A sordid history of gerrymandering

We’ve come a long way from the country’s first gerrymander, which involved two future presidents vying for election to the first Congress.

James Madison, the future No. 4, faced off against James Monroe, the future No. 5, in a district crafted by Patrick Henry specifically to be tough for Madison to win.

Henry, a committed anti-federalist, wanted to deny Madison any role in Congress. He hoped to wound the new government system, which he despised.

Madison pulled out a victory and went on to shepherd the Bill of Rights through Congress.

Henry operated at the bluntest level, adding whole counties to Virginia’s 5th Congressional District and deciding which ones to leave out.

As technology improves, gerrymandering has gained precision to the point that it has become a dark science, reducing people to their basest political, racial or cultural beings, often in the service of a political party’s power.

That was how Illinois lawmakers produced “the earmuff,” one of the more extreme gerrymanders of modern times.

Its map resembles a crab claw or two ear coverings connected by a single hinge. At one point, it is so narrow that it traces down to an interstate, all in service of trying to forge a majority-Hispanic seat in the Chicago area.

Just after the turn of the century, Arizona lawmakers drew a district that tracks the waters of the Colorado River for 40 miles as it flows through the Grand Canyon. It gained no voters but served as an electoral bridge before stretching out to encompass the Hopi reservation.

That district was a nod to centuries-old animosity between the Hopi and the Navajo, whose reservation surrounds the Hopi lands. This animosity forced the mapmakers to get creative to ensure that the two reservations had different representatives in Congress.

For former Rep. Steve Israel, a New Yorker who ran the Democrats’ House campaign committee from 2011 to 2015, the most extreme gerrymander became known as “Goofy kicking Donald Duck.”

That was Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District, which looked like a 3-year-old was handed a crayon and told to get to it. With a little power of suggestion, the result looked like the squiggly outlines of the two Disney cartoon characters, with Donald’s rear being kicked by Goofy’s thin leg.

Gerrymandering is headline news this month as Texas Republicans plot to redraw the state’s congressional lines. They hope to slice and dice districts currently held by Democrats and win more Republican seats.

Democratic-majority states such as California, Illinois and New York have vowed to retaliate.

Former Rep. Tom Davis, who ran the National Republican Congressional Committee from 1999 to 2003, couldn’t help but laugh at New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s indignation over Texas’ redistricting. Just last year, she led her own state redrawing, netting three extra seats for her party in November’s elections.

“Hochul is the height of hypocrisy,” Mr. Davis told The Washington Times.

In redistricting, he said, the only language is power, though who is holding it isn’t always clear.

He recalled the redistricting after the 2000 census, when California was trending Democratic and Republicans were preparing for a wipeout from the state’s House map.

Instead, some incumbent Democrats approached him and said they were worried about losing their seats to the up-and-coming Hispanic population surge. They offered a deal: If he would support protecting the current Democrats, they would help keep the Republican seats largely the same.

Instead of a net loss of eight or more seats, he was looking at a wash.

He rushed to sign on, fended off some local Republicans who griped, and accepted the accolades when Republicans went on to expand their House majority by eight seats in the 2002 elections, midterm contests when the president’s party is usually expected to lose seats.

Republicans maintained all 20 seats, albeit with a couple of changes in locations and members.

“This was all done under [Democratic leader] Dick Gephardt’s nose, with Nancy Pelosi’s acquiescence,” Mr. Davis said. “For me, the NRCC chairman, going into a midterm cycle with my party in the White House, to take those 20 seats off the table was like manna from heaven.”

The lesson from that, he said, is that party coalitions are constantly shifting and competing interests are at play. The interests of incumbents can upend a party’s plans to maximize voting power.

Mr. Davis was part of his own horse-trading with his Northern Virginia seat.

His district originally included Reston, a heavily Democratic area. Still, he foisted it off onto Rep. James P. Moran, a Democrat who represented the inner suburbs centered on Arlington and Alexandria.

“Your best friend in redistricting is the guy from the other party that’s next door to you,” Mr. Davis said. “He can pick up what you don’t need and what he does want.”

Alex Keena, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies gerrymandering, said Texas’ effort this year is unique: It appears to be the first time a president has so “openly and candidly” prodded a state to act in the middle of a 10-year redistricting cycle.

He said it’s also politically risky for the Republican Party.

If the state swings slightly to the left, the map could look grim for Republicans who spread themselves thin.

“Squeezing in even more bias in the map means that GOP incumbents will win by a smaller margin of victory, which makes them vulnerable if there is a Democratic ‘wave’ election in the future,” he said.

That happened to Georgia Democrats in the 1990s when they gerrymandered the map to protect incumbents. Once the state began to shift to the right, the map helped Republicans dominate.

Mr. Keena said political scientists dub that “dummymandering.”

A close cousin is what might be called “backfiremandering,” when lawmakers draw districts to remove a particular politician only to have the person return more powerful than the ousters could have imagined.

J. Miles Coleman at the University of Virginia Center for Politics pointed to the Virginia Democrats’ map after the 1990 census. Rep. George Allen, a Republican, was forced into a battle against a better-positioned Democratic colleague, Rep. Lewis Payne.

Mr. Allen decided not to run and, with time on his hands, turned his attention to the governor’s mansion. He went on to crush his Democratic opponent in the 1993 election and ignite a Republican takeover of the state.

Mr. Coleman said Texas Democrats, who have fled the state to try to block redistricting, used to be masters of the gerrymander.

In the 1990s, they drew the maps to their advantage to the point that they held 19 of the state’s 30 House seats after the 1994 election despite losing the popular vote by 14 percentage points.