How US elections turned into a battle of dirty tricks
Gerrymandering – the practice of designing a legislative district exclusively to gain a partisan advantage – is among the oldest practices in the American republic.
In recent decades, gerrymandering has largely been the preserve of Republicans.
America’s redistricting wars have expanded beyond even the Republican Party’s wildest imagination. Thanks to captive state legislatures and prostrate judiciaries, what began as a GOP attempt to mitigate midterm election losses has morphed into an existential clash over the meaning of representation.
Read more about what US elections have become in the article by Civic Forum founder Reed Galen: Trump redraws the map: how the US government is taking questionable steps to win elections.
During Barack Obama’s two-term presidency, the GOP gobbled up nearly 1,000 state legislative seats, turning competitive bodies into conservative supermajorities that changed the character of state government. While Democrats also engaged in gerrymandering – supposedly in the name of "fairness" – they mostly ignored state legislative elections, convinced that the White House and Congress were the most important levers of power.
More fundamentally, Democrats consistently underestimated the lengths to which their Republican opponents were willing to go for power.
This failure has been particularly glaring since President Donald Trump took control of the GOP a decade ago, at which point securing, entrenching, and expanding power became the only item on the party’s agenda.
Last year, after multiple Republican-led states passed or attempted to pass new congressional maps aimed at increasing the GOP’s electoral advantage before this November’s midterms, the Democrats decided to fight fire with fire.
But in this fight, Democrats are again missing both the forest and the trees.
For starters, not all their forays into gerrymandering have delivered the desired results.
The judiciary then dealt the Democrats an even bigger blow.
Challenges to gerrymandered maps have often cited the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which aimed to safeguard people’s ability to exercise the right to vote. But the US Supreme Court has spent the last decade gutting the Act, and last month, the Court’s conservative majority put the final nail in its coffin by effectively nullifying Section 2, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting practices or procedures.
Landry simply issued the diktat – vaguely claiming the authority to "protect voter safety, participation, and the integrity of the process" – and local election officials complied, highlighting the vulnerability of America’s distributed, underfunded, and understaffed election processes.
The midterm campaign is shaping up, yet again, to bring out the worst in both parties.
Around 10% of the 435 seats in the US House of Representatives are now considered "competitive" by Ballotpedia. This is both bipartisan and intentional.
Both parties, the author argues, are weak.
Lacking an attractive program based on a coherent and constructive vision for the US, all that is left for both parties are tactics. That is the bleak lesson of the redistricting wars.
US voters, as usual, have only two options: bad and worse. Whichever they choose this November, America’s most pressing problems will remain unaddressed.