Ian: Bad maps are breaking America

Maybe the big problem in American politics is not that voters are too angry, too polarized, too cynical, too online, or too stupid to understand what is going on.

Maybe the big problem is that in too many places now and for the foreseeable future, voters do not actually get to choose their politicians anymore. Politicians are choosing their voters.

In my view, that is what gerrymandering is: the quiet crime underneath all the loud crimes. Imagine people in suits and ties, calmly and quietly committing massive wire fraud, while the poor sap wearing the ski mask and sticking his gun in a bank teller’s face gets all the attention and a twentieth of the money.

Everyone should be furious right now. Not just Democrats. Not just Republicans. Voters. Human beings. Citizens, all of us. The allegedly important people in this whole arrangement.

If you want to get to the bottom of why Congress is broken, why politicians are untouchable, why extremists thrive, why corruption survives, why so many elected officials are auditioning for cable news instead of representing actual human beings with jobs and bills and insurance problems, start with the maps.

Bad maps are the big problem that make all the little problems possible; and it’s getting a lot worse.

This year’s redistricting arms race started when President Trump pushed Republicans in Texas to redraw their congressional map in the middle of the decade to try to squeeze more Republican seats out of it. The message was simple: we are doing this now, we do not care how it looks, and if you do not like it, you can go to hell.

Then came the answer.

California answered. Virginia answered. Other states started looking for ways to answer. Last month, I spent a lot of airtime talking about Virginia, where voters approved a new congressional map that is, honestly, an extreme partisan gerrymander whose only purpose is to help Democrats and hurt Republicans. In a purple, swingy, fairly evenly divided state, the new map could leave Republicans with just one congressional seat out of eleven. One. That is not balanced. That is not fair. If I were a rural Republican voter in Virginia, I would be furious.

But Virginia was never the whole story. Virginia was retaliation. Virginia was the return fire. Virginia was one party picking up the same ugly weapon the other party had just clocked them in the head with.

And then, as they have done so often in the last ten years, the Supreme Court poured gasoline on the whole thing.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, the one that created a second majority-Black district after years of litigation over whether Black voters in Louisiana were being denied fair representation. Black Louisianians make up roughly a third of the state’s population, but for years had only one majority-Black congressional district out of six. Lower courts had said that likely violated the Voting Rights Act, so the state drew a second majority-Black district. Then that map got challenged as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, and the Supreme Court sided with the challengers.

By the way, the plaintiff in that case, Bert Callais, is an election conspiracist and 2020 denier who was at the Capitol on January 6th. But I digress.

The Callais decision is not just about Louisiana. It is giving Republican-led Southern states a green light to redraw maps and weaken or eliminate Democratic-leaning districts where Black voters have been able to elect candidates of their choice. Tennessee did not wait around. On Thursday, its GOP-dominated legislature passed a new bad map that erases the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, centered around Memphis, splitting Shelby County into three Republican-leaning districts.

The Tennessee NAACP has already filed a lawsuit challenging the new map, we’ll see where it goes. The backlash to the backlash is building and nobody knows where it’s taking us.

South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and others have entered the chat. The redistricting war is not slowing down. In the former Confederate states, it is metastasizing. State courts are likely to be pulled into a new wave of fights over gerrymandering and voting rights in the aftermath of Callais.

And let’s be very clear: both parties gerrymander when they get the chance.

Democrats do it. Republicans do it. Virginia was not some beautiful expression of democratic virtue. It was retaliation. It was escalation. It was one party saying: if you want to bring a gun to a knife fight, do not act scandalized when the other guy picks up a gun too.

But there is also a difference between saying “both sides do it” and pretending both sides have treated fixing it the same way.

Democrats, nationally, have at least tried to make anti-gerrymandering reform part of their agenda. They have pushed for independent redistricting commissions and federal limits on partisan gerrymandering. Republicans have blocked those efforts. So yes, everybody is swimming in the sewage, but only one side has spent serious energy trying to drain the tank.

That does not make Democratic gerrymanders good. It makes them predictable.

If you tell one party the rules no longer matter, eventually the other party stops pretending the rules matter too. If you make democracy a dirty-trick contest, eventually the other side gets good at dirty tricks. And then everyone loses.

This is why the maps matter so much.

Bad maps create safe seats, and safe seats create politicians who are more afraid of a primary challenge than a general election. That means they are not worried about normal voters. They are worried about the loudest, angriest, most ideological voters in their own party. They are worried about activists, donors, influencers, cable news hits, and whatever rabid online mob is currently chewing through the furniture.

Bad maps are how you get extremism.

Bad maps mean representatives do not have to persuade a real coalition of voters. They have to survive the base. They do not have to solve problems. They have to perform loyalty. They do not have to bring home results. They have to produce content.

Bad maps are how you get gridlock.

Bad maps mean politicians can ignore broad public opinion because their real election is decided in a district custom-built to protect them. They can vote against things their constituents actually want. They can lie. They can grandstand. They can turn government into theater. And unless they anger the most intense faction inside their own party, they’ll probably be fine.

Bad maps are how you get corruption.

People love to talk about term limits. I get it. It feels satisfying. Throw the bums out. Hit reset. Drain the swamp. But I have said this a million times before and I will keep saying it: you do not need term limits if you have competitive elections. Competitive elections are term limits. Real elections are term limits. Accountability is term limits.

But if the map is rigged, that accountability is nothing but Soviet-style bull, and always will be.

Louisiana knows this better than most places.

We have enough problems with poverty, insurance, infrastructure, crime, education, coastal collapse, energy policy, health outcomes, and public trust. We do not need a congressional map where Louisiana voters are treated like pieces instead of people.

This is what makes Callais so dangerous. It does not fix the map problem. It makes the map problem harder to solve.

The Court says states cannot rely too heavily on race when drawing districts. But race and politics are deeply intertwined in Louisiana because race and politics are deeply intertwined in American history. That is not some weird woke theory. That is the story of the place we call home. That is why the Voting Rights Act exists in the first place.

So when courts say states must protect minority voting power but also must not consider race too much while doing it, they are asking mapmakers to perform delicate surgery with a chainsaw. Then they act shocked when the patient just keeps losing blood.

And when the number of Black people holding elected office in the South collapses over the next few cycles, nobody should pretend it happened by accident. It will be easy to show that it happened because white politicians wanted it that way. Their greedy little hands are already crowding the cookie jar.

But the answer to all this is so, so simple: voters should choose their representatives in competitive, fair districts drawn by independent commissions, not by politicians protecting themselves or their party.

That should not be radical. That should be the kind of democracy you can explain with crayons. But in the stupid times we live in, our leaders have managed to turn “let voters have fair elections” into some impossible philosophical riddle.

It is not impossible. It is just inconvenient for people who benefit from the current system.

The Tennessee map is ugly. The Virginia map is ugly. The Texas play is ugly. The Louisiana mess is ugly. The national redistricting arms race is ugly.

But the ugliest thing is the shrug. The “meh.” The idea that this is just how politics works. The idea that voters should accept being packed, cracked, sliced, sorted, and stapled into districts designed to predetermine outcomes.

No.

Bad maps are not some technical problem for election lawyers and political nerds. Bad maps are why everything else is broken. They are why politicians do not listen. They are why Congress cannot function. They are why extremists get rewarded. They are why compromise gets punished. They are why people lose faith in government and then, naturally, the people who broke the government point to the wreckage and say, “Look, see? Government cannot work, so you have to vote for me.”

Very convenient little scam.

And the lesson for voters is the same as it has always been: do not let them distract you with the little problems while they rig the big one.

Because bad maps are where the rot starts. Bad maps are how they keep getting away with it.

Bad maps are the big problem that make all the little problems possible.