The above picture, a screenshot from last night's Rachel Maddow Show, captures a good deal of what's wrong with democracy, American style--that is, "democracy." The ubiquitous state map divided into counties shaded red and blue is of considerable interest but does not expose the chicanery of Republican mapmakers. So instead of considering the result by county, let's contemplate how Alabamians voted in their state's US senate election Tuesday within the seven congressional districts created by the Republican controlled Alabama state legislature.
Democrat Doug Jones won the statewide vote by about 21,000 ballots, or 1.5 percent of all ballots cast. Yet he was outpolled by the Republican, Roy Moore, in six of the seven congressional districts. This means that had the election been for the House of Representatives, and all Jones supporters had voted for the Democratic candidate in their district, and all Moore supporters for the Republican candidate, the outcome would have been six Republican representatives and one Democrat--an overwhelmingly Republican state delegation headed to Washington despite the fact that more Alabamians voted for a Democrat.
The Democrats couldn't do any worse, right? If you divide the state into sevenths, and Democrats win the aggregate vote by 1 or 2 percent, it's impossible to lose within all seven subdivisions. You have to win somewhere. If the lines were drawn at random, you'd expect to win four seats, only three if you were quite unlucky and maybe five if the sun shone on you. But, in Alabama, an evenly divided electorate--or, to be precise, an electorate narrowly favoring the Dems--yields a 6 to 1 Republican advantage in actual representation in "the people's House."
Of course, Alabama district boundaries were not drawn at random. They were drawn by Republican legislators determined to achieve a certain result, one favorable to Republicans. It's very obvious that they've succeeded in this endeavor. There's an apt way of describing what's going on that shows how ass-backwards things are. In theory, voters on Election Day choose who will represent them. But what actually happens is that, long before Election Day, politicians choose the voters who will select members of their own party to go to Washington.
The only congressional district Jones carried was the 7th, which he won by 57 percent (78-21). In the gerrymandering trade, this is what's called "packing"--you pack the other party's voters into as few districts as possible so that you can win everywhere else. In the case of Alabama, "everywhere else" is literally everywhere. The below map, unlike Rachel's above, shows the relationship between district boundaries and population centers. Notice the 7th district's narrow arm that extends northeasterly and artificially in order to include Birmingham, the largest city in the state and home to reliably Democratic voters. This isthmus cuts Tuscaloosa County in two before widening dramatically to take in a huge chunk of the majority African-American counties of west central Alabama. The remaining challenge for Republican cartography is Montgomery, second biggest city in the state and even more Democratic than Birmingham. The solution is the distorted hourglass that is the state's 2nd congressional district, with Montgomery located at the narrowest point. To the north and especially to the south, the 2nd district flares out and takes in a bulbous swatch of rural southeastern Alabama. It takes a lot of redneck acres to make sure that residents of Montgomery will never get the Democratic representative they always vote for!
With the current map, there is obviously no chance of anything changing in Alabama at the congressional level. Roy Moore, a laughably ridiculous dumpster fire of a candidate, won six of the seven congressional districts against a decent, smart, accomplished Democrat who, by the way, got more votes statewide. And Alabama's gerrymandering is within a standard deviation of the national mean. According to polling, Democrats currently enjoy an 11-point advantage on the congressional generic ballot question. If that result came to pass in next year's midterm election, it still might not be enough for the Dems to win a majority of seats in the House of Representatives. Running even in Alabama translates into a national landslide. But it doesn't matter how well Democrats do in Alabama: they will represent one of the state's seven congressional districts until there is either electoral reform or the Republicans lose control of the state legislature in a census year. Many other states are arranged similarly.
Comments