Consider This from NPR - In Many States, 2020 Election Winners Hold All The Redistricting Power

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

Every 10 years after the U.S. Census, lawmakers in most states have the power to redraw congressional and state legislative districts. It's called redistricting. The party in power can do it in a way that benefits them politically — and it's perfectly legal. That's called gerrymandering. Now that the 2020 election season is nearly over, a picture is emerging of how redistricting and gerrymandering will unfold in states across the country. NPR's Ari Shapiro spoke to reporters in three state capitals: Ashley Lopez with member station KUT in Austin, Texas; Dirk VanderHart from Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland; and Steve Harrison of member station WFAE in Charlotte, N.C.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Okay, be honest. Off the top of your head, can you name the person who is your local state representative? They don't often make national news. But as a group, they can determine who controls the political power in this country. I'm Debbie Booth Schmidt. I'm running for state representative to fight for our North Coast economy. Okay, Oregon's 32nd State House District hugs the Pacific Ocean and the Columbia River along the border with Washington State. And this election season, Democrat Debbie Booth Schmidt and her Republican opponent, Suzanne Weber. Suzanne Weber. Real life experience makes her a great public servant.

These two spent a lot of money making sure voters knew their names. I'm Debbie Booth Schmidt. I run a small business. We need someone like Suzanne who has the right experience to lead. This race was likely the most expensive state house race in Oregon history. The two candidates spent a combined two and a half million dollars. And let's put this in perspective. For most state lawmakers, this is not even a full-time job. In Oregon, their annual salary is $31,000. In New Hampshire, it's just $100. In many states, they only work one or two months out of the year. Well, the people of rural Northwest Oregon have spoken. 2.5 million dollars in a race that Republican Suzanne Weber won with around 22,000 votes.

She gave her victory speech in a video on Facebook, sitting alone at her kitchen table. In the next few days, please watch my Facebook page for announcements on where to return your lawn signs. My team will be out around the district picking them up over the next week. By the way, Republicans did not win control of the Oregon legislature. But the point of this story is that this was a relatively small race for local government. And it drew this immense amount of money. It was the same story in a lot of states. You've heard a lot about the presidential race.

Maybe too much. But there's a lot more that'll be on the ballot this fall. One reason for all of the spending is that as former President Barack Obama reminded his supporters during the campaign. In this election, the state leaders we elect will help redraw electoral districts all across the country. That's because 2020 is a census year. It only happens once every 10 years. And after the census, states get to redraw congressional and state legislative maps. It's called redistricting. In most states, lawmakers draw those maps, and they have a lot of leeway.

Consider this. The party that won control of your state legislature last month may have a chance to cement its lock on power for a decade. Coming up, three reporters from around the country on the picture of power in their state capitals. Plus, why crazy-shaped voting districts that benefit one political party are perfectly legal. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Friday, December 4th. Writer Baratunde Thurston says this democracy experiment requires more than just voting.

This is incumbent on all of us. It takes two. It takes two to make a thing go right. It takes two to knock it out of sight. And both parties in a national level discourse, both sides have to still remain committed. How to be a good citizen. That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR.

Okay, first things first. In most places, redistricting doesn't just shape the division of power at the state level. It also affects the distribution of power in Washington, in the U.S. House of Representatives. And those House seats matter a lot. I mean, after last month's election, it looks like Democrats will have a majority of maybe a dozen seats. And that could make a difference in whether the Biden-Harris administration can pass any major legislation or not. We're talking health care, immigration, everything. And every 10 years, the distribution of those House seats changes. Which brings us to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court says they will

not be wading into partisan gerrymandering cases. Last year, the Supreme Court heard a case about partisan gerrymandering. That's when one party draws crazy-looking districts to help keep the other party in the minority. And the Supreme Court said it wasn't going to touch this. The court's saying courts cannot rule on this, that this is strictly within the purview of Congress. The ruling was 5 to 4, with the court's conservative justices in the majority. If this decision had gone the other way, it could have led to changes in who controls Congress and state legislatures. Justice Elena Kagan said today the court failed in its role of protecting free and fair elections. Lester? Pete Williams of the Supreme Court, thanks.

President Trump is in Japan tonight. And so that decision basically gave a green light to something both parties had been doing with a wink and a nod for a long time. I mean, take 2010. That was the last census and the last round of redistricting. That year, Republicans took power in most states, and they used that power to redraw districts in their favor. You could see that advantage play out in the elections that followed. In Pennsylvania, for example, 44% of the voters chose Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives in 2014. But 13 of the 18 districts, more than two-thirds, are represented Did you get that math? Pennsylvania Democrats won 44% of the votes, and they got 28% of the power.

I think people don't completely appreciate how much gerrymandering affects the outcome. That's why Barack Obama has made getting rid of partisan gerrymandering one of the big fights in his life after the White House. You can draw a district that almost guarantees one party is going to win instead of another because you have voter histories and you have a sense of where people are typically going to vote. So Obama worked really hard this year to get Democrats to focus on state-level elections. And they did. And the result was a huge disappointment. Literally, the website FiveThirtyEight called it just about the best-case scenario for Republicans.

Democrats hoped to win back control of some state houses that they lost in 2010. That didn't happen anywhere. Since state legislatures are where redistricting battles are about to play out, we gathered three reporters who cover three different state houses to talk about what redistricting is going to look like. Ashley Lopez from Member Station KUT in Austin, Texas, Dirk Vander Hart of Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland, and Steve Harrison of Member Station WFAE in Charlotte, Texas, Dirk Vander Hart of Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland, and Steve Harrison of member station WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina. Good to have you all here. Hey, Ari.

Hi. Hey, Ari. Ashley, let's start with you in Texas. The state's getting more diverse, and it's one of many places where Democrats had hoped to take over the House and didn't. What happened there? Yeah, so those hopes were totally dashed. Democrats were hoping to gain a majority in the Texas House, you know, at least one chamber, so they could have a seat at the table this time around because

they've been completely shut out for decades. But much like every other state that Democrats were hoping to flip a chamber in, they were unsuccessful. In Texas, they had their sights set on flipping nine seats that were quite frankly just out of reach for them, largely because those districts were drawn to favor Republicans by Republicans 10 years ago. So in case you wondered if top to bottom. And because of a U.S. Supreme Court decision recently that said that states can gerrymander for partisan bases, then they really don't have any reason to hold back. That makes it sound like Democrats in Texas have no tools at all. Is there any kind of check or balance on Republican power in the state? Yeah, well, like the last time, the courts are really the only check they have, right? So even though partisan gerrymandering is legal, which is drawing districts that favor

a party over the other, drawing maps that discriminate against people of color is definitely not. That's illegal. And because race and partisanship sometimes go hand in hand, it might be kind of impossible for Republicans to gerrymander based on partisanship without like running afoul of racial discrimination laws. So in fact, Stephanie Swanson with the League of Women Voters of Texas, she said that this has actually been a persistent issue in Texas. So in the past 50 years, Texas has been found to have racially discriminated or violated the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle. They could very much still do the same thing.

And that's all we have currently right now are the courts to stop it. Yeah. So Texas has like a pretty bad track record with this. And because of so much of Texas's growth in the past few years and decades has been overwhelmingly because of growth among communities of color. Groups say they're looking to make sure that those political lines draw, like retain that political power and population growth that has accumulated over the past few years. All right, let's turn from Texas to Oregon, because Republicans next year are going to have total control of 20 state legislatures with mapmaking power, and Democrats are only going to have total control of seven. But Oregon is one of those seven.

So Dirk Vander Hart, what does that mean for redistricting in your state? Well, that's right. Democrats here have super majorities in the House and Senate, along with the governor's office. And as of January, they're going to hold the secretary of state's office as well. That's really notable here because in Oregon, if the legislature and governor can't agree on how to redraw legislative maps, the Secretary of State takes over the process. And actually, in the past half century, the legislature has failed to pass a plan much of the time. So that is one reason Republicans were really adamant about hanging on to the Secretary of State's office in this year's election. There would have been at least some path for them to have meaningful influence

in redistricting. Instead, though, a progressive Democrat named Shamia Fagan won the seat. So does that mean Republicans are totally frozen out in Oregon as the Democrats are in Texas? You know, for 2021, that absolutely looks like the case. Earlier this year, there was an effort to try to establish a nonpartisan redistricting commission that would take control of the process from lawmakers. That's something Republicans were pretty supportive of, but it failed to even get enough signatures to make the ballot. So Shamia Fagan, the new Secretary of State, has said she would appoint an independent commission to help advise her.

We have not seen a lot of what that looks like. All right, let's head east to North Carolina, which has been the site of many high-profile gerrymandering cases over the last few years. What do things look like now in Charlotte, Steve Harrison? Yeah, so I think it's safe to say North Carolina has been one of those bitterly contested states over political gerrymandering after Republicans took control here in 2010. It was a North Carolina case that was heard by the Supreme Court in the summer of 2019, in which the justices said that gerrymandering based on political party was not unconstitutional. And that was a decision that Democrats across the country said was bad for democracy.

In North Carolina, there was also litigation in state court that was successful and forced Republicans to redraw legislative and congressional maps before the 2020 election. And with these new maps, Democrats were really hopeful they could win at least one chamber and have a say in drawing the new maps next year. But they had to win in rural and suburban areas. And like what happened in Texas and other places, those hopes really fizzled out. The GOP kept control of both the House and Senate. And so what does that mean for redrawing the maps next year? Has the GOP indicated what they plan to do?

So they aren't giving any clues, but first they're doing a little bit of gloating. They're saying, look, we won in 2010 on maps that Democrats drew and we won in 2020 on maps that Democrats said were pretty fair. So they're taking a victory lap. The question is, are they going to take a hardline approach next year and draw the maps themselves and lock Democrats out? Democrats here are pretty worried. Here's Natasha Marcus, a state senator from Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte. What I do think is that Republicans who run the General Assembly are smart smart and they're going to certainly

take steps to make things look transparent. And one more thing. There's an assumption here that Democrats are going to benefit from new maps just because so much of the population growth is in cities like Raleigh and Charlotte, which are very blue. But the state's top Republican, Senate Leader Phil Berger, is saying not so fast. He's making this kind of interesting argument that Republican voters in these cities are disenfranchised because the GOP doesn't have any representation there. So he's saying, look, we have 30 percent of the vote and no members in the legislature. So he's saying, hey, maybe we should draw a safe Republican seat in Charlotte. So take a step back. These votes in November have implications for political power in the U.S.

over the next decade. What is this likely to mean? So yeah, one thing going forward in North Carolina, there was hope to have an independent commission to draw maps. That's what Democrats wanted. That's not going to happen. And I think that's been a push in a lot of places around the country. And Republicans just aren't interested in doing that. That was Steve Harrison of member station WFAE in Charlotte, North Carolina, along with Ashley Lopez of member station KUT in Austin, Texas, and Dirk Vander Hart of Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland. One more note on redistricting. You just heard that in North Carolina and other states, there's been a push to have redistricting done not by the legislature, but by an independent commission. Well, commissions like that actually

do exist in some states that'll draw new maps next year. But the movement to get more states to adopt them has only seen modest success. So far, only a dozen or so states, most of them in Democratic control, have districts drawn by independent commissions. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.