This is Part 2 of an exclusively Occupy.com series analyzing the 2022 midterm elections, read part one.
The so-called “red wave” that so many pundits assumed would sweep the country on the night of the 2022 midterm elections never materialized. In the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats have lost approximately 20 House seats as of this writing, though ballots are still being counted in some close House races. And in the U.S. Senate, Democrats not only maintained control but may actually increase their lead if Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) prevails in Georgia’s December 6 Senate runoff election.
For perspective, since World War II, the incumbent president’s party has lost seats in the US House of Representatives in all but two midterm elections, with the average loss amounting to 29 seats. In the 1994 midterms, President Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party lost 53 seats. In the 2010 midterms, President Barack Obama oversaw a loss of 63 House Seats. President Donald Trump lost 40 Republican-controlled House seats in 2018. Comparatively, President Biden may have overseen the smallest midterm election loss of any president since 1978, when Democrats lost just 15 House seats. And this is despite Biden contending with the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war, which triggered record-high inflation and gas prices.
In fact, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say the only reason Republicans will control the U.S. House of Representatives for the next two years is because of Republican redistricting maps and Republican judges.
How Republicans gave themselves control of the House
In 2018, Ohio voters overwhelmingly passed Issue 1 with 74% of voters in favor. Issue 1 was a ballot measure aimed at eliminating partisan gerrymandering by requiring the process be a bipartisan endeavor. For redistricting maps to be approved in Ohio, there would now have to be a three-fifths vote in favor of new maps in both the Ohio House of Representatives and the Ohio Senate, including support from at least half of the members of the minority party.
However, Ohio Republicans simply ignored the will of the people in the 2020 redistricting process. Even though the Ohio Supreme Court repeatedly struck down the GOP-controlled legislature’s Congressional maps for being illegally gerrymandered, Republican lawmakers waited out the clock leading up to the 2022 midterms after submitting court-ordered revisions that were still gerrymandered in the GOP’s favor. This forced Ohioans to vote this November under illegal maps deemed too favorable to Republicans. As of this writing, Republicans hold 12 of 16 House seats in Ohio.
Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor vowed to campaign against gerrymandering after she leaves office at the end of 2022. Notably, O’Connor referred to the 2018 anti-gerrymandering initiative as a failure, having “no discernable or enforceable effect to curb gerrymandering in Ohio.”
But Ohio’s nakedly corrupt gerrymandering of Congressional districts is likely to continue, given that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) effectively greenlit gerrymandering in an early 2022 ruling. As Mark Joseph Stern wrote in Slate, a 5-4 SCOTUS ruling in February quietly gutted the portion of the Voting Rights Act pertaining to racial gerrymandering:
For decades, the VRA prohibited states from drawing congressional maps that dilute the votes of racial minorities by depriving them of a fair opportunity to elect their preferred representatives. Sensing an ally in the judiciary, red states brazenly violated this principle during the latest round of redistricting. In states like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas, Republican lawmakers packed racial minorities into as few districts as possible. These lawmakers then carved up remaining minority communities, distributing them throughout majority-white districts.
One clear-cut example of this is Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, which the state obtained after an explosion of population growth mostly in the majority-Black, heavily Democratic Atlanta metropolitan area. According to the New York Times, Georgia Republicans carried out a process known as “cracking,” in which population centers are cracked apart and distributed into multiple Congressional districts in order to dilute their voting power. Prior to the SCOTUS’ ruling undoing the ban on racial gerrymandering, cracking to dilute Black voting power was an illegal practice.
Thanks to the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature, the majority-Black Atlanta suburbs of Powder Springs and Austell were grouped into the 14th district, which is currently represented by QAnon adherent Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia). Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index (PVI), which measures how likely a given district is to vote for a particular party, rates the district as R+27, making it one of the reddest districts in the country. For perspective, Wyoming’s lone at-large district has an R+25 PVI rating.
Moving towards non-partisan redistricting
The most obvious solution to partisan gerrymandering is to take the ability to redraw maps away from politicians and transition toward a nonpartisan redistricting process not controlled by elected officials. According to Ballotpedia, seven states have such processes in place – Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan, and Washington state all use independent commissions to redraw their maps after each Census.
Having an independent commission to draw Congressional maps is a relatively new development, with Arizona becoming the first state to do so after a 2015 SCOTUS decision in the Arizona State Legislature vs. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission case. In 2000, Arizona voters approved a ballot initiative to create a nonpartisan commission for drawing new Congressional maps as a means of fighting gerrymandering, taking that power away from the state legislature. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in writing the majority opinion, wrote that Arizona “turned to the initiative to curb the practice of gerrymandering and, thereby, to ensure that Members of Congress would have ‘an habitual recollection of their dependence on the people.’”
“In so acting, Arizona voters sought to restore ‘the core principle of republican government,’ namely, ‘that the voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around,’” Ginsburg wrote.
The states with nonpartisan commissions tend to have Congressional delegations that are more representative of how those states vote in presidential elections. Arizona and Colorado, which are viewed as purple states, have a 5-4 split and a 4-3 split, respectively, with Democrats having the slight majority. Michigan, another purple state, has seven Republicans and seven Democrats in Congress. Likewise, states that overwhelmingly favor one party over another have that same sentiment reflected in their Congressional delegations. Hawaii’s two Congressional districts are both (PDF link) represented by Democrats. Idaho’s two Congressional districts are both represented by Republicans. Washington state voters have seven Democrats and three Republicans representing them in Congress. And California’s 53 Congressional districts are represented by 42 Democrats and 11 Republicans.
Actually getting to the point where every state has nonpartisan redistricting is another matter. While implementing a nonpartisan redistricting commission via a statewide ballot referendum may be the most direct method, there are 22 states with no ballot referendum process, according to Ballotpedia. In those states, passing such reforms would come down to state legislatures. And even if the process is changed, it may require a federal judiciary friendly to democracy to enforce it. Ultimately, change this significant will require what it always has: Voting in large numbers when there’s an election, and organizing in between elections. With diligent efforts, what seems impossible today can be inevitable tomorrow.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
-Margaret Mead
Carl Gibson is a freelance journalist and columnist whose work has been published in CNN, The Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, Barron’s, Business Insider, The Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Twitter @crgibs.
