How Democrats Tied Their Own Hands on Redistricting

The Atlantic

19 hours ago

As New York Governor Kathy Hochul denounced the GOP's aggressive attempt to gerrymander Democrats into political oblivion this week, she lamented her party's built-in disadvantage. 'I'm tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,' she told reporters.
As political metaphors go, it's not a bad one. Hochul omitted a key detail, however: Democrats provided the rope themselves. For more than a decade, they've tried to be the party of good government on redistricting. But Democrats' support for letting independent commissions draw legislative maps has cost them seats in key blue states, and their push to ban gerrymandering nationwide flopped in the courts and in Congress.
Now that Republicans, at the behest of President Donald Trump, are moving quickly to redraw district lines in Texas and elsewhere in a bid to lock in their tenuous House majority, Democrats want to match them seat for seat in the states that they control. But the knots they've tied are hard to undo.
To boost the GOP's chances of winning an additional five House seats in Texas next year, all Governor Greg Abbott had to do was call the state's deeply conservative legislature back to Austin for an emergency session to enact new congressional maps. The proposed changes carve up Democratic seats in Texas's blue urban centers of Dallas, Houston, and Austin, as well as two seats along the U.S.-Mexico border, where Republicans are betting they can retain support among Latino voters who have moved right during the Trump era. Democratic lawmakers are trying to block the move by leaving the state and denying Republicans a required quorum in the legislature.
By comparison, Democrats face a much longer and more arduous process to do the same in California and New York. Voters in both states would have to approve constitutional amendments to repeal or circumvent the nonpartisan redistricting commissions that Democrats helped enact. In California, Democrats hope to pass legislation this month that would put the question to voters this November. If the amendment is approved, the legislature could implement the new districts for the 2026 election. In New York, the legislature must pass the change in two separate sessions, meaning that a newly gerrymandered congressional map could not take effect until 2028 at the earliest.
By then, some Democrats fear it may be too late. Republicans want to gain seats through mid-decade redistricting not only in Texas but in GOP-controlled states such as Florida, Missouri, Ohio, and Indiana. The GOP goal is to secure enough seats to withstand an electoral backlash to Trump's presidency in next year's midterms.
That imbalance has caused Democrats to reassess—and in some cases, abandon altogether—their support for rules they long championed as essential to maintaining a fair playing field on which both parties could compete. 'What is at stake here is nothing less than the potential for permanent one-party control of the House of Representatives, and the threat of that to our democracy absolutely dwarfs any unfortunately quaint notions about the value of independent redistricting,' Micah Lasher, a New York State assembly member who represents Manhattan's Upper West Side, told me. It's a reversal for Lasher, a former Hochul aide who won office last year while endorsing independent redistricting.
Lasher is the author of legislation that would allow New York to redraw its congressional maps in the middle of a decade if another state does so first. Lawmakers there could consider the bill when they return to Albany in January. The proposal is limited in scope: It does not throw out the state's decennial post-Census redistricting process and merely creates an exception allowing New York to respond to other states' moves. This is partly due to worries that voters might reject a more aggressive plan; in 2021, New York Democrats and election reformers failed to win approval of a series of statewide referenda aimed at expanding access to voting. (Republicans don't face the same concerns, because voters in red states won't have a direct say in the maps they draw.)
Proposals like Lasher's have won the support of Democrats who previously led the fight to ban gerrymandering. On Monday, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee became the first party organization to formally call for Democrats to redraw congressional maps in states where they have the power to do so. 'We're looking at a country where everything has changed, quite frankly, and the things that you thought could not happen happen,' Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the majority leader of the New York state Senate and the chair of DLCC's board, told me.
Even as they pursued a national ban on gerrymandering, Democrats never forswore the practice entirely. Indeed, their ability to respond to Republicans now is constrained in part by the fact that district lines in blue states such as Illinois and Maryland are already skewed heavily in their favor. (Democrats control the legislature and governorships of far fewer states than do Republicans, which further limits their power to match the GOP in gerrymandering.)
Yet Republicans' recent moves, aided by a Supreme Court ruling that sidelined federal courts from striking down purely partisan (as opposed to racial) gerrymanders, represent an escalation that has stunned Democrats. I asked Stewart-Cousins whether the party's push to take politics out of redistricting, which has succeeded in protecting one out of five congressional seats from the threat of gerrymandering, was misguided. 'It wasn't a mistake,' she insisted, casting the party's new posture more as a temporary shift than a permanent reorientation.
Lasher, however, wasn't so sure. 'It is fair to say that Democrats in New York and around the country vastly underestimated the willingness of the Republican Party to cross every line, break every norm, and do so with enormous speed,' he said. 'We're in a period of adjustment. We better adjust really damn quickly.'