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TX-22 House Election: DeLay and Redistricting

Texas 22: Houston suburbs: Sugar Land, Pearland (map)
Democrat: Nick Lampson, ex-congressman
Republican: write-in candidate Shelley Sekula-Gibbs (incumbent Tom DeLay resigned, but still on ballot—2004: won 55%–41%)
Poll: Lampson 43%, Sekula-Gibbs 14%, Libertarian Bob Smither 10% (10/10)
Outlook: leans Democratic
Final result (11/9): Democrat 52%, Republican 42%

There's never been anyone quite like Tom DeLay, for two decades the Republican representative of this district. As he climbed the GOP ladder in Congress, the feisty, diminutive ex–pest exterminator morphed into a Democrat exterminator, and for years he was frighteningly successful. His narrow fundamentalism and rigid Republicanism, fused with an intense desire to win at all costs, made him a very effective House leader, first as majority whip under Newt Gingrich and then as majority leader under Dennis Hastert. For both of these speakers, he ran the Republican caucus with an iron fist and an attention to detail that resulted in an atmosphere of extreme partisanship and, more often than not, Republican victories.

Certain of his own rightness (and righteousness), he forced party-line votes from uncomfortable GOP moderates and quashed all dissent in a chamber once known for lively debate. He crafted legislative bills to be as right-wing as possible while remaining viable, and by counting votes carefully (sometimes with the added pressure of electoral blackmail), he passed one bill after another by a single vote. In the 2003–04 session, for example, it was Medicare weakening 216-215, Head Start defunding 217-216, and DC school vouchers 209-208. He was rated zero by the Sierra Club, and he called the Environmental Protection Agency the "Gestapo of government." He made friends of lobbyists, and destroyed the careers of those lobbyists who weren't his friends. He lived high and wide, relishing the perquisites of power, and he often sailed close to the legal wind, certain he was invulnerable.

TX-17 House Election: Poker Games and Good Old Boys

Texas 17: central: Cleburne, Waco, College Station (map)
Democrat: Chet Edwards, incumbent since 1991 (2004: won 51%–48%)
Republican: Van Taylor, businessman
Poll: Edwards 55%, Taylor 38% (10/10)
Outlook: likely Democratic
Final result (11/9): Democrat 58%, Republican 40%

In 1994, as the Gingrich revolution was sweeping through the House of Representatives, Texan Tom DeLay (aka The Hammer) said, "By the time we finish this poker game, there may not be a federal government left! Which would suit me just fine."

But before finishing off the federal government, DeLay had to destroy the Democratic Party. First, he instituted strict party discipline on GOP House members, in order to foment as much trouble as possible for Bill Clinton. Second, he allied himself with George Bush to create an authoritarian Republican steamroller that flattened everything from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other. And third, he took the unprecedented step of initiating a mid-decade redistricting of Texas, in order to rid the state (and the House) of as many of those pesky Democrats as possible. (If you want to see an engrossing, well-crafted film on the subject, check out The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress, by Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck.)

GA-12 House Election: Party and Pelosi

Georgia 12: eastern, Augusta to Savannah (PDF state map)
Democrat: John Barrow, incumbent since 2005 (2004: won 52%-48% against Burns, before redistricting)
Republican: Max Burns, ex-congressman in district (2003–2005)
Poll D +3: Barrow 42%, Burns 39% (10/26 sub)
Outlook: tossup ▼ (from leans Democratic)
Post updated: November 5
Final result (11/16): Democrat 50.3%, Republican 49.7% (details here)

When Democrats controlled the Georgia legislature in 2001, they drew congressional district lines in such a way as to save as many Democratic seats as possible during a time when the state was drifting steadily rightward. That meant 6 Democratic districts (including the 12th) and 7 for the opposition. Unfortunately, the 12th experienced a little slippage in 2002 for a scandal-tinged incumbent, but it returned in 2004 to be the Democratic district it was designed to be.

When Republicans took over the legislature in 2005, they decided to redraw the lines in such a way as to create as many Republican seats as possible. That meant, they calculated, 9 Republican districts (including the 12th) and 5 4 for the opposition. To achieve the switch in the 12th, they lopped off college-town Athens, home of incumbent John Barrow (photo), and stretched the district along the South Carolina border almost to the coast. The change did remove those pointy-headed Athenians, but it also increased the percentage of African Americans in the district, and African Americans tend to vote for Democrats. They didn't get rid of John Barrow either; he moved to Savannah and is poised, in this year of Democratic victories, to hold onto his seat.

GA-08 House Election: Redistricting & Values

Georgia 8: south-central, centered on Macon (map)
Democrat: Jim Marshall, incumbent since 2003 (2004: won 63%-37%, before redistricting)
Republican: Mac Collins, ex-congressman, businessman
Poll: None
Outlook: leans Democratic
Post updated: October 21
Final result (11/8): Democrat 51%, Republican 49%

When Georgia Republicans saw how well Tom DeLay's mid-decade redistricting worked in Texas, they decided to try it in Georgia. With a hammerlock on state government (and in the teeth of proposals for a nonpartisan redistricting commission), they forced through a creative gerrymandering in 2005 that they hoped would pick up two more GOP seats to add to their current 7–6 advantage (PDF map here). And Bush's partisan Justice Department quickly approved the changes. But in this year of a Democratic tidal wave, it appears that their efforts may have been in vain: the two districts they designed for pickups, the 8th and the 12th, are trending Democratic.

Jim Marshall is the Democratic incumbent in the 8th, though according to the 2004 map he currently represents the old 3rd District, which overlaps the new 8th only in part. This redesigned strip of Old South plantation country is not an easy row to hoe for an opponent of George Bush, who beat John Kerry here with 61 percent of the vote, but Marshall seems up to the task.

DeLayed Reaction

Tom DeLay left the House of Representatives this last week with a sneer and a smile. He said that partisanship was a good thing for democracy. What he failed to point out was that the kind of lying, thieving, criminal partisanship he practiced had nothing to do with the democratic exchange of ideas or with the good of the commonwealth. Tom DeLay's approach to politics was all divisive personal attacks and untrue allegations, masquerading as the words of a caring, moral person. Kevin Drum passes on a prime example of his twisted idiocy. Speaking of the Columbine High School massacre, DeLay said:

Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.

It is good to see the Hammer removed from public office. His scorn for the law was blatant. He was another of the many Republicans who, hating government and believing only in the power of personal greed, joined government to destroy it. At the time of the invasion of Iraq, he said: "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes."

Of DeLay's many illegal or immoral acts, those best documented were the tricks and lies he perpetrated to redistrict Texas again—after a legal redistricting but without waiting for another decennial census to change the data. DeLay rigged the Republican capture of the Texas legislature, then rode roughshod over decades of tradition and law to gerrymander the districts for the House of Representatives. In the process, he accepted—and tried to hide—hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate donations, which are completely illegal in Texas. That saga is retold in the excellent new documentary film "The Big Buy: How Tom DeLay Stole Congress." (You can order a DVD here.)

Getting Tom DeLay out of Washington is a step in the right direction. Getting Tom DeLayism out of Washington will take much longer. A good place to start is the election of November 2006. A few more Democrats in the House and the Senate could change the course of history. Let's start the process—without delay.

Trouble in Sugar Land

Tom DeLay may have outsmarted himself. Besides facing corruption charges and new ethics allegations, he's losing strength at home, among his constituents of the Texas 22nd district.  A recent poll by Channel 2 in Houston shows that:

• 51 percent disapprove of the job he's doing as a congressman.
• 56 percent give him a letter grade of C, D, or F.
• 57 percent think he should either resign from the House leadership or resign from Congress.

DeLay is paying now for the rolling waves of corruption and lobbyist-financed golf vacations, the Schiavo-inspired meddling in matters most families consider private, and the relentlessly sectarian Rapture rhetoric.

But he's also paying for his hubris in the forced redistricting of Texas last year. In order to create additional Republican-friendly districts, DeLay stripped his own district of some strongly GOP areas, and now changing demographics are reducing his support even further. As a result, in his own hand-designed, self-chosen district, DeLay is in trouble. As John Judis reports in The New Republic:

While DeLay's district--and particularly Fort Bend County--may still have a majority of registered Republicans, it has quietly become more centrist and less tolerant of his ideological excesses, as Asians and other new groups of voters have moved in during the last decade. DeLay can still win reelection, but he will not have an easy time. And he could find himself in a downward spiral as he has to devote more resources to fending off charges in Washington while his popularity wanes at home.…

DeLay's 22nd district, which he designed in a 2003 redistricting effort that aimed to net seven more Republican seats in Texas, has also begun to change in ways that will not benefit an outspoken Christian conservative like himself. When DeLay first won office, the district was predominately white, with a few pockets of black voters. Because the area's population has ballooned 18 percent since the 2000 census, there are no dependable figures about the district's overall composition, but both Republican and Democratic leaders agree that, without losing its high levels of wealth and education, it is becoming a "majority-minority" district, in which whites are outnumbered by other ethnic groups. Latinos and blacks moved into the district in the late '80s. And, in the '90s, middle-class Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, and Chinese immigrants began to pour in. Two Hindu temples now vie for attention with the Baptist megachurches.

Despite DeLay's weakness, it's not a slam dunk. Democrats in 2006 will still have to find the right candidate and fight the good fight to win in the 22nd. But similar demographic changes favoring Democrats are happening all over the country, just as Judis and Ruy Teixeira predicted in their 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority. As Teixeira's website points out, the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis is unlikely to last long:

Regardless of the outcome of the race for DeLay's seat next year, the 22nd's political and demographic dynamics are emblematic of what is happening in many districts across the nation, particularly in the south and west. If Democrats will pay attention and target their investments and resources carefully, they can end GOP domination of Congress sooner, rather than later.

That means 2006. The White House is very much in play too, though that may have to wait until 2008.

Redistricting: Declining Competition

Congress has become increasingly partisan over the last two decades. It's hard to find middle-of-the-road senators and representatives willing to make the necessary compromises to crete laws acceptable to a bipartisan majority. As a result, even the smallest issue is transformed into a party-line test, a winner-take-all donnybrook.

That is not what American voters want, according to the polls. So why does the situation continue to worsen? The received wisdom is that gerrymandering (like that monstrosity in Louisiana shown above) has created partisan congressional districts in which one party or the other has a strong advantage, so that the primary is the meaningful contest, not the general election. Consequently, Democrats elected are likely to be to the left of the average Democrat (nationwide), and Republicans to the right of the average Republican. Furthermore, incumbents in such unbalanced districts have little moivation to compromise with their opponents—their own party's primary voters are likely, in fact, to punish them for not hewing to the party line. So further polarization leads to declining competition in a never-ending spiral.

But the received wisdom may be wrong. Alan I. Abramowitz, Brad Alexander, and Matthew Gunning of Emory University have written a groundbreaking study, "Incumbency, Redistricting, and the Decline of Competition in U.S. House Elections," that questions whether redistricting has much at all to do with the decline of competitiveness in House elections. They write:

Competition in U.S. House elections has been declining for more than 50 years and the 2002 and 2004 House elections were the least competitive of the postwar era. This paper tests three hypotheses that attempt to explain the decline in competition in House elections: the redistricting hypothesis, the partisan polarization hypothesis, and the incumbency hypothesis. We find strong support for both the partisan polarization hypothesis and the incumbency hypothesis but no support for the redistricting hypothesis. Since the 1970s there has been a substantial increase in the number of House districts that are relatively safe for one party and a substantial decrease in the number of marginal districts. However, this shift has not been caused by redistricting but by demographic change and ideological realignment within the electorate. Moreover, even in the remaining marginal districts only a small minority of House races are competitive. The main explanation for the lack of competition even in marginal districts appears to be the inability of challengers to compete financially with incumbents.

It's the money, they say, that protects incumbency and reduces competition. And if that's true, I would posit, it's the money that increases partisanship and pushes members of Congress toward the margins of their own parties.

That's a good reason to work for public financing of elections, as Mark Schmitt argues persuasively. It can be implemented, given voters' distrust of the current system, and has been in Arizona and Maine. Implemented nationally, it will open up the process to new blood and begin to overcome the natural Republican advantage in private money—an advantage the Democrats almost nullified in 2004, though that campaign was possibly anomalous.

But Schmitt also questions the researchers' basic finding about redistricting. There may be more to the received wisdom than their data suggest. He writes:

I do have one caveat to the Abramowitz et al paper: I don't find his rejection of the theory that redistricting is a principle cause of the decline of competition to be convincing. The authors theorize that if redistricting reinforces incumbent advantage, one should expect to see a greater decline in competition in the cycle immediately after redistricting, that is, 1982, 1992, or 2002. Since those election cycles tend to be more competitive than cycles in the middle/end of the decades, they conclude that redistrticting is not the major factor in incumbent advantage or partisanship. But redistricting is always going to be a disruptive event. Even if redistricting is done in a way to protect both current incumbents and the party in power, the election immediately after a redistricting is likely to bring some change.…

So, let's not take redistricting off the table as a factor.

I agree. And even if redistricting is less important than we thought in reducing competitiveness, it still accelerates the spiral of dual radicalization and rigid partisanship. That's reason enough to work for a national legal standard for nonpartisan redistricting.

Redistricting: Hammer and Tongs

Drawing district lines for Congress and for state legislatures is more art than science—pop art, you might say, as in population. In most states, the legislature does the deed with an eagle eye on gaining political advantage, often twisting and turning district lines to capture or exclude voters of one shade or another. The most famous early American example was the 1812 Massachusetts map drawn under the governorship of Elbridge Gerry: it looked like a salamander, so it was called a gerrymander.

The putative goal of redistricting is to create areas with equal numbers of voters, to ensure that each person's vote counts the same (a principle ignored in US senatorial and presidential elections); and in the latter half of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court required several changes to reach that goal. In the 1960s, the Court said that all states must redraw districts every ten years to reflect changes recorded by the decennial census.  In the 70s, the Court developed a standard of population equality that required legislative districts to differ by no more than ten percent, unless justified by some "rational state policy." In the 80s, the Court developed a standard of equality for congressional districts that required them to be mathematically equal, unless justified by some "legitimate state objective."

But creative politicians have found ways to thwart the egalitarian spirit of the law while adhering to the numerical letter. The gerrymander lives, from California to Georgia, to feed the hungry incumbents. Tom "Hammer" DeLay decided that redistricting once every ten years wasn't often enough in Texas, and his naked political power bent the legislature to his will and finagled the Democrats out of three congressional seats. Now Arnold "Tongs" Schwarzenegger wants to do the same thing in California, but this time under the guise of nonpartisanship. Arnold proposed a panel of retired judges to do the deed, supposedly taking politics out of the process altogether. Oddly enough for a Republican proposal, this would also be to the detriment of Democrats.

Here's the point. Nonpartisan redistricting is a very good idea, and the state of Iowa has done it right. It would be a great step forward if every state adopted a similar program. In Iowa:

The legislature has the final responsibility for enacting both congressional and state legislative district plans, but the nonpartisan Legislative Services Bureau has initial responsibility. It must develop up to three plans that can be accepted or rejected by the legislature. The plans are criteria-driven, meaning that the bureau draws districts based on clear, measurable criteria.

The four criteria, in descending order of importance are: 1) population equality; 2) contiguity; 3) unity of counties and cities (maintaining county lines and “nesting” house districts within senate districts and senate districts within congressional districts); and 4) compactness.

You'll notice that the criteria do not include "protecting the seats of incumbents" or "squeezing as many members of the other party (not my party) as possible into as few districts as possible." And the song of the gerrymander is not heard in the land.

So Arnold sounds like a sensible little-d democrat, right? Wrong! For Democratic California to adopt such a proposal would be tantamount to unilateral disarmament. In Republican Texas it's the steamroller, while in California it's flower power. And the reactionaries win both ways. As Kevin Drum puts it, "Raw power would be their ally in red states and appeals to progressive idealism would be their ally in the blue states. That's quite a combination."

So let's push for Iowa-style redistricting nationwide. That's the ticket. It would be fairer, and it might even begin to reduce the partisan rancor in Sacramento, Austin, and Washington.