RRepublicans believe they have a great chance of gaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022, which will require a swing of about six seats to nominate Nancy Pelosi as speaker and derail Joe Biden’s agenda.
To help themselves to the top, they are promoting laws on the oppression of voters in almost every state, in the hope of limiting the Democratic turnout.
But Republicans are also preparing another, probably more powerful tool, which experts say will allow them to take control of the House without winning a single vote after their 2020 count, or to win a single Democratic voter. block.
The instrument is redistribution – the redesign of congressional boundaries undertaken once every ten years – and Republicans have unilateral control over it in a critical number of states.
“The public sentiment in 2020 benefited the Democrats, and the Democrats retained control of the House of Representatives,” said Samuel Wang, a professor of neuroscience and director of the Princeton Gerry Manning project. ‘[But] due to redistribution and redistribution, these factors would be enough to cause a change in the control of the House, even if public opinion did not change at all. ”
While redistribution of politicians in some states provides an opportunity to redesign political boundaries, redistribution means that there are more districts to play with. After each U.S. census, each of the 50 states gets a share of the 435 Seats based on population. States gain or lose seats in the process.
Due to population growth, Republican states, including Texas, Florida and North Carolina, are expected to get seats before 2022, although the breakdown has not been completed, with the 2020 census delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Republican-controlled lawmakers will have the power to push the new districts almost anywhere they see fit, with a freedom they would not have enjoyed only ten years ago, thanks to some controversial Supreme Court rulings.
“The threat of extreme gerrymandering is more acute than it has ever been due to the combination of the failure of supervision by the courts and the Department of Justice, coupled with new supercomputer powers,” said Josh Silver, director of Represent.us. The non-partisan group released a report this month warning that dozens of states “have an extreme or major threat to their constituencies being set up for the next decade”.
“Honestly,” Silver said, “what we see around gerrymandering by the authoritarian wing of the Republican Party is part of the Putin-led democracy they are promoting – the combination of voter oppression and gerrymandering.”
Rules governing redistribution vary from state to state. The process may include state legislators acting alone, governors or independent commissions. Cards are intended for ten years, although they are subject to legal challenges that could lead to them being discarded.
It is expected that the new Republican attempts at gerrymandering will focus on urban areas in southern states with an excessive number of colored voters, meaning that voters are unlikely to be allowed to vote anymore.
In Texas, mapmakers could try to add districts to the growing populations of Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth without increasing the minority and Democratic voters responsible for the growth. In Florida, they could add Republican voters to a growing Democratic district north of Orlando. In North Carolina, where the Democratic governor is locked out of the process, Republican cardmakers could potentially try to add a district to the Democratic leaning research triangle, in a way that more Republicans prefer.
Republicans could also try to pay back colors in Atlanta that pushed Biden to a victory and fueled the defeat of two Republican senators in January in special elections in Georgia by cracking and packing voters in new districts.
“Republicans can only take one seat by rearranging the line around black people and other Democrats in the Atlanta area,” Wang said.
Racial treatment – or the use of race as the main criterion for drawing district lines, as opposed to party identification or another sign – remains vulnerable to federal court challenges, as opposed to judicial action along biased lines, which has been declared “out of reach of the federal courts ”by Supreme Court Justice John Roberts in 2019.
A separate ruling by Roberts’ court in Shelby County against Holder from 2013 is considered a contribution to the likelihood of gerrymandering. The ruling released provinces with an acute history of racial discrimination against voters due to federal oversight imposed by the 1965 Voting Act. This means that in 2021, for the first time in 50 years, some southern legislators will draw district boundaries without such oversight.
‘Much more national awareness’
Potential legal challenges aside, the success of Republican cardmakers is not self-evident. The turnout in future elections – higher or lower – could jeopardize expectations based on historical patterns. The biased mix of voters in any district can change unpredictably. And if you pull out a card to fold out an extra seat, the occupants can be vulnerable.
Public awareness of such anti-democratic efforts has increased, Wang said, since a Republican effort in 2010 called Redmap has garnered dozens of “extra” seats.
“There’s a lot more national awareness of driving,” Wang said. “And civic groups are now much more in the mix than they were ten years ago.”
Silver said the threat of haste has doubled the urgency of advancing voting rights legislation that has passed the U.S. House but is stuck in the Senate.
“This is why we need to pass the For the People Act, which is federal legislation that would create independent commissions in all 50 countries with one stroke of the pen, end voter oppression and restore representative democracy in the United States,” he said.
“We must stop rumbling, otherwise there will be no representative democracy in America, period – only predetermined and symbolic election results.”