Where does congressional representation come from?

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2022

Charles Blow takes the (Florida) Fifth: We had planned to discuss an intriguing aspect of congressional districting this week. 

We refer to the use of gerrymandering, or something exactly like it, to increase the number of congressional representatives who are black or Hispanic.

From the liberal / progressive / Democratic Party standpoint, the attempt to increase minority membership in the House can be a bit of a double-edged sword:

Districts may be deliberately drawn in such a way as to make them "majority minority." On the bright side, this may increase the numbers of black or Hispanic pols who get elected to the House, but it may also help the GOP maintain an overall advantage in that body.

For an example of the way this can work, consider the state of Florida's Fifth congressional district. In the recent column in which he didn't call Ron DeSantis a racist, Charles Blow cited part of that district's recent history:

BLOW (9/28/22): In 2010, Florida voters, by a strong majority, approved a constitutional amendment rejecting gerrymandering. The amendment made clear that “districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or to diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice.”

Yet Florida’s Republican-led Legislature produced a gerrymandered map anyway. In 2015, the state Supreme Court struck down much of the Legislature’s proposed map, and demanded that eight House districts be redrawn. Among them was the Fifth District, which at the time snaked up the state from Orlando to Jacksonville. The redrawn map allowed Black voters to elect four Black representatives.

In Blow's account, we're told that the Republican legislature produced a gerrymandered map in 2015 (or perhaps before). 

In 2015, the Florida Supreme Court demanded that eight districts be redrawn, including the Fifth District. According to Blow, after the gerrymandering was eliminated, the redrawn map "allowed Black voters to elect four Black representatives."

It almost sounded like the initial gerrymandering had been done to deprive black Floridians of the ability to elect black representatives. It almost sounded like the elimination of the gerrymandering opened the door to the election of four black representatives.

At least in the case of the Fifth District, that isn't what actually happened. Here's the way the leading authority on that district reports the relevant history:

As defined by the state legislature in 2013 (which lasted until 2017), the 5th district ran from Jacksonville to Orlando; it was considered one of the most-gerrymandered congressional districts in the country.

[...]

On July 11, 2014, Florida Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis ruled that this district, along with the neighboring District 10, had been drawn to favor the Republican Party by packing black Democratic voters into District 5. On August 1, Judge Lewis gave Florida's state legislature an Aug. 15 deadline to submit new congressional maps for those two districts.

As Blow's fuzzy passage suggested, the Fifth District was one of the gerrymandered districts which was ordered redrawn. Indeed, according to the leading authority, "it was considered one of the most-gerrymandered congressional districts in the country."

Judge Lewis found that the district had been gerrymandered for the specific purpose of creating a majority-black district, increasing the likelihood that a black Congressional rep would be elected.

That said, Judge Lewis also found that the district had been gerrymandered to favor the Republican Party! By packing so many black voters into one absurdly-shaped district, the Republican legislature had made it easier for the GOP to win elections in the neighboring districts from which those voters had been drawn.

For the record: 

Judge Lewis was black. He'd been named to the bench by a Democratic governor, Lawton Chiles. It was the black nominee of a Democratic governor who made the findings described above—and the story continues from there:

5th District Representative Corrine Brown issued a statement blasting Lewis's decision on the district map as "seriously flawed," and Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Marcia Fudge sent a sharply worded letter to Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel complaining about the party’s support for the lawsuit challenging Florida's district maps.

Brown said that "we will go all the way to the United States Supreme Court, dealing with making sure that African Americans are not disenfranchised." Florida House Redistricting Chairman Richard Corcoran, a Republican, said that "consideration of political data is legally required" to ensure that district boundaries would not be so shifted as to not allow African-Americans a chance to elect representatives of their choice.

On appeal, the Florida Supreme Court approved a redrawn version of District 5 on December 2, 2015. That plan went into effect for the 2016 elections. The new district had a dramatically different shape than its predecessor. It now stretched in an east-west configuration along the Georgia border from downtown Jacksonville to Tallahassee. However, it was no less Democratic than its predecessor, as noted in the Florida Supreme Court's final opinion:

"With a black share of registered Democrats of 66.1%, the black candidate of choice is likely to win a contested Democratic primary, and with a Democratic registration advantage of 61.1% to 23.0% over Republicans, the Democratic candidate is likely to win the general election."

In the face of black Democratic power, the district remained heavily gerrymandered, even after the original gerrymandered map was redrawn. This is a type of "gerrymandering" in which Dems have often participated.

The key point here is this:

When a district is packed with black voters to the extent described, that means that neighboring districts will be easier for Republicans to win. From the Democratic Party perspective, the reconfigured Fifth District was full of "wasted votes."

We were struck by the disingenuity of Blow's column on an array of points. Among these problem areas, we thought he gave an absurdly cloudy picture of the way this kind of districting works.

Gerrymandering works various ways within our hopeless political system. In the matter under discussion, Florida's Republican legislature had created a heavily-black District 5 to serve the GOP's overall interests. 

Such tradeoffs have been general within congressional districting. Real life is not a fairy tale, despite the things you increasingly hear from the corporate players who are paid to play the role of blue tribe journalistic leaders.

Tomorrow: Some numbers