Julie DelegalOn Nov. 4, Republicans seized control of the U.S. Senate from Democrats, and not a single bullet was fired. In a world still filled with civil wars and religiously motivated slaughter, conducting peaceful elections is no small thing.
It turns out that the GOP didn’t need any bullets, though. Instead, they used their bankrolled brainchild, born in 2010: Project REDMAP. An initiative to re-draw the election maps to benefit GOP candidates during the once-per-decade redistricting process required of each state legislature, Project REDMAP has achieved its objective.
President Barack Obama acknowledged that the Republicans had “a good night” last Tuesday. Some observers assume that the GOP’s good night means that U.S. voters are moving to the right. In light of 20th century history, however, and some very close statewide contests, we can’t assume a right turn at all — not among the voters, anyway.
Floridians can take a couple of things from this election: voters are more polarized than ever, and, seeing the strife and the Red Illusion, young progressives may be losing hope.
The Midterm Backlash
Going into the election, Republicans already had the House — but that didn’t stop them from gaining another 13 seats. They needed to add six more to take control of the Senate; they added seven.
One interpretation of these events is that voters have put one party in control of Congress and the other the White House. We’ve certainly done it before. In fact, as Jonathan Hobratsch writes in his blog for the Huffington Post, bifurcation has become an American political tradition.
Every president who has served two full terms since Dwight Eisenhower has experienced what Hobratsch calls “The Second Term Midterm Presidential Curse.” Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George Bush ’43 each suffered at the hands of the majority party during the last two years of his term.
As my political friends from both sides of the aisle like to point out, our form of government abhors quick policy shifts. We’re built for slow, incremental change. So are the 2014 elections merely a swing of the pendulum rightward?
The Lopsided Pendulum
Yes, the elections represent a swing to the right –in governance if not in citizen beliefs. But it may not be momentary. By skillfully redrawing election maps since the late 1990s, the Republicans have rigged the game.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Charlie Crist’s 1.1 percent loss to Gov. Rick Scott statewide, can look far different from election results in the state’s subdivisions. That’s because state boundaries — which define U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races — were drawn a long time ago.
Congressional districts, however, along with state House and Senate districts, get drawn every 10 years by whichever party is in power. Enter Project REDMAP, in 2010.
According to Ari Berman, writing for The Nation, Project REDMAP was bankrolled by “six- and seven-figure donations from the likes of the US Chamber of Commerce, tobacco companies Altria and Reynolds American, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the Karl Rove–founded American Crossroads and the American Justice Partnership, a conservative legal group that has been a partner of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a state-based conservative advocacy group.”
REDMAP’s precursor was the genius of RNC attorney Ben Ginsberg, who sought to make white Democrats extinct. He called his effort “Project Ratfuck.”
Here’s how it works: When, as in Florida, lawmakers carve Democrats into a single minority access district, they’re necessarily carving Democrats out of surrounding districts. The process is known as “bleaching” Democrats out of contiguous districts. (“Bleaching” is a race-based term that I didn’t coin.)
With bleaching, it becomes mathematically impossible to have truly competitive general elections for the U.S. House and the state houses. The district lines are strategically placed to deliver elections in the primary, when our most ideological voters come out to vote.
Berman, quoting a civil rights attorney, explains the racist motives behind the GOP’s gerrymandering:
“What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.”
— from “How the GOP is Resegregating the South,” January 31, 2012
Republican-drawn boundaries on the congressional map explain why Rep. Corrine Brown won Congressional District 5 this year 65 percent to 35 percent.
But here’s the flipside: Since lawmakers went out of their way to pack Democrats into her district, it follows that eight of the nine U.S. House districts that touch Brown’s would be “bleached” just enough to leave Republican supermajorities. In those eight districts, Republicans won easily.
The congressional map explains why a state that helped elect Barack Obama twice has elected only 10 Democrats to 27 possible seats in Congress.
A cursory look at congressional contests as a whole, courtesy of the New York Times, reveals that narrow victories are the exception, not the rule. By far, the wins are lopsided, on both sides of the aisle.
North Carolina, Texas, and California win the “Most Lopsided Congressional Victories” award. All of North Carolina’s U.S. House Democrats, for example, won by more than 70 percent of the vote in their districts. Texas candidates from both parties had winning percentages in the 80s and 90s.
The irony is that even as Republicans have filed lawsuits to overturn remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act, they’re using it to justify how they draw their districts. The Voting Rights Act requires, in part, the maintenance of minority access districts (MADs) to ensure that black voters don’t get shut out of the electoral process. But while black voting-age percentages as low as 45 percent may suffice to elect candidates that blacks prefer, the GOP has pumped up those numbers to guarantee easy wins in MADs, and, as we’ve seen, landslide GOP wins in neighboring “bleached” districts.
In Florida this year, the League of Women Voters and other advocacy groups litigated their Fair Districts lawsuit in front of Leon County Judge Terry Lewis. Lewis found that Brown’s district and all those contiguous to it were drawn to give Republicans an unfair advantage, which violates the Fair Districts provision of the Florida Constitution.
The Palm Beach Post reports that the League and other plaintiffs are asking the Florida Supreme Court to invalidate the plan that Lewis approved. They they contend that it makes only minor adjustments in north and central Florida congressional districts. The state’s high court is slated to hear the case on March 4.
Inexcusable Loss
The Democrats have lots of reasons for failing to win the Governor’s Mansion this year — 16 of which are outlined by Peter Schorsch in his blog, SaintPetersblog.
I’ll add two more: A ground game that fell short, and a failure to draw the curtain back on the GOP’s illusion of hegemony.
There’s no excuse for not getting out the vote. Schorsch observes that Crist should have embraced Obama once again, particularly in Northeast Florida.
But here’s the real tragedy: the GOP didn’t draw the boundaries of countywide and statewide elections. They’re among the few truly competitive, winnable races for Democrats. And statewide, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 455,406 registered voters.
Democrats failed, inexcusably, to deliver the memo that Crist could, indeed, win. We have failed to point out that Republicans don’t outnumber us, despite the count in Congress or the Legislature. There is no rising Red Tide.
It’s the maps, y’all.
Meanwhile, young progressive voters see the results of Project REDMAP and wonder why they should bother voting at all. Crist led in all demographics except people over 65.
If Democrats want to put any progressives into the candidate pipeline, they’re going to have to get the under-40 crowd to the polls in 2015. Next year’s municipal elections are our last dress rehearsal for the big show in 2016 — the one for which Jeb Bush and the Florida GOP machine have been rehearsing for a decade and a half.
Julie Delegal, a University of Florida alumna, is a contributor for Folio Weekly, Jacksonville’s alternative weekly, and writes for the family business, Delegal Law Offices. She lives in Jacksonville. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
