Michigan and Utah and Missouri and Colorado in unrigged. In Michigan, it's an amazing story. It's Katie Fey, she's 27 years old. A lot of your listeners may be familiar with her story. Two days after the 2016 election, she wants to take on something in our politics that might be unifying something that might get everyone in her family filled with Trump voters, Clinton voters or Bernie Sanders voters to rally around one issue and she picks gerrymandering in Michigan. And she goes on to Facebook, and puts up a Facebook post about how she wants to take this topic on and other people who want to join her want to reply. And they built through that one social media post a redistricting revolution. You had partisans drawing maps in Michigan, behind closed doors in 2011. You're going to have an independent commission of citizens doing this in daylight in 2021.
Jenna Spinelle
And I want to come back to Katie and and some of these grassroots organizers in a minute. But sticking with redistricting here, what does the process look like over the next year? And how are the Katie Fahey's of the world and all the fair districts and these types of groups, what does this coming year look like for them as far as how they're keeping an eye on what's happening, holding people's feet to the fire, those kinds of things?
David Daley
Absolutely. We draw these new state legislative and congressional lines every 10 years after the census. And one of the things that has slowed this process down here in early 2021, is that the census numbers have not yet been reported to the States. The earliest This is now likely to happen is mid to end of February, there's a lot of people that think April or May is really much more likely, every state has its own process. As soon as the census numbers arrive. And in a lot of states, they begin with hearings, and with the crafting of a bill that include these new maps, really, very soon thereafter. I think that what you have our citizens in many of these states who have already organized themselves in North Carolina, and Texas, and Ohio, in Michigan, that they're going to be watching. And they're going to be in the middle of these public hearings. And they're going to be testifying as to what a community of interest is, they're going to be keeping this issue alive in the news media. And they're going to be using this software to design maps that show really what kind of fairness is possible. And I don't think that these lawmakers are going to be able to craft maps as they did in 2011 in secret, and pretend that they're the only maps possible they're going to be seen in public, they're going to be tested by citizens. And there's going to be much more of a spotlight on redistricting than perhaps there ever has been.
Jenna Spinelle
You write in Unrigged that, in some ways, the notion of democracy itself is is at stake here, depending on the way that some of these things go. Some of these places could look far less small d democratic than they have in the past. Can you talk more about what you mean by that?
David Daley
These district lines that are drawn are really the building blocks of our democracy, these legislative districts and congressional districts. When you draw those lines, oftentimes, you have the power to select winners and losers. And because of the polarization in our politics, and the geographic scattering of Democrats in cities, and Republicans more efficiently spread across suburbs and rural America, the way that you craft these districts can lock a party into power for years and years, even when they win fewer votes. In so many states, the lines that were drawn in 2011 for state legislatures, they locked the party that drew them in power for 10 years. And after the 2018 election, there were 59 million Americans, almost one in five of us that lived in a state in which one or both chambers of the state legislature were controlled by the party that won fewer votes. And that is deeply antithetical to the notion of a representative Democracy, our state legislature is supposed to be the office that is most responsive to the people. And when these lines are drawn in a way that one party controls them, no matter what, it pushes our politics to the extreme, because when a general election is not competitive, it means that the primary election, usually held in the middle of the summer, it's low turnout, only the most extreme members of the party, left or right, tend to participate. And you get a very different kind of politics, you get a different kinds of politicians. And they become insulated from the people. And then policy drifts out to extremes. So these maps are really the starting point for everything that happens in a state for a decade.
Jenna Spinelle
The other thing that it's kind of going through the back of my mind. Now this is this is a much more cynical thought. But I wonder if to the point of having fair maps will lead to different types of candidates being elected to state legislators, I wonder if we're kind of already too far down a different path there. If a lot of what we read about polarization all of these things, if that's already too far gone, that even if the maps are more fair, it might not necessarily lead to a change in in the types of candidates that are running or are getting into office and state legislatures.
David Daley
The story that I think is just most powerful when it comes to showing the impact of these district lines is a story from North Carolina. And this is the story of Mark Meadows. In 2010. When republicans take control of the state legislature in North Carolina, they decided that they want to draw a congressional map that, as the chairman of the committee says at the time, explicitly creates a 10 republican seats and three democratic seats in a state that is probably narrowly republican but a pretty close in pretty competitive statewide. They do this by going to the western part of the state, where there had been a swing district that had gone back and forth throughout the 2000s. They had elected a Republican in 2000 2002 after 911 by 2006, as public dissatisfaction sours over the Gulf War and the economy. It Alexa democrat a conservative democrat named Heath Shuler, who many football fans will remember as a quarterback with the Washington football team. And Schuler even holds the state in 2010. But when he sees the map that is drawn in 2011, he takes one look and retires immediately, because what republicans did is they crack the city of Asheville in half, they drew a line through the most liberal kind of hippie vegan City. In his district. They put half of the voters into a new district and half of the voters into Patrick McHenry, his district, another conservative Republican. And as a result, they created two republican districts down there simply by how they drew that line. Mark Meadows is a sandwich shop owner and he runs for the seat. It's a wide open republican primary six, seven candidates, Meadows runs essentially as a hard right birther who you can find the video online of him saying, I'm going to send Barack Obama back to Kenya or wherever it is that he comes from. Meadows wins this primary with about 37 38% of the vote, goes on to Washington wins the safe because it has been drawn to elect the most extreme winner of a primary. He goes to Washington, he files the parliamentary emotion that knocks john bainer. A republican out of the speaker's chair, he he essentially forces the government shutdown of 2013. He then goes and becomes Donald Trump's chief of staff. He's the most powerful man in Washington in many ways. And he's created by redistricting. If those districts are drawn in a different way. We don't have the Mark Meadows and his ilk in office. And I think what happened with the gerrymandering of this last decade is that it inflicted a Frankenstein's monster on our politics that the folks who drew these lines, I think they wanted to lock in a partisan advantage for themselves. But I don't think that they understood that what they were really doing was pushing our politics to such an angry, resentful place and is they're coming back from it. It's going to be Very difficult, but it has to start with fixing what was broken. And what was broken is the very idea of fair elections and representation itself.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, it's like, be careful what you wish for a type of scenario or something like that. So your book unrigged is the story of these individuals and these groups and volunteers across the country that really take action and put boots on the ground on not just gerrymandering, but lots of other issues. And I'm wondering if these individual stories I think are great and certainly inspiring. But do you have any sense of what kind of the wrath of this are? I mean, how many Katie Fey he is, or Luke Melville's, are the other folks out there. I mean, are these people needles in haystacks? Or are there lots more people who are doing this work that just maybe don't quite get the spotlight that they have?
David Daley
In 2018, you had five states that did initiatives or constitutional amendments on redistricting. So along with JT Fahy in Michigan, you had Utah, Ohio, Colorado and Missouri, in 2020, you saw this pass in Virginia, and there were efforts in Oklahoma, and Arkansas and Oregon and out in the Dakotas. And many of those guns stymied either by COVID. And the pandemic, which made it more difficult to get out and collect signatures, or by state political establishments that filed lawsuits and essentially knocked them off of the ballot. So certainly, this is not easy. Luke mayville is another amazing story in Idaho where they have, you know, it's certainly a deep red state, but look at a group called reclaim Idaho were able to organize and win expansion of Medicaid there in 2018. And that happened as well in Nebraska, and other states that we think of as red states. And I think that when you look at Luke, when you look at Katie, when you look at Desmond Mead, and the folks in Florida, who won a restoration of voting rights for the 1.4 million people in that state who had a felony conviction in their past, and it served their time, but had essentially lost the franchise forever, due to a law that dated back to the Jim Crow era, there has been such powerful movements that have been created in states by real individuals who have hopped off of Twitter and you know, that turned off MSNBC, and got to work knocking on doors trying to persuade their neighbors, and these have been trans partisan, the victory in Florida. And I know it's been undone in many ways by a gerrymandered legislature and will be decided now in the courts. But when you look at the magnificence of what does when made a meal balls were able to win in Florida in 2018. This is a year in which voters elect a republican governor, a Republican US Senator, it's not a blue wave here in Florida in 2018. But 64% of voters they're signed on and said, Yes, we think someone who has made a mistake and served his or her time ought to get their voice and civic affairs back. That's an incredibly powerful thing. It shows that these issues are not democratic issues or republican issues, but deeply American questions of fairness and people wanting their government to work and their elections to be fair, and I think that there's a lot of hope that we can take from that.
Jenna Spinelle
So what becomes of these movements these Coalition's now? I mean, in some places the ballot measures have passed and there it seems, maybe at least on its face, that their work is done. Are they looking to move on to another issue? Or are there still other parts of things like Medicare expansion, like redistricting, like felony disenfranchisement in Florida? Are there other parts of those issues that they're focusing on? Are they looking to move their energies elsewhere?
David Daley
I think you've got your finger on the most important question, which has been that all of these initiatives, while they have won and been successful, have run into opposition from legislators in the states and politicians who feel like they're insulated from the public and who have tried to block them or slow them down in the actual enactment phase. So one of the really important lessons that I think people have learned is that a victory is never complete, and it's never over. Not on election day, in many times, not ever a victory has to be continually defended. And I mean, Dr. King talked about an arc of the moral universe that is long, but bends toward justice. And I think what we all have to realize is that arc doesn't bend by itself that we've all got to have our hands on it if we want to pull it in the direction of fairness and more democracy, and that you can't simply put your hand on the arc on election day, if we want to live in a multiracial democracy that upholds the ideals that we want this country to live up to. All of us have to have our hands on that arc at all times.
Jenna Spinelle
So all of the or at least most of the the kind of success stories we've been talking about here have come as a result of the ballot initiative process. Do you know of any parallels similar stories that happened through a more traditional legislative means?
David Daley
I think the victory in Virginia is one that everyone can look at and feel really good about, because there is no independent initiative possibility on redistricting there. And voters had to organize and lobby their legislators in order to win the independent commission, that will go into effect in 2021. They had to convince lawmakers that this was important that enough of voters cared. They had to convince Republicans who control the legislature in 2019, and also the democrats who won the legislature and control that in 2020, to pass the exact same amendment two years in a row so that it could then go to voters for approval. This is the first time that a state legislature has voluntarily turned over this much control over the drawing of their lines, really in the country's history. And it was only made possible because citizens organized and showed up in Richmond and prove to lawmakers that this mattered to them. can that happen every place? Not necessarily. You all have been fighting and trying just as hard when Carol kuno homes, a fair districts. A pa group has been doing this in Harrisburg, I know and working so effectively. And they had a wonderful bill that I believe had more co sponsors than any legislation in the last session of the legislature there. It's not proof that success is possible. But it's certainly a roadmap that shows that sometimes it can be sure.
Jenna Spinelle
So as we kind of bring things to a close your day, what else are you watching what other stories are on your radar? As you look out to the rest of this year?
David Daley
I think a really important question is going to be the question of citizen voting age population. And whether or not state legislators can draw district lines that are based not on total population, which has been the longtime standard for state legislatures, and is the constitutional standard for Congress and for congressional districts, or whether they can use numbers based on citizens over the age of 18. And this would have really a major effect. If state legislatures made this move, you could see states like Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Georgia, for example, where this has been talked about, and it would essentially shift political power and make districts older, whiter, more conservative and more rural. And this will, I think, has the possibility to become the real legislative battleground, and legal battleground of the next decade, whether or not the states have that right. Whether it is a violation of one person, one vote, and it has the potential really to remake and redefine the essence of representation.
Jenna Spinelle
That is a big story. I feel like we can have a whole other conversation. I know that you will be doing your due diligence in your reporting on it over the next months and years, and maybe what we'll have you back on sometime down the road to talk about it. But in the meantime, thank you so much for joining us today.
David Daley
Always a pleasure. Thank you for this podcast. It's so wonderful. Thanks.
Candis Watts Smith
That was a great interview. As always with Jenna and I learned a lot from Dave, he helps me thinking about some important things. And one of the things that stood out to me and in connection to what we were talking about before, Chris, is about how in this next round of fights that are inevitable to come up around gerrymandering, the battlefield is gonna look different, in part because of cases like Shelby County, which happened in 2013, and Ruto, which happened in 2019, where the Supreme Court essentially said, partisan gerrymandering is. Well, basically they said, We are not going to say anything about it, because that is a political matter. And that is non justiciable is that the word And so again, I don't want to get on my high horse about how the supreme court does not always produce democratic outcomes. But essentially, that's what we have. And that's where we are. So there's gonna be a necessity to bring cases so that we have more democracy, not less that more people can participate. But there are going to be some barriers at various levels of government and different aspects. Right. The judiciary, the federal government, the legislative branches, there's going to be challenges all over the place.
Chris Beem
Yeah, because the Supreme Court decided that this issue, either. Well, I mean, I don't want to get down into the weeds of the decision. But basically, they gave no meaningful guidance on this issue. And so there's no final determining legal authority to say, this is okay. And this is it.
Candis Watts Smith
I find it fascinating that essentially, we're burning votes, right, that you can gerrymander on partisan lines, and essentially just tell a whole group of people that your votes don't matter. And we can predict that pretty easily about who's going to be the winner. Right. So this is where people say gerrymandering allows political representatives to choose their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives. The other part, which I find just so frustrating, and infuriating, is that we often like to pretend that American politics is not that race and racism aren't core components, right? American politics, and certainly the party system. So it's not only that African Americans, black folks tend to be democrats and Latinos tend to be Democrats, but also that the Republican Party tends to be white. So to try to make a distinction. Yeah, of course, there's a distinction between partisanship and race, but either way, gerrymandering on either serves to dilute the votes of a large proportion of citizens, and it's wrong. It's wrong on either way. And so I find it, I just don't understand. Actually, I do understand because john roberts hates voting.
Chris Beem
Well, he does. I mean, I don't disagree with you. But here is the problem I have, and I don't know what to do with it. When you're redrawing districts, there are a series of objectives of values of outcomes that you're looking for. And once you've done it, once you kind of tried your hand at it, you quickly come to realize that it is as much art as science, there is no obvious straightforward Oh, well, this is clearly what should happen, right? In terms of drawing lines, because you're balancing things like constituency groups and geography and population sizes and fairness, right. And to get all these things to go together, is difficult, even for the most fair minded of us,
Candis Watts Smith
Maybe I'm saying the same thing, but in a different way, Chris, is that we do live in a highly segregated country. And so one of the things that we're seeing the reasons why we're seeing Donald Duck slapping Goofy, or whatever, or we're seeing these crazy districts is because the effort is to either pack districts where you're just putting a whole bunch of people who are just alike, and a district and then you're wasting their votes, because then they're going to be surrounded by people who are totally different. And when their representative gets to the legislator, they are not going to have any place to have coalition or you're slicing them, you're cracking them. So that Yeah, you know that we tend to have racially segregated neighborhoods and then you crack them so that they have no power at all. So there is a fine balance. And the fact of the matter is, is that if people can use all of the big data and census data and every magazine that you've ever read and all of the websites to figure out what you do to create districts that are completely unfair, then that means that you can use that same information to create good, fair, competitive districts, I think that we have to keep our mind that there is a possibility of reform, there's a possibility of doing good and right. And that's what Dave's book shows, too. He provides plenty of models where people are just using technology and social media for good that they're getting their boots on the ground, to bring people together.
Chris Beem
But my argument would be and this is actually something that Dave says in his book is that he thinks that gerrymandering is one aspect of this broader trend in American society where red states are becoming less democratic, and blue states are becoming more democratic. And that's obviously democratic with a small d. And you see this manifested in a number of ways. I mean, every time I hear somebody say, we're a republic, not a democracy, I want to hit something. But it is now kind of a knee jerk response. I mean, they're just this denigration of the idea and the ideal of democracy among many people on the right side of American politics. And then on the other side, you see a party, a democratic party that sees its future, in expanding the electorate, bringing more people in giving more power to people of color. So their inclination is to make things easier, more access, etc. It's too easy to use that brush. But I am hard pressed to see how it's wrong. How it's incorrect.
Candis Watts Smith
Yeah, I mean, I'm from North Carolina, that's a place where the demographics are changing. And republicans in that place, have really entrenched power. I can't remember after which election that they made these efforts to reduce the power of the governor, which was a Democrat.
Chris Beem
So where I'm from did the same thing.
Candis Watts Smith
Okay. So, Chris, I think you know, what, I want to leave you on the dark side. And I think that these issues are really tough. They're really hard in the moment that we're living in now makes it seem like things are going to get worse, and maybe they will. But I think that what Dave's book shows us and gives models for is that there are different ways that we can do this, and that there are citizens that are really pushing for and being successful, in some cases, for producing and requiring enforcing demanding change, and they're getting that.
Chris Beem
No, I think that's absolutely correct. And I also think that there are anti, or at least, significantly less democratic elements of the American political system. We've talked about them, the electoral college and Senate, the two senators from each state, it makes a wildly undemocratic representation of the popular well, but there is something there are mechanisms by which you can change the way that district lines are drawn in your state. And there are ways to make them more fair. And so if you're looking for a lever, and issue around which to focus your energy, days book does a really good job of showing you why this is the issue. And really, given that the census Now is the time. So anyway, I mean, I think that's a pretty good note to end on. Thanks to Dave daily. And Jennifer really good interview. And thanks, Candace for a yet another really interesting conversation. I'm Chris Beem.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith. Thanks for listening.