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Ground War
Ground War
Courts, Commissions, and the Fight over Partisan
Gerrymanders
NICHOLAS GOEDERT
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021925678
ISBN 978–0–19–762663–4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–762662–7 (hbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–762665–8 (epub.)
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197626627.001.0001
For Sumin and Arcadia
Contents
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments
This book has been over a decade in the making, during which the
entire field of redistricting took many unexpected twists and turns,
requiring rewrites and restructurings that sometimes seemed
endless. As with any project of such scope and duration, it would not
have been possible without the help and support of many people
along the way. Those listed here represent only a small sample.
I am first indebted to the late Prof. Roy Schotland, whose
mentorship in election law seminars at Georgetown led me down the
career path of studying the empirical implications of election
institutions. I am thankful to the Princeton University Department of
Politics for their initial encouragement of my project in the early
stages, especially my dissertation advisor, Brandice Canes-Wrone;
my other advisors over the course of my graduate career, including
Nolan McCarty, Aaron Meirowitz, Chris Achen, and Tali Mendelberg;
and all of the American Politics graduate students and faculty who
deepened my development as a scholar, both in my coursework and
at the weekly research seminars where I was given the chance to
present my own ideas and delve into those of my colleagues.
I would like to thank the Department of Political Science, the
College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, and the Policy
Destination Area at Virginia Tech for lending their institutional
support for both this project and my research over the past five
years. I am especially grateful to the empiricist group within our
department, including Aaron Brantley, Karen Hult, Eric Jardine,
Caitlin Jewitt, Jason Kelly, and Karin Kitchens, for their valuable
feedback on my manuscript prospectus and several of the analytical
chapters. Additional thanks to Robert Hildebrand for help with
rendering the book’s graphics and maps, and Conrad Briles for
proofreading.
I am also grateful for the engagement and encouragement of the
participants of a manuscript workshop I held in 2019. Daniel Bowen,
Keith Gaddie, Alex Keena, Nolan McCarty, and Nick Stephanopoulos
each provided thorough critiques of my initial draft that proved
invaluable toward getting me over the hump toward final
submission. And I would like to thank my editor, David McBride, for
his patience and persistence in seeing the book through to review
and publication during a very difficult time.
Most important, I am grateful for the unconditional love and
support of my family throughout my life and during the years spent
on this project, especially my wonderful parents, Jim and JoAnn.
I dedicate this book to my beautiful, kind, and generous wife,
Sumin, who has encouraged me in all aspects of my life every day
for the past five years, and my daughter, Cady, whose birth provided
the ultimate deadline to finish my writing and whose miraculous
growth provided inspiration for me to see it through to the end.
1
Introduction
A Tale of Two Gerrymanders
Pennsylvania, 2001–2010
For the first half of the 2000s, Pennsylvania Republicans might have
believed they had found the perfect gerrymander. At the beginning
of the decade, the Republican-controlled legislature, with assistance
from national party figures such as Karl Rove and Chairman Tom
Davis of the National Republican Congressional Committee, crafted a
map “designed so effectively to change political outcomes in
Pennsylvania that it began to be referred to by Democratic state
legislators as a ‘massacre’ and by a local Harrisburg newspaper as
‘the most partisan congressional gerrymander of this young century,
and among the worst in the last several decades of the earlier
millennium’ ” (Douglas 2016, 199–200). After yielding a 12–7 GOP
majority in the elections seventeen months earlier, the map was
upheld in 2004 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Vieth v. Jubelirer. In
this case, a 5–4 conservative majority held that no standard yet
existed that would allow the courts to fairly adjudicate the harms
caused by partisan gerrymanders.
Yet that same map must not have seemed so perfect to
Republicans in 2006, when Democrats regained control of Congress
by flipping thirty-one seats that included four Republican-crafted
districts in Pennsylvania. While this was a strong night for Democrats
on many fronts, their gains were not spread equally across the
country: Democrats also gained two seats drawn by bureaucrats in
Iowa and two seats drawn by a nonpartisan commission in Arizona,
but the balance of the delegation in California, where the map had
been approved by both parties working in close concert, remained
unchanged.
The Pennsylvania map was aggressive in seeking to maximize the
Republican advantage, eliminating a district in each of Pittsburgh
and Philadelphia and placing six Democrats in districts with other
incumbents. But in drawing such a bold map, the governing party
did not anticipate the partisan shifts that their state would
experience over the decade, particularly as voters in suburban
Philadelphia increasingly identified as Democrats. Few of the
Republican-held seats could be called truly safe: George W. Bush
received 52% of the vote or less in seven of these twelve seats in
the 2000 election. So the Republicans, relying on the moderate party
brand remaining viable in many of the suburban swing seats, were
buried under the Democratic tide of 2006. Four incumbents were
defeated that year, some by scandal and others simply by changing
demographics, with a fifth losing in 2008.
Republicans in Pennsylvania, attempting to win more than two-
thirds of the seats in an evenly matched state, gambled on
assembling swing districts that they hoped to win merely by running
moderates or popular incumbents. So it is unsurprising that things
did not go as planned for Pennsylvania Republicans when the tide
turned against them. Had the mapmakers not been so willing to take
risks, dividing pockets of moderates into Republican districts in order
to eliminate as many Democratic seats as possible, some of their
doomed incumbents might have survived the massacres of 2006 and
2008.
Pennsylvania voters were able to reverse the result of the partisan
gerrymander at the ballot box in 2006 and 2008. But their failure to
achieve relief from the courts in 2004 also ensured that this reversal
was short-lived. The Republican wave of 2010 restored the map to a
five-seat GOP advantage, and this majority was further exaggerated
by another Republican gerrymander in 2012. That year, Republicans
in Pennsylvania won thirteen of the state’s eighteen seats despite
losing the congressional popular vote. Again, Pennsylvania voters
turned to the courts, but this time, the state courts. In 2018’s
League of Women Voters v. Pennsylvania, opponents of partisan
gerrymandering finally won a major court victory. The Pennsylvania
State Supreme Court reversed the congressional map on state
constitutional grounds, and Democrats achieved an even split of the
delegation under the court-drawn map in the 2018 midterm
elections. Nevertheless, this decision narrowly applied only to
Pennsylvania, and when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a series of
challenges to partisan gerrymandering in Whitford, Rucho, and
Benisek, nationwide relief in the court system remained elusive.
Because of the ambiguous lessons we might draw from it, the
Pennsylvania congressional map of the early 2000s has been a
touchstone allowing many scholars to arrive at very different
conclusions about partisan gerrymandering. In their book
Gerrymandering in America, McGann et al. (2016) argue that the
success of Pennsylvania’s map at the Supreme Court in the Vieth
case caused states to feel less constrained about drawing partisan
maps in the next decade, leading to much more aggressive and
successful partisan gerrymanders after the 2010 census. But in his
book Drawing the Lines, Seabrook (2017) uses the backfire of the
same Pennsylvania map in 2006 and 2008 as evidence of inherent
electoral constraints that limit the ultimate effectiveness of partisan
maps.
California, 2001–2010
At the same time that Pennsylvania lawmakers were drawing the
partisan maps that would win in court but backfire at the ballot box,
California legislators were drawing a map that was much less legally
controversial yet arguably just as pernicious and more effective.
During the 1990s, a court-ordered plan kept the partisan balance
close in California for most of the decade, but leftward trends finally
caught up to Republicans in 2000, when Democrats flipped four
Republican districts in that cycle to take a 32–20 advantage in seats.
California gained one seat in the 2000 census, and Democrats held
control of state government. Many expected the party to use this
power to significantly expand their majority.
But the Democrats did not use this opportunity to draw an
aggressively partisan map. Instead, they felt pressure from both the
right and the left to be much more cautious. If they drew a map to
gain as many seats as possible, they risked a Republican-backed
ballot proposition to change the redistricting process and the
prospect of serious primary challenges from state legislators forced
to retire due to legislative term limits. Thus, leaders of the state
congressional delegations of both parties reached an agreement to
draw a map that would ensure the reelection of almost every
incumbent. Over the objections of almost half the Democrats in the
state legislature, the plan passed with roughly even support from
both parties.
While one might expect a map produced by bipartisan
compromise to be a story of triumph for pluralist and deliberative
democracy, those involved in the process describe something else
entirely. Congressman Alan Lowenthal (2019, 4), a California
Assembly member at the time, recounts:
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