I can predict with confidence who will win Virginia’s special election on redistricting on April 21: Fairness will win.
I know this because both sides are claiming to be the fair side. We have “Virginians for Fair Elections” on the “yes” side and “Virginians for Fair Maps” on the “no” side.
As to which flavor of fairness will be victorious, that’s a different matter, although if voters find themselves confused, there’s good reason. The great political analyst William Shakespeare dealt with this centuries ago when he wrote: “Fair is foul and foul is fair!”
U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, D-Alexandria, recently told NBC News: “We have to effectively make the case that even though this seems unfair in Virginia, it’s totally fair for America, for those of us who believe that taking back the House is the most significant thing we can do to stop Donald Trump.”
That’s actually a pretty pithy quote of what’s at stake in Virginia: Republicans see redistricting as unfairness, Democrats see redistricting as a way to counter Trump.
More to the point, the argument for redistricting is that Virginia needs to counter what other states have done at Trump’s behest to gerrymander their maps to create more Republican seats. At the moment, The New York Times calculates that nationally, this mid-decade redistricting (or “re-redistricting” as some like to call it) has so far allowed Republicans to pick up two or three extra seats. If that number seems small to you, it’s because California’s redistricting to produce five Democratic seats canceled out Texas’s redistricting that should produce five Republican seats. After that, it’s been just one or two seats here or there. If Trump thought he would use redistricting to produce a big shift of seats, he’s already been proven wrong. He might shift some, but only at the margins.
Now, here comes some math that hasn’t gotten much attention: If Virginia approves redistricting April 21 (and if the proposed map performs as expected), Democrats would actually pull ahead in the national redistricting tit-for-tat.
The proposed map is intended to knock out four of the state’s five Republican House members (Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire and Rob Wittman, leaving only Morgan Griffith). If The New York Times tally of +2 or +3 Republican seats is right, then Virginia’s +4 Democratic seats would turn that into either +1 or +2 Democratic.
If no more states redraw their lines, Trump’s gambit would have truly failed.
There might be other states, though. The Florida legislature gavels into special session April 20, a day before the Florida vote, with the goal of redrawing its map. Florida could potentially produce two to four more Republican seats, which would tip the scale back to Republicans — narrowly. Some Republicans, though, have started to worry that drawing four new seats could be too many; that such a map would make Republican majorities too thin and leave them vulnerable to unexpected results.
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It seems fair — there’s that word again — to wonder what impact the convergence of these two events might have on each other. When Virginians see the Florida legislature going into special session on April 20, will that prompt some people in Virginia to turn out on April 21 to vote yes who might otherwise have stayed home? If Florida legislators see Virginia reject redistricting, will that cause them to stand down — or forge ahead and expand the Republican advantage? If, conversely, they see Virginia pass redistricting to produce a Democratic lead nationally, will that prompt Florida legislators to draw as many Republican seats as they can?
If we’re going to talk fairness, we also need to acknowledge the inherent unfairness we already have in congressional maps — maybe not in Virginia, where the party mix reflects the state’s partisan divide, but elsewhere.
In our federal system, the U.S. Constitution leaves the business of drawing congressional lines to each state, and many of them gerrymander. That means any mid-decade gerrymandering, whichever way it tilts, is built on an uneven map.
Princeton University has produced a Redistricting Report Card that grades each state on how fair its lines are. It’s based on math, so if you want to read about Reock scores or Polsby-Popper scores on compactness, or see how Princeton uses the Cube Law and Normative Symmetry to assess partisanship, here you go. For the rest of us, we’ll go with Princeton’s letter grades just as if we were back in school.
Eight states didn’t get a score for their congressional lines because they just have one U.S. House member, or, in the case of some states with more than one member, they were just too geographically small for the math to work.
After that, 18 states get an “A” for fair maps — Virginia is one of those.
Five get B’s.
Four get C’s.
Three get D’s and 12 flunk with F’s.
There aren’t many political trends at play here: Democratic and Republican states, if given the chance, gerrymander with equal abandon. Red Texas got an F even before it redrew its lines to make them even more Republican, but blue Illinois got an F, too.
In the current re-redistricting, what we’ve generally seen are gerrymandered states gerrymander even more enthusiastically. Read into this whatever you will: All but one of the states creating more Republican seats were already D’s and F’s. Missouri is the exception — it was an A; it doesn’t have a new score yet. Meanwhile, the states squeezing out more Democratic seats are ones that had avoided gerrymandering before, but are now embracing it. California was a B and Virginia was an A. If the prospect of redistricting is causing more angst in Virginia (and I don’t know that it is), it’s likely because of that potential A to F shift.
What would the U.S. House look like if there was no gerrymandering anywhere? We can’t really say — there are two many variables — but it would be different in at least some ways. Texas would have more Democrats; Illinois would have more Republicans. We’d also likely have more competitive seats, although not as many as we might think. Look at Virginia, with its A rating. Even with the current map, more than half of Virginia’s 11 seats are out of range of the other party simply because of residential patterns. You simply can’t draw a Republican district in Northern Virginia or a Democratic one in Southwest Virginia.
Would it be possible to achieve some national consensus to produce non-gerrymandered maps everywhere? It’s possible, in the same way that it’s possible that space aliens will land in my backyard and use their death rays to mow my grass. However, it’s also about as likely. There is insufficient motivation — and entirely too much temptation involved. Too many people who pine for such a day are naive about human nature.
The best we can hope for is to hope that the current re-redistricting fever will break. What would it take for that to happen? Last week, I moderated a debate on redistricting at the law school at the College of William & Mary. The two debaters — Brian Cannon for the “no” side, Del. Marcus Simon for the “yes” side — came to predictably conflicting conclusions. Cannon, who previously led the push for a redistricting commission in 2020, said we could help slow all this by voting down this amendment. Simon, a Democrat from Fairfax County, said Virginia needed to show all these other states that Democrats are willing to fight back. Only that, he said, would cause those Republican states to stand down.
Who’s right? Who knows? Who has made the best argument for fairness? That’s what you’ll decide April 21.
Want more politics and analysis?
On the latest Cardinal podcast, I talk with host Dutchie Jessee about how April will be a consequential month in Virginia politics.
Find that and all our podcasts here or wherever you get your podcasts.
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