The Roots of All Evil: So... what's gerrymandering?

In this episode, I explain how representation of citizens works in the U.S. Government, how redistricting follows the census, what gerrymandering is, where it came from, why it's so bad in general, where things stand currently, and how things are only likely to get worse from here.  And I discuss what we can do from here to hopefully make things better instead.  All that in under 25 minutes... so we're not wasting any time here!

Here's a link to a picture of the original gerrymandered district:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Two-Hundred-Year-Statistical-History-of-the-Ansolabehere-Palmer/55136e3e5db308cca4a5611001d65cb89510227f/figure/1

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, this is Anthony Convariati and welcome to Get to the Point. So as I was saying in episode three, an underlying goal of my interview was to get some outside perspective on the most important issues to cover and going forward with this podcast. As you know, I'm trying to identify the biggest problems in politics today, analyze them, and then offer some judgments about them, including proposing solutions. And certainly the biggest issue brought up in the interview was gerrymandering. So let me start with an explanation of what gerrymandering is and how it works. The people of the United States are represented within the US federal government by the aptly named U.S. House of Representatives, which we'll refer to as the House. The number of representatives in the House originally grew as the population grew, but eventually it got so big that they just decided to cap the size at four hundred and thirty five representatives and three electors for DC. So now we have four hundred and thirty-eight representatives representing roughly three hundred thirty million people. When you count the one hundred senators as well, you get that total of five hundred and thirty eight electoral votes that you see in presidential elections. So currently each representative speaks and votes for about seven hundred and fifty thousand people. A term for a representative is two years. So everyone eligible to vote in your district gets to weigh in on election day in early November of every even year, and the representative who is elected or reelected is then sworn in for their two-year term just about two months later on january third. In theory, it's very democratic, since representatives are chosen explicitly by majority vote and chosen again quite often. If you don't like your representative, you get to weigh in again in the next election, and everyone eligible to vote gets the same one vote. In practice, however, it doesn't work nearly as well as it should. The first thing to note is that representatives are allocated per state, not uniformly. California has roughly thirty seven million citizens, and from twenty twelve to twenty twenty it had fifty-three representatives. New York has about nineteen million citizens, and its most recently had twenty seven representatives. Now the situations in these two cases work out relatively well since you get a ratio of about 704,000 and 719,000 people per representative, respectively. However, when you have a small state, you have to divide up its full population by a whole number. You can have two or three, say, but you can't have 2.5. And when you have a really small state, you still have to have one representative to cover it. So the ratios actually vary a lot. For example, Delaware has about 901,000 people, and Montana has about nine hundred forty four thousand people. Each of those states just get one representative for that comparatively high number of people. On the flip side, Rhode Island has two representatives that cover about five hundred twenty-eight thousand people each, and Wyoming only has about five hundred and sixty eight thousand people total, so they get one representative. Yes, it would be much more fair if we didn't set up representation boundaries by state lines, but the examples I gave are the extreme cases, and for the most part it works pretty well. Now, one important thing to understand about the United States of America is that quote unquote a state is a fundamentally important thing, actually more so than an individual human is. You can see this in a presidential election when sometimes a candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the election because they won the electoral vote. Now, every ten years, on the year that's a multiple of ten, we have a census. Based on the relative population increases and decreases from state to state, the four hundred and thirty five representatives get reapportioned across the fifty states as fairly as possible. So for example, that fifty-three in California and that twenty-seven in New York could each easily go up or down by one or two. After twenty twenty, the fifty-three in California went down to fifty-two, and the twenty-seven in New York went down to twenty-six. So this is the type of thing you would usually expect to see, plus or minus one state to state after a given census. Now, after the census and before the next election, which is two years later, the state's legislature gets to decide how to divide up the land area of the state in a way such that each state representative gets just about exactly the same number of constituents. It doesn't matter if the state's total number of representatives changes it or not. The legislature gets to redraw the map at that point every decade. Of course, if you only have one representative, there's no dividing things up. But if you have more than one, congratulations, you get to draw up a nice new map. The proper way to do it is to work it out so you'll get a pretty fair result. If you have a state that's say 58% Democrats, 38% Republicans, and 4% independents, and you have ten districts, then you want to divide the state up in a way where you'll get about six Democratic representatives and about four Republican representatives. That's pretty close to fifty-eight, thirty-eight. So it works reasonably well. Maybe you'll end up with seven and three or five and five sometimes, but that's fine. The idea is that people running for the House should be trying to best cater to as many of their constituents as possible, regardless of party affiliation. This approach leads to representatives being more open to making compromises, since a lot of the country is pretty centrist and doesn't want to aggressively push for anything too extreme in either direction. This is a pretty harmonious governing style and hopefully works toward the greater good for everyone overall. Okay, history lesson time. Now back in eighteen twelve, the Massachusetts state legislature was controlled by the Democratic Republican Party, which eventually became the Democratic Party of today. And they were drawing up maps like these. Actually, okay, they were drawing up maps for Massachusetts state senators, but it's the same idea. And they decided to divide up an area around Boston in a really weird way. Picture Boston as having a diamond shape. They made this one district that covered the bottom of the diamond, then thinned down as you went northeast, thickened again around the left corner of the diamond, and stretched out thinly over past the top and back down towards the right corner a bit. In fact, the top right part looked a little bit like a head, and the bottom middle looked like it had feet with claws. And well, pretty soon you had a cartoonist drawing a picture of it, embellished a bit to make it look like a mythological salamander. I'll try to put a link to a picture of this in the show notes. So the governor of Massachusetts at the time was a man named Elbridge Gary, spelled G E R R Y, who later became vice president, actually. He wasn't big on this practice personally, but he did still sign the bill into law. So between Governor Gary and the ridiculous salamander shape, well, you can see how people started calling that a Garrymander or a gerrymander, and started calling the whole practice of making weirdly shaped districts like that gerrymandering. When the eighteen twelve election happened, Governor Gary lost his seat to a member of the Federalist Party, and the Federalists also won control of the Massachusetts House. But the Democratic Republicans kept firm control over the state Senate. In other words, the gerrymandering strategy worked big time. So why does this work? Well, say you get to draw up a district in your state and you want your party to win it. If you have a general idea of how people in different areas are going to vote, then you can set it up in a way that your district is about let's say sixty percent your guys and forty percent the other guys. And you'll almost definitely win that seat. If your state's about sixty forty to begin with, you can just do that for all your districts and you'll either win all of them or darn close to that. Now things are more evenly divided or you want to play a little safer, another thing you can do is try to pack one district completely full of people who are going to vote for the other guy. By sacrificing that one district, you get the ratio of the whole rest of the state to be more in your favor. So there's an art to how many of those quote unquote 100% for the other guys' districts you want to sacrifice to get your ratios up for your party and all the other districts in your state. If you're not careful, you could be in a situation where you thought you had some districts with about a 55-45 advantage, but let's say your opponent's party has a really good year and you end up with some 49-51s or so and you lose all those districts. It's important to note that a significantly large percentage of the population usually doesn't vote at all. But sometimes a bunch of non voters on one side will get really fired up and vote anyway. That's why you see these numbers change around a lot like that. Like I said, there's an art to it, but the state map is your canvas, and you get to paint the black lines around all the red and blue on it however you want to. Sure, sometimes lawsuits and courts get involved if they think they can prove that you're racially discriminating against a group of people with your maps, but usually your party's quite happy to help you out, and you can get your maps with your ridiculous gerrymandering signed into law just fine. So why is gerrymandering one of the roots of all evil? Well, we know that it's a strategy that a party in power in a given state can use to make it much easier for their people to get elected and re-elected, and to make it much harder for their opponents to win or hold on to any seats. One description of it that I've seen is that it allows politicians to choose their voters rather than letting voters choose their politicians. Now, let's say that you have an example district that's gerrymandered for the Republicans. Let's also say that this is somewhere in the heart of gun rights country. You have a Republican seat now. The primary comes up and it ends up being widely publicized that the incumbent has an A minus rating from the NRA. Well, as it turns out, another person competes against the incumbent in this primary, and it's widely publicized that this challenger has an A plus rating from the NRA. Well, only registered Republicans vote in a Republican primary, so unsurprisingly the challenger wins the primary. Now, let's say that a moderate Democrat has survived the primaries on their side. Maybe someone who actually has a B or C plus rating from the NRA, more in line with the average voter in the district. And let's say that this Democratic candidate is outstanding in all sorts of other ways. Let's say they're running on some great policies that would benefit many, many poor people who really need the help. In a fairly laid out district, that Democrat may have been quite likely to win, and Congress would have added one more reasonable person who probably would have been good at understanding both sides and compromising. But this is a gerrymander district, so the Republican is going to win. And the Republican who wins it is going to be the craziest, most extreme Republican that the primary voters could find. If you don't like that example, just flip the parties in it and replace gun rights with, I don't know, let's say abortion rights. Or picture it happening in your own district. Say you live in Deep Creek, Maryland, and you're very conservative just like your nearby friends who live in West Virginia. You're up there in the upper left peninsula of the state. An election comes up and you vote for the guy who won the Republican nomination to represent you, but he loses. In fact, the Republican loses the battle for that seat every time. Why? Because the entire city of Rockville, right outside DC, is also in your district. And there are so many Democrats in the Rockville area that they're just always going to outvote you. Meanwhile, if you had a lot of the other rural areas of the state in your district instead, you'd be getting a Republican representative most of the time. In fact, Maryland would probably have two or three Republican representatives out of eight instead of what it has right now, which is just one. Not that the Republicans are any better in many of the states they control, far from it. In the twenty ten midterm elections, Republicans regained a lot of power, and they ended up doing a massive amount of gerrymandering when they redrew congressional districts just after that. So of course, those same maps were in place in the twenty eighteen midterm elections when the Democrats did very well. It was actually the best midterm election they had since the one in 1974, just after Nixon resigned, for perspective. In House races, the Democrats won the popular vote by a 7.1% margin. They gained forty seats. According to one study afterwards by the Associated Press, if the districts had been drawn fairly, the Democrats would have picked up roughly sixteen more seats, so fifty six rather than forty. Though some ballot initiatives have been passed across the country in recent years to restrict gerrymandering, the Democrats are doing their part to escalate the gerrymandering arms race too. It's a problem on both sides as it continues today. Texas gained two House seats after the twenty twenty census due very much to a growth in the population of Latinos and blacks and Asians, but they ended up creating two more safe Republican seats, which definitely doesn't represent most blacks and probably doesn't represent Latinos and regions especially well either. But you also see states like Illinois and New York drawing up maps now that give Democrats a huge advantage. I think it's safe to say that the situation is getting worse rather than better. So where do things go from here? Let's say that every time we have a census and need to redraw the maps, whichever party is in power in the state legislature pushes the gerrymander concept further. Also, like I described before, the people who are actually elected to these positions are more and more radical, or to be blunt, crazier and crazier, perhaps. Analysis methods only improve, and computer programs like in gerrymander only become more and more widely available and easily accessible. When your opponent gets to a point where you're in a huge wave in your favor and that's you forty seats rather than fifty-six, your only real choice if you value retaining power at all is to respond in kind. Hence the escalating gerrymandering arms race. So eventually you don't really have any competitive districts at all. Barely any seats change hands at all every two years. In many cases, the occupant of the seat is an incumbent who's been there for decades and is firmly in the pocket of all sorts of lobbyists. They don't really have any motivation to actually do anything for the people in their district since it's not like they're ever getting voted out anyway. And in other cases, you get someone in there who's never even finished high school, has insanely uninformed beliefs conditioned by the most radical videos on the internet you can find, and really has no idea what they're doing at all when it comes to lawmaking. Basically, the limit ultimately converges to the point where the number of Republicans and Democrats in the House becomes virtually constant. So the House becomes much less likely to change hands after any given election. If this stable point ends up being right near the center, then control will still flip back and forth over time and it won't get too bad. If it stabilizes to a point where the Republicans maintain control no matter what, then income inequality is only going to continue to increase, social programs will not be implemented for disadvantaged groups, and barely anything is going to get done to fight climate change until it's too late. Some of this will happen simply because the Republicans like to just not pass bills to change the status quo, which they can easily do whenever they hold the House. But the proactive, hyperpartisan things they do push because they have crazier and grazier people among their ranks, will only move forward when the Senate and presidency are also under Republican control. Oh, and every Democratic president in power will be impeached at least once or twice per term, no matter what they do or don't do. If the House stabilizes to a point where the Democrats maintain control no matter what, expect all sorts of investigations to keep going. There's always some Republican malfeasance to look into whether it's actually fire or just smoke. Also, they'll keep passing massive spending bills until they have attempted to do something about every inequality and slight known demand. A lot of these will be pet projects that sound extremely progressive but are very impractical since they help so few people. Also, whenever the government spends more, even if they can successfully extract tax money from the rich and from corporations to pay for it, the money is going to somebody, and those somebodies are generally government contractors. And if more money goes into the system and into the hands of people who are actually spending it, then more inflation is going to occur. So some people's lives will improve greatly enough, then inflation won't be an issue for them. But a great many poor people who aren't earning any of this money will only be increasingly worse off. Sure, some of them will have free daycare or tax credits or better health insurance, but even all that won't be enough. If it stabilizes to a point where it can actually still flip back and forth, we'll get a seesaw effect where the worst impulses of both parties will be indulged part of the time. Hopefully, each party will undo the bad stuff the previous party did the last time. But if the Democrats have social programs that require massive taxes on the rich, and the Republicans make it a point to lower taxes on the rich, then the national debt's only going to have to go up faster. And it that's a taking time bomb. As long as investors still have faith in the credit of the United States, they'll still invest in us. But if things get so crazy that it really looks like we have no idea what we're doing anymore, things could fall apart very quickly. The international economy uses the US dollar as its reserve currency, so there's a great deal of incentive to help prop up the dollar no matter what, and it's quite difficult to switch the world's reserve currency to something else. However, if the world at large decides to switch the reserve currency to, say, the Euro, then nothing is holding up the US dollar anymore. And that'll cause hyperinflation. Do you know what the best way to pay off one hundred trillion dollars is? Inflate price is so much that one hundred trillion dollars only buys you what's currently one trillion dollars worth of stuff. Then a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas will be more like four hundred dollars rather than four dollars, and the dollar store is going to have to rename itself Franklin's. Bottom line, we have two political parties in this country, and our population at large is increasingly dividing up more and more between them. People often only want to watch, listen to, or read news that blames the same people or groups for everything that they already want to blame anyway. Social media algorithms increasingly lead you down rabbit holes into territory that's more and more of an isolated echo chamber. The fact that an increasing percentage of our conversations are among people who we meet online, it's incredibly easy to see these other people as abstractions and stereotypes rather than as fully formed human beings with lots of nuances like we ourselves are. So that doesn't help things. Gerrymandering screws up voting itself in a way that parallels this. People believe stranger and stranger things, and they can more and more comfortably elect and re-elect representatives that fit these beliefs as well. Just like how you can find like-minded people on the internet for whatever fringe beliefs you have. People are rearranging your voting districts around you so that if your favorite party is the one in control of your straight legislature, you won't have to worry about those pesky moderates or voters from the other party turning on your representative and voting them out. So do we have any potential solutions for this problem where we can avoid mutually assured destruction? Well, actually yes, and we've already started trying them. One so reloading about gerrymandering is that mathematically speaking, at any point in time you're going to find yourself in a situation where its existence helps one party more than it helps the other party. Thus, the party that helps less has some motivation to push for the practice to be outlawed. Since the Republicans raised the stakes after 2010, the Democrats were able to take the moral high ground on the issue, and they did. The Democrats proposed something called the Freedom to Vote Act in the twenty nineteen legislative session, which is a very extensive bill that included outlawing gerrymandering among its provisions. But the Senate was controlled by Republicans then, so it wasn't even brought up for a vote. And then they proposed it again in the 2021 session. The second time they made a bigger deal out of it by making it their very first bill of the session, HR one, House of Representatives won. That didn't pass the Senate, but there was also another attempt with a bill called the Freedom to Vote Act, which technically got enough votes, but was then filibustered by the Republicans in the Senate in early 2022. So some serious attempts have been made to address gerrymandering, but only forty eight out of the fifty Democratic standard are united enough to make even a small modification to the filibuster to actually let the bill be voted on. On the statewide front, a number of ballot initiatives have been introduced to ban gerrymandering in specific states and have passed. On the legal front, many gerrymander maps have been challenged on the grounds that they racially discriminate against minority voters, and some judicial rulings from these have improved things as well. So overall, we're in a situation with gerrymandering where it's continuing to get worse, but there is some hope, and there will always be one party or the other who is disadvantaged by it, who may very well try to do something about it if they feel that it's in their best interest to get rid of it overall. In theory, you only need to have two more Democratic senators when there's a time when Democrats have control of that House and the presidency together in order to pull this off, or if the Republicans become massively disadvantaged by a gerrymandary at some point in the future, then in theory you could get enough Republicans together to pass a law that bans it. So it is possible that eventually the side who is losing if they can somehow actually regain control will put an end to it. However, the very nature of gerrymandering puts you in a situation where the side who is most advantaged by it is also the side that is most interested in keeping it around and is also the side that is most likely to have and maintain power. So in a sense, it's a war to see who can gerrymander more and faster and do so in a way that they can keep the power they have and really maintain and lock in power for the long term. Now, usually the parties adapt with changing demographics to better represent about 50% of the population, and they tend to go back and forth in power. But with gerrymandering, a party can lock into its own issues and its own belief structure and not even change them and not even try to appeal to a wider base, but still maintain power because it has just enough to hold on to it. I mentioned the filibuster a little bit earlier. That is a problem that the Senate has that, like we said last episode, is analogous to gerrymandering as being another root of all evil, even though it's different. But now's not the time to cover that. So what's my ruling on this? My ruling is we have to just keep doing what we can. We need to support efforts to get gerrymandering stopped wherever they come from, however they show up. We need to think if there's anything we can do to creatively legally challenge it, perhaps. We need to think in terms of seeing if there are weak points where a gerrymandered district can be flipped because it wasn't gerrymandered carefully enough, and therefore the state can be more carefully balanced. There are some things we can do, but it's a huge problem. And the point at which we had the greatest hope for dealing with it was when we had the Freedom to Vote Act, but we didn't quite have enough Democrats supporting it to get it passed. So as it stands now, gerrymandering is here, and they're putting new maps together, and everybody's gerrymandering more than they were before, and the situation is not improving. So I like to have a verdict at the end of these. I like to be able to say, here's my verdict, and what do you think? I guess the only verdict I can say this time is gerrymandering is bad. Gerrymandering is one of the roots of all evil. It reflects a brinksmanship and a facet of human nature where a person sides with a lesser entity rather than the greater good and supports that lesser entity first and foremost and perhaps even maliciously screws over their opponent. Maybe we can find more ways to encourage people to be more moderate. Maybe there are ways to find more compromise. I think it's obvious that social media pushing us into our rabbit holes and helping us find our own echo chambers and being able to customize the news to be what we want to hear rather than anything objectively true that may or may not be good news to us is a problem. We need to acknowledge that as a problem. And maybe there will be a trend of some sort where people stop wanting only news that they like and instead would rather just have something more objectively true. Maybe that's what we need. Maybe we just need people to be more moderate, and people who are more moderate to be more politically active, and people who see extremism in any form when any party gets too crazy on one side or the other for people to see that and rein it in. So that's where we stand with this. That's the situation. Those are my thoughts on it. It's more a problem than a solution, yes. But there's only so much I can say.