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Friday, November 10, 2006

Law - "How Republicans' Gerrymandering Efforts May Have Backfired"

The free version of the Wall Street Journal has a very interesting story today headed "Redistricting: Home to Roost." Here are just a few quotes:

WASHINGTON -- Gerrymandering was supposed to cement Republican control of the House of Representatives, offering incumbents a wall of re-election protection even as public opinion turned sharply against them. Instead, the party's strategy of recrafting district boundaries may have backfired, contributing to the defeats of several lawmakers and the party's fall from power.

The reason: Republican leaders may have overreached and created so many Republican-leaning districts that they spread their core supporters too thinly. That left their incumbents vulnerable to the type of backlash from traditionally Republican-leaning independent voters that unfolded this week.

That helps to explain why three of four Republican incumbents in the Philadelphia area were beaten this week, while the remaining incumbent hung on by just a few thousand votes. In Florida, meanwhile, state lawmakers had shifted some Republican voters from the secure district of former Rep. Mark Foley in an attempt to shore up the re-election chances of Rep. Clay Shaw without risking the Foley seat. Instead, Democrats took both. In Texas, former Majority Leader Tom DeLay's decision to transfer thousands of stalwart Republican voters from his district in 2004 to boost a neighboring seat heightened the burden on the write-in candidate trying to hold Mr. DeLay's seat. She lost it.

"The trade-off in redistricting is between safety and maximizing the numbers," says Alan I. Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. "You can't do both." * * *

The drive to maximize seats was seen by Republicans as a matter of survival. Democrats regained ground every cycle after the 1994 Republican takeover. By 2000, the Republican majority had shrunk to 221 seats from 231 in 1994. Democrats, aligned with the chamber's one independent, needed just six seats to retake control in 2002.

So Mr. DeLay and House Speaker Dennis Hastert turned to their allies in the statehouses to redraw congressional district boundaries to erase Democratic seats and give Republicans new ones. "We wish to encourage you in these efforts, as they play a crucial role in maintaining a Republican majority," the two leaders wrote in a letter to Pennsylvania lawmakers.

There are three weapons to employ in redistricting. "Packing" involves concentrating a group of voters, such as African-Americans, in one district. "Cracking" means splitting up a group of voters to diminish their influence. "Pairing" forces two incumbents into the same district. Pennsylvania lawmakers used them all.

Here is a list of earlier ILB entries referencing "redistricting."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 10, 2006 10:22 AM
Posted to General Law Related