EP. 5 — A GERRYMANDERING TALE YOU HAVEN’T HEARD

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Weston Wamp: I'm Weston Wamp and this is Swamp Stories brought to you by Issue One.

In recent years, no reform issue has gained more momentum than getting rid of so-called gerrymandering. As it turns out, people don't like it when politicians get to choose their voters instead of the other way around. Not long ago, gerrymandering was a little known artifact from New England political history that only political science buffs knew much about, but that's changed. Now, gerrymandering is a hot button issue for many voters. They're galvanized by stories of Republicans in Pennsylvania and North Carolina using majorities in the state legislature to redraw congressional districts to favor the GOP, but there's also the case of Democrats in places like Maryland doing the same thing, but that tends to get less ink.

Rallying around the simple logic that politicians shouldn't pick their voters, voters should pick their politicians, grassroots organizations have led ballot initiatives. They've lobbied state legislators and even funded legal challenges. Ultimately, they drew the Supreme Court into the fight against gerrymandering and it's becoming a pretty damn effective rallying cry. Often from liberal voices, they argue that Republicans are abusing the U.S. Constitution's call for states to oversee elections by drawing maps that are manipulated to keep their party in power. But as you'll remember, everything I learned growing up around politics led me to believe that neither party has an exclusive on integrity and almost anytime you hear one party try to claim moral high ground, there's almost always more to that story.

And this one involves a 26 year old who surprised everyone last cycle.

Katie Fahey: I saw that we actually had a lot in common around where our concerns were, which was around how do we actually get this system working again because it’s not working for the average person.

Weston Wamp: This is episode five, A Gerrymandering Tale You Haven't Heard.

My own family's experience in Tennessee politics told me that there was something fishy about the often partisan narrative around gerrymandering. You see, when my dad was elected to Congress as a Gingrich Republican in 1994, he was replacing a 20 year incumbent Democrat who he'd nearly beaten in 1992. He flipped a seat long-held by Democrats. By 2001, with the 2000 census numbers in, the Tennessee state legislature, which was controlled by Democrats, seized on an opportunity and basically seeded the third Congressional district in Tennessee to my dad. He was getting upwards of 65% of the vote and they didn't think it could be one bag, so they took a few of his liberal leaning counties and replace them with more conservative counties and with enough rearranging Democrats in the Tennessee state legislature had crafted a new fourth congressional district that they believed could be won by a Democrat, particularly considering that Republican incumbent Van Hillary had left office to run statewide.

The plan worked as gerrymandering typically does. And Lincoln Davis, a long time Democratic state legislator went on to serve in Congress for a decade. The question I was left with was this, was our case unique or were Democrats gerrymandering districts back when they had majorities in more state legislatures than they do today? If so, that seems like it would change the narrative on this issue. And another question I had: were Republicans up in arms about gerrymandering when it was hurting them? In search of some of those answers, I was researching a pattern of gerrymandering in Pennsylvania that ultimately led to the Pennsylvania Supreme court intervening in 2018 and I came across a fascinating case study. In 1990, a 32 year old Republican activist defeated a long time Democratic Congressman in the suburbs of Pittsburgh only to immediately face the realities of redistricting.

Rick Santorum: Well, I knew that they were going to do that to me. I was told pretty much when I ran for Congress that no, we're going to go through redistricting. We're going to lose two seats in Pennsylvania, and even if you win, I guarantee you we're gonna eliminate your seat. 

Weston Wamp: Congressman Rick Santorum's new district was three to one registered Democrats to Republicans. Not only did Democrats redraw the district, they didn't take any chances he would win.

Rick Santorum: I knew going in that I was going to be there for one term in all likelihood. It was actually a very freeing because I had one thing on my mind, trying to make an impact and stand up for the folks in Western Pennsylvania who wanted to see Congress cleaned up and so that's what I did.

Weston Wamp: Santorum was acting like someone who only planned on serving one term. Unafraid of the consequences, he took his own party's leadership on and became known as the leader of the Gang of Seven. That was the group that exposed the House Banking scandal.

Rick Santorum: I went to Washington and was there, like I said, just to try to do the right thing and I ran across this report from the general accounting office that there was this institution in the House called the House Bank. There was some funny business going on there with members being able to borrow money, interest free and write checks. They didn't have money to cover, and I sort of found it hard to believe, but I read the report and I remember going to one of the senior members whose responsibility was to oversee the bank and the guy said, “yeah, that's been going on for a long time. The deal is just a report every few years. Usually, you know, there's a little bit of a stink about it and then it just passes over and we just keep going.” And so I decided, well, I'm not going to be around all that time. I'm going to dig my heels in and try to get a real investigation of this.

Weston Wamp:  It's not directly related to the subject of gerrymandering, but it's worth pointing out that reform has a way of appealing to our better angels. We like to see politicians take risks and tell the truth when it's not easy. Santorum did that. And voters in new 14th district shocked state Democrats by rewarding it.

Rick Santorum:  I always say good government is good politics. And if you're out there and you're doing what is in the best interests of the American people and you're seeing things that are not right and you're exposing those things and you're standing and fighting the fight to get that reform, voters from both of the aisle are going to reward you for that. I mean, you mentioned my district was 3:1 registered Democrat and I ended up getting 61% of the vote. In 1992, when George Bush ran against Bill Clinton and George Bush got 29% in my district.

Weston Wamp:  Of course, Santorum went on to serve in the U.S. Senate and eventually ran for president. But gerrymandering very much effected his own political career. In Santorum, we see many exceptions to what we're really led to believe. First that Republicans abuse gerrymandering and Republicans alone, that's just not true. Second, that gerrymandered districts can't be won by the party that's been gerrymandered out. Santorum is a rare example of that happening. And then finally he also proved in the House Banking scandal that sometimes it is Republicans who fight corruption. In many ways though his case should call into question why we believe the system is broken. Across the country, a nonpartisan organization that's supported by countless Hollywood celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence is leading an unprecedented grassroots effort.

Jennifer Lawrence:  And then there's gerrymandering with politicians drawing the boundaries of their own voting districts in just crazy shapes designed to prevent competition. Today, only 14% of House campaigns are actually competitive. 86% of them are not. And we wonder why young people feel that their vote doesn't matter.

Weston Wamp:  The founder of RepresentUs is veteran reformer, Josh Silver. I got some of his time by phone and he summarized the ill effects of gerrymandering as he sees it this way.

Josh Silver:  There is a misconception that gerrymandering is all about competition and lack of it, and that is true, but the even more insidious result of gerrymandering is that today, 86% of U.S. House races are gerrymandered. That means there's no competition in the general. There's only competition in the primary elections where very few voters turn out and the ones that do are overwhelmingly partisan and extreme, on the left and the right. So what you have as a system that structurally incentivizes politicians to be extreme in their positions, not to compromise, and to appeal to that small sliver of the voting electorate that turnout in primary elections. And that is why we have this Congress today that is by and large, extreme, polarized, and unable to compromise.

Weston Wamp: We're going to take a short break.

All right, let's get back to it. People aren't going to be well-represented when the goal of gerrymandering is effectively to eliminate general elections when most voters turn out. While Silver and RepresentUs are devoutly non-partisan, many Republicans feel like gerrymandering opponents make an argument that's convenient for Democrats, considering that Republicans are the ones that hold two thirds of state legislative bodies across America and therefore they control how most of the country will be redistricted after the 2020 census. And another curiosity is why Republicans haven't made a bigger push to fix gerrymandering when it was working to their disadvantage for decades prior to 2010. Even Rick Santorum who took the brunt of gerrymandering like few ever have, still stands by the system arguing that the 200 year old tradition does no harm.

Rick Santorum: It's been going on since the beginning of the Republic. You know, we are an inherently political process. I mean drawing congressional lines or state legislative lines is a political process and the idea of taking politics out of politics is impossible. You telling me that a court that draws congressional districts is not political. I hate to tell you, judges are just as political, sometimes more political than the politician.

Weston Wamp: Santorum’s right that you can’t take the politics out of politics, but we should be able to build a political system where parties aren’t engineering outcomes exclusively for the purpose of getting their candidates elected. In other words, voters should choose their politicians. Politicians should not choose their voters. And to be fair to Santorum, in his home state of Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court is chosen in partisan elections. But while I understand where he's coming from on this issue, Silver makes a compelling case about not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good.

Josh Silver: There's a whole gamut of different straw man arguments that have been created to protect the status quo. One of them is the idea that you should have elected folks who are directly accountable to the public drawing congressional lines and it's total BS. I mean, the fact is is that right now, you've got coaches making the decisions on the crucial calls in the game rather than impartial referees. And what we need are impartial referees and they need to be independent from politics. It's the only way to fix it. Otherwise you're asking the fox to put a lock on the hen house. Any argument against that is basically saying, "yeah, we want to keep the fox putting a lock on that" and now the fox is going to eat those chickens. Sorry.

Weston Wamp:  So is it possible that there's a solution somewhere between the purest hopes for benevolent courts or commissions and the good faith concerns from people like Santorum that only people who are accountable to voters should be drawing congressional lines? Personally, the part of this subject that I think gets more attention than it deserves is that Republicans have used gerrymandering to build favorable maps. It doesn't sit well because of the examples we've already taken a look at. Democrats have abused gerrymandering too and even recently in states like Maryland, but in all of this, there's still a big glaring problem.

Regardless of the motivation, America's congressional districts have taken insane shapes. Some are contiguous, some unnecessarily require an airplane flight to traverse. The mere shapes of our districts are an impediment to good representation in many states. If the focus of the gerrymandering conversation is instead focused on the much less politically charged argument, that districts don't make any geographic sense, we might all find common ground.

Because in all seriousness, a fifth grader could see the flaw in a system that has caused districts to become so gerrymandered that county lines don't even seem to matter. People are often confused about who their congressman even is and by the time they figure it out, another census has occurred and they're being moved into another district. So what if we make the focus less about who's trying to win or gain advantage and more about good government and let regular people, voters themselves help the politicians draw district maps that look more like logical groupings of communities. Silver explains what they have seen at RepresentUs that's garnered grassroots support and that works a whole lot better than the status quo.

Josh Silver: We believe at RepresentUs that the independent redistricting commission model like you see in California and Michigan is the ideal. We also support this so-called bipartisan commission model like you see in Arizona or newly passed in Ohio as a good enough approach. When you have these commissions, be it independent or bi-partisan, the law also lays out the metrics by which they need to emphasize or consider as they redraw the districts and they follow the objectives of being more contiguous, being more racially and socioeconomically aligned that they take into account objectives that are about fair and equal representation, not about creating partisan advantage. So we believe the model has worked relatively well since 2008 when California passed it, in 2010 when Arizona passed it, a decade of proving grounds that show that these models do work better.

Weston Wamp: One of the signature policy wins of the 2018 cycle was born when 26 year old Katie Fahey started a statewide movement that led to 70 people gathering in her home to challenge partisan gerrymandering in Michigan.

Katie Fahey: I made a Facebook post actually that said like, "Hey, I want to end gerrymandering in Michigan. If you want to help, let me know, smiley face."

Weston Wamp:  Might as well call it the Facebook post heard round Michigan. I called up Fahey and she told me the story of ruffling the feathers of almost everyone in the Michigan political establishment until 'Proposal Two' as her cause had come to be known, had gathered the hundreds of thousands of signatures that it needed to ultimately get on the ballot and change their state's constitution. The beauty of Fahey's reform effort is that it was truly nonpartisan.

Katie Fahey:  Well, we tend to have a lot of people who sometimes vote for Democrats, sometimes about for Republicans, and so it just seemed like one of those issues where you know, everybody kind of had been manipulated it at one point or another and we're, we're fed up with it.

Weston Wamp:  The charge of the new commission that Katie's group created wasn't to magically make all the districts fair again. It established logical parameters based on cultural, historical, and economic interests for redistricting moving forward because at the end of the day, the problem as it relates to regular citizens is that congressional districts look like salamanders and that leads to all sorts of problems.

Katie Fahey: One example, in rural Michigan up in the upper peninsula, the Northern part of the state, there's one city where there's not even a road that connects it to any of the other cities in its district. So you literally have to like drive onto the district two or three times to get to this major city within it just because of how it was drawn, which just isn't practical when you're on the ground. When you're one of those people in those communities, it doesn't look that way.

Weston Wamp: Now like all commissions, there are challenges in determining a perfect composition and the most fair appointment process. There is no single solution to this one, but let’s remember, gerrymandering is about political power. As Americans, we should be able to design a process where partisan advantage is not the end all be all of the issue. We should pay attention to communities that share interests, economic interests, or geographic interests. We should pay attention to county lines. There are a host of factors that we should take into account. Ultimately the power to draw the lines is the power to determine who has power. And as I already explained to you, I learned this firsthand as a kid who watched Democrats in our state legislature choose that the congressman to the immediate west of the district my father represented was going to be a Democrat. And people are clearly beginning to figure it out, and that’s why there’s so much energy around independent commissions around the country. Because if we can’t take the politics out of redistricting, it certainly helps to take the politicians out.

Katie Fahey: I had remembered learning about gerrymandering in school. I remember raising my hand and saying “If we know that this isn’t really putting the voters first, why do we let it happen?” and my teacher saying something along the lines of “Well, it’s always been that way.” And I was like, well you know, it doesn’t have to be.

Weston Wamp: Fahey gives a nonsense outsiders perspective on what she saw going on. 

Katie Fahey: When you look at these lines like they're just a political game, then you're treating individual people, individual voters, and citizens like they are just a game piece.

Weston Wamp: With respect to both sides, gerrymandering reminds me of the profound third sentence in our Declaration of Independence. It says "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." There's no doubt that gerrymandering has gone on for the better part of two centuries, but its negative impact has compounded. So instead of clinging to a part of the process, that doesn't work well. Let's alter it.

Next episode, we'll go straight to the heart of secret money in our elections and trace its origins all the way back to the early 20th century.

Thanks for listening to Swamp Stories presented by Issue One, the country's leading political reform organization that unites Republicans, Democrats, and independents to fix our broken political system. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better, rate and review it on iTunes to help us reach more listeners. You can find out more at swampstories.org. I'm your host, Weston Wamp. Thank you to Executive Producer Ethan Rome, Producer William Gray and Editor Parker Tan from Parkerpodcasting.com. Swamp Stories was recorded in Tennessee, edited in Texas, and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

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