Polk County Democrats

Introduction and History

According to conventional wisdom, redistricting turns the idea of democracy on its head, by allowing leaders to choose their voters, instead of the other way around.  It is the process where the makeup of the population-sensitive House of Representatives changes to reflect changes in population.

The Constitution is very clear on the composition of the US Senate: two senators for each state, period.  That means that the population of the state is desregarded, such that states with the smallest and largest populations each have the same number of Senators: two.  That's called the "great compromise," and was the price paid to the small states for their ratification of the Constitution.  It gave the small states influence in the Senate far beyond their population, and that inequality continues to this day.  But it's easy to understand.

Not so in the case of the other half of Congress, the House of Representatives.  The Constitution, it must be admitted, basically messed up on how it set up the House, not only by what it did, but by what it failed to do.  It got the basic principle of establishing a census and apportioning the membership of the House by population right, but from then on it either got things wrong or didn't say anything at all.  For example, it said nothing at all about how the apportioning was to be done, and it took more than a century before Congress finally decided that.  And it said some things (like a 30,000 person per Congressman upper limit) that either had to be changed or just ignored.

But in 1911 Congress stepped in and made an order of things once and for all: it fixed the number of Representatives in the House at 435, and decreed that the Representatives be apportioned among the states using a mathematical method so arcane and unfathomable as to be beyond understanding or review by any but the most determined mathematicians. 

Since 1911, the House has been reapportioned after the census each 10 years, and as states gain or lose significant population, they also gain or lose Representatives in Congress in the same proportion, and therefore electoral votes for President as well.  (The Constitution, in another blunder, set each state's electoral votes for President as equaling its number of Representatives and Senators.)

Every 10 years (in every year ending in "0"), the process begins by carrying out a census.  Zero being an even number, that means that every census year is itself an election year, and thus that there will be two years after it before the next election.  It is during those two years that the redistricting process unfolds in all its glory.

The first step is the mathematical one of parsing the census data to decide the number of Congressional districts for each state.  It's a zero-sum game because of the 435-member limit, meaning that every gain in one state comes at the expense of a loss in another. 

That's the easy part, assuming you can find mathematicians smart enough to understand the formulas, and in 2010 that number turned out to be 12: 12 new districts are to be added to the lucky states, and those 12 are to be carved out of the unlucky ones.

Then the fun part starts, where the individual states create the number of districts the formulas tell them they have, and that is controlled wholly by the imagination of those in charge.

For most states (and for North Carolina), that is in the collective hands of the state legislature, which is to say political hands that are uninterested in mathematical niceties.  When political power is concentrated in one party, the other may depend upon the new districts being unfavorable to its election prospects for the next decade, and with the electronic data available today that process is surgically precise.  Having redistricting in the hands of Republicans is an electoral death-sentence for Democrats in the state.

After the 2010 election, redistricting in North Carolina was in the hands of Republicans. 

With both houses in the legislature firmly Republican  and Democratic Governor Bev Perdue with no veto over redistricting, we can count on being unhappy with the results.  

Our redistricting will just involve redrawing the lines for our same 13 Congressional districts, though.  North Carolina is one of the largest states in the Union and getting bigger every year, but we fell victim to the maddening complexity of the "formulas".  The decision for the location of the 435th and last Congressional seat came down to Minnesota and North Carolina: Minnesota was either going to retain its current eighth seat or lose it to form a new 14th district here. 

By 15,000 people, Minnesota won the battle, and the final seat.  The state of North Carolina has nearly twice as many people in it as Minnesota does, but that has nothing to do with it.  "The Formula" is all, and so we stay at the unlucky 13.  When people tell you that the census matters -- this is what they mean.

Winners and Losers, 2010

Here are the actual changes wrought by the 2010 census, along with earlier predictions of how it would turn out, courtesy of our friends at Swing State Project, an indispensible site for any political junkie:

It was the South and the West that gained all the seats, and the rust-belt North that suffered the losses. 

What Will Happen Now?

The lucky states gaining seats will have to make their existing districts smaller and add one or more new districts to take in the overflow.  Those losing seats must decide which district (or, in the unhappy cases of Ohio and New York, two districts) to cut and then redraw the remaining districts and play musical chairs with the displaced Representatives.  It's the time when Representatives thinking of retiring or running for higher office do so, but often two incumbents end up facing each other in the next election.  It's hardball.

States like North Carolina that came out even can either leave their districts the way they are or redraw them to include different people, and whether or not they decide to redraw depends mostly on who drew them up last time.  The last redistricting in North Carolina was under the control of Democrats, so the Republicans this year will undoubtedly get out their pencils.

The trick for the Republicans will be to try to bleed off their excess voters in their safest districts into neighboring swing districts (or even Democratic ones), without so weakening their safe districts as to put them into play.  That's hard to do, though, and the inside-baseball strategy sessions will be heated affairs and no real predictions can be made. 

One of the things that prevents the politicians from wielding their scalpels too freely is the Voting Rights Act, a federal law that prevents the intentional suppression of minority representation by configuring districts to their disadvantage.  That will certainly be a factor in our grotesquely-Gerrymandered  12th district, and so nothing will likely happen there. 

The politics isn't often so obvious either.  There is the constant tug-of-war between Congressmen in "safe" districts and those whose districts are always battlegrounds, with the battleground Congressmen wanting to bleed off supporters from safe districts into their own, and replace them with opponents they want to get rid of.  The safe Congressmen want none of that, so battle lines get drawn and the results more often than not are a draw. 

Update, January, 2012

The state legislature has enacted the new Congressional districts, and they are shown here. The Department of Justice in Washington has reviewed the map under their powers from the Voting Rights Act, and have signed off on it. The new districts are law.

All analysts have agreed that the Republicans did more damage to Democratic Congressional electoral hopes in North Carolina than anywhere else in the land, and it is entirely possible that we could lose four house seats. The most important result locally is that Polk County will move from the 11th district of Heath Shuler to the 10th district of Republican Patrick McHenry. Shuler, the handwriting clearly on the wall, announced his retirement, and thus the shoes begin to drop.

The new map for NC Senate districts is here, and again, Polk County is moving. We are leaving Hendersonville and Tom Apodaca behind, and moving the to 47th district of Republican Ralph Hice. As with our Congressional District, we're moving east and north.

The new map for the NC House is here, and this time we're staying put: we still join Transylvania and part of Henderson County in the 113th district of Republican Trudi Walend.

When do these changes go into effect? Well, basically now, but no one knows for sure because legal challenges from Democrats are pending. One suit asked the courts to postpone candidate filing and primaries pending further rulings, and that was denied. polkdemocrats.com is conceding the inevitable, and assumes the new districts.

The Issue: Should Redistricting be Political?

An increasing number of states say no, and have taken redistricting out of the hands of elected officials and placed it into the hands of appointed bipartisan commissions who are charged to make the process rational rather than political. polkdemocrats.com does not believe it possible to get politics out of anything, and is cynical to the highest degree toward bipartisan committees of any kind, and so believes that the political will of the voters should be allowed to work even when it is disadvantageous to Democrats.

That is the situation in North Carolina, and nothing can be done about it in terms of this redistricting cycle anyway, but it is an issue that deserves debate and the results in states using the non-political approach should be monitored to see if they result in more-rational redistricting.

Footnotes

"Original Intent"

Most people -- and all the "originalist" Republicans -- don't know that there are parts of the Constitution that we simply ignore, and always have: things that are so wrong and so hard to change that everybody just agrees to pretend they don't exist. 

One of those involves reappportionment, and is in Article 1 Section 2. There, the founding fathers specified that the number of representatives "shall not exceed one for every 30,000" citizens.  No one has ever paid any attention to that, including the Founders themselves, who, in the First Congress in 1789, created districts where Congressmen represented more than 33,000 people each.  That "per people" number rose at every census and redistricting since, and nobody paid any attention to the constitutional 30,000 limit then either, until today the average Congressman represents more than 650,000 people, one of them (in Nevada, which will soon change) more than a million.  If the Constitutional requirement as written today were honored, the House would have more than 10,000 members, as frightening a prospect as could be imagined.

The "original intent" boys like Antonin Scalia have a lot of 'splaining to do, not only about the "original intent" that was later changed by amendments, including the Bill of Rights, that are more important than the Constitution itself, but "original intent" like the 30,000 number that never made any sense and has been ignored by Republicans and Democrats alike for 200 years.

"The Formulas"

Behold the single most-useless information to be found anywhere on polkdemocrats.com:

The formula for determining the priority of a state to be apportioned the next available seat defined by the method of equal proportions is

where P is the population of the state, and n is the number of seats it currently holds before the possible allocation of the next seat. An equivalent, recursive definition is

where n is still the number of seats the state has before allocation of the next, and for n = 1, the initial A₁ is explicitly defined as

Now you know.

The 12th District

The most obvious candidate for Republican redrawing of districts in North Carolina would be the heavily-Democratic 12th District, one of the most grotesquely-Gerrymandered districts in the nation.  It follows the heavily-urban areas along I-85 just to the east of us, and, completely intentionally, has the highest concentration of African-American voters in the state.  It is reliably Democratic, and the Republicans could easily extinguish it by making the shape more coherent and thus diluting out all those Blacks into the surrounding districts and replacing them with non-Blacks.  That probably won't happen, though.

The 12th district is currently held by Mel Watt, the only African-American in the North Carolina delegation, and forcing him out by reapportionment would almost certainly run afoul of the federal Voting Rights Act, with its protection of minority rights.  Moving that many Democrats out of the 12th and into surrounding districts would also have the effect of making those districts more Democratic, which is the last thing the Republicans want to do.

Look for the long, winding, shoestring district to stay like it is...