Your weekly source for analysis and insight from experts at the Brennan Center for Justice
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It’s redistricting season, and legislatures are using new census data to redraw electoral maps. What we’ve seen so far isn’t pretty. Eighteen states have drawn districts already. Eight of them are heavily gerrymandered, in some cases even more aggressively than in 2010. Gerrymandering is hardly new. Both parties do it when they have a chance. But this year, there are new, disturbing twists that will make the gerrymandering more damaging and enduring than before.
As my colleague Michael Li notes
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, the surgical quality of the 2020 gerrymanders, aided by increasingly sophisticated data and mapping technology, will badly skew representation. In North Carolina, Republicans passed a congressional map that would eliminate 2 of 5 Democratic seats and that could give the GOP an 11 to 3 seat advantage in a strong GOP election cycle — all in a state with a narrowly divided electorate. New maps in Tennessee and Missouri could eliminate longtime Democratic seats in Nashville and Kansas City. In Illinois, Democrats passed a wildly contorted new congressional map that gives the party a 14 to 3 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation. New York could be next. In the game of rigging maps, though, Republicans have a stark advantage: Democrats control the drawing of just 75 districts compared to the 187 that Republicans control.
Speaking of Republicans, the legislatures they control are working to carve up suburban districts. These areas, once Republican strongholds, have purpled in recent election cycles. To counteract this trend, legislatures are cutting up the suburbs and joining them with overwhelmingly Republican rural districts.
In addition to the regional biases, it’s plain that the new maps target voters of color. Consider Texas. People of color accounted for nearly all of the state’s population growth, but the redrawn Texas map will deliver precisely zero new opportunities for minority representation in Congress. In fact, the Texas Legislature may even have found a way to reduce Latino voting power by shifting a significant block of them into an overwhelmingly conservative rural district.
The Supreme Court created a legal loophole that opens the door to these racially motivated gerrymanders. While racial gerrymandering is illegal, the 2019 Rucho decision announced that courts can’t police partisan gerrymandering. So political operatives simply say that blatantly racial — even racist — map drawing is just good old partisan politics. (We’ll be fighting to make sure they can’t get away with that.)
The Texas map represents another disturbing trend: a dramatic decrease in competitive seats. Even in a Democratic “blue wave” election, only one congressional seat currently held by a Republican would be competitive in the Lone Star State. (The 2010 map contained as many as six competitive seats.) Indeed, Democrats would have to win an absurd 60 percent of the statewide vote to capture an additional seat in Congress.
A democracy in which huge swings in voter preference produce marginal changes in representation, in which entire communities are targeted and disempowered with no legal protection, is an unhealthy democracy.
Only Congress has the power to fix this mess. The Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, currently pending in the Senate, would ensure fair representation for all Americans. All we need is 50 senators and a little bit of political courage.
Democracy
The Big Lie and Other Threats to Democracy
A new report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance has for the first time listed the United States as a “backsliding” democracy. Responding to the alarming new study, Wendy Weiser warned how the Big Lie has fueled efforts to not only cast doubt on election results, but to sabotage the electoral process itself. “Now there are legislators that are exacerbating the problem by passing laws that will facilitate a hyper-partisan takeover of election administration,” she said. CNN
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Justice
Looking Abroad for Examples of Humane Prisons
It’s all too easy to think of the United States’s dehumanizing prison system as the only way to go about incarceration — but it’s not. In the newest essay in the Brennan Center’s Punitive Excess series
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, Ram Subramanian reflects on several study trips he organized to introduce American criminal justice officials to the corrections systems of several countries in Northern Europe. As states and localities try new systems that center human dignity in prison practices, it’s essential to look to international contemporaries that have pioneered an ethos and mission to support and reform individuals that end up behind bars. “Putting the brakes on American punitive excess can and should be accomplished by centering human dignity as a foundational, organizing principle of the nation’s corrections system,” he writes. READ MORE
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Fellows
Learning Across Generations this Holiday Season
With Thanksgiving in the rearview mirror and more holidays ahead, many families may be wincing at the prospect of yet another dinner table fight over politics, public health, or climate change. Rather than brace for another fracas, Ted Johnson argues that the time has come for families to embrace open-minded and intergenerational civic learning and to recognize that we can all have something to teach one another, regardless of age. “Intergenerational interactions — like those that occur during holiday gatherings — present an opportunity for the type of engagement and deliberation necessary to temper the political polarization presently roiling the nation,” he writes. Read more
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Coming Up
VIRTUAL EVENT: TONIGHT, Blueprint for Democracy and the Courts, Judicial Recusal & Ethics
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Wednesday, December 1, 7–8 p.m. ET
Our democracy rests on the premise that justice prevails in our courts. When bias and corruption undermine justice, public trust in the judiciary system erodes. Join us for a discussion on the influence of special interests and the need for robust judicial recusal and disqualification standards, featuring panelists Billy Corriher, writer for Facing South and Governing; former judge Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Law Judicial Institute; Douglas Keith, counsel in the Brennan Center Democracy Program; and former Wisconsin circuit court judge Sarah O'Brien. RSVP today
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Produced in partnership with Common Cause Ohio and the Ohio Fair Courts Alliance
VIRTUAL EVENT: American Promise Connect: The People’s Constitution
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Monday, December 6, 7–8 p.m. ET
American Promise advocates for a constitutional amendment on campaign finance reform. This event will feature John Kowal and Wilfred Codrington III discussing the possibilities and their new book, The People’s Constitution: 200 Years, 27 Amendments, and the Promise of a More Perfect Union
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. RSVP today
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Produced in partnership with American Promise
Want to keep up with Brennan Center Live events? Subscribe to the events newsletter.
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News
Elizabeth Howard on risks to election officials // ABC NEWS
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Michael Li on GOP gerrymandering in swing states // NEW YORK TIMES
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Faiza Patel on issues with Facebook’s blacklist // INTERCEPT
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Jasleen Singh on the growing divide for voting rights // HUFFPOST
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Michael Waldman on the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict and Ahmaud Arbery case // ASSOCIATED PRESS
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