 | | Texas officials are being sued for failing to draw Latino-majority districts in urban areas of Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, as well as in South Texas.LM Otero/Associated Press |
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Republican gerrymandering efforts used to focus mainly on diluting the influence of cities. Legislators could cram urban Democrats into one or two districts to preserve the surrounding districts for Republicans, or divide them among many districts in which they would be outvoted. |
That hasn't stopped. But redistricting maps approved this year show the battle lines radiating outward to the suburbs, where Republicans are trying to build levees against an increasingly Democratic and multiracial tide. |
What's striking is how thoroughly the shifting demographics of the suburbs have changed the task for mapmakers: The suburbs, historically used by Republicans to defend against the electoral threat of cities, are now themselves a threat. |
"You used to crack the urban areas and join them to the suburbs, and now you're having to crack the suburbs and join them to rural areas," said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. |
Take Texas' 13th Congressional District, which extends 450 miles from the Texas Panhandle to just outside the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, and which the Republican-controlled State Legislature redrew this year to include increasingly blue suburbs north of Dallas and Fort Worth. The district has always been Republican and will remain so; its new Democratic residents are far too few to make a difference. And dissolving them into the red — and white — seas of the Panhandle enabled Republicans to cram the rest of the Dallas-Fort Worth region's Democrats into three districts instead of four. |
Or look at the 22nd Congressional District, south of Houston. It was previously centered on Fort Bend County, which is home to Asian, Black and Latino communities and voted for President Biden. The district's new lines encompass rural areas to the southwest, putting it out of Democratic reach after two election cycles in which a Democrat, Sri Preston Kulkarni, was competitive. Much of Fort Bend County will move into the Seventh District, already held by a Democrat. |
In some cases, Republicans have ceded cities in order to shore up the suburbs. Previously, Texas legislators split Travis County — which includes Austin — among five districts, four of them red. This year, they gave Austin two Democratic districts in exchange for safe Republican seats all around it. |
Republicans are also taking aim at suburbs in Georgia, where Democrats flipped two Atlanta-area House districts — the Sixth in 2018 and the Seventh in 2020 — that were once Republican strongholds. Those Democratic gains stemmed in part from political shifts among white suburbanites but also from Black, Asian and Latino population growth. |
Under maps passed by Georgia's Republican-led legislature, the bluest parts of both districts would be stuffed into the Seventh, while rural territory in northwestern Georgia would neutralize the remainder of the suburbs and make the Sixth District safely Republican. |
Allison Riggs, a co-executive director and chief counsel for voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, emphasized North Carolina. There, legislators packed urban voters into one district each in Charlotte and Raleigh, and parceled out the increasingly Democratic and decreasingly white suburbs among several. |
"You know in these counties and in these areas, there are enough votes to create new opportunities for voters of color, new opportunities for Democrats," Riggs said. "And instead they're carved up like a pizza pie." |
Neil Makhija, the executive director of the advocacy group Indian American Impact, noted that growing Asian American communities had helped turn many suburbs blue, including in Georgia and North Carolina last year, when they voted in larger numbers than they had in previous elections. He expressed concern about the new district lines around Dallas and Fort Worth that link suburban Indian American communities to rural counties along the Oklahoma border. |
Republicans in North Carolina and Texas have said they drew their maps in a "race blind" manner, without looking at racial data. And nationally, Adam Kincaid, the director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, told my colleague Nick Corasaniti, "What you see is reflective of the more even distribution of Republican and right-leaning voters across wider geographic areas." |
But Republican gerrymandering is following Democrats as they spread out more widely into the suburbs — and race, partisanship and geography are so deeply intertwined that the effects of redistricting based on any one of them are not necessarily meaningfully different. |
The "G.O.P. can pack or crack our communities and claim they aren't racial gerrymandering, but instead using partisan indicators," Makhija said, adding that his group was also closely watching redistricting in Democratic states like New York and California. "There's no difference to us, however, because the end result is the same: We lose our voice in the process." |
Maps that disadvantage people of color are not unique to Republican states. Groups that promote better racial representation in politics have objected, including with lawsuits, to districts drawn by Democrats in Illinois, and Democrats are also expected to gerrymander aggressively in New York. But most of the gerrymandering nationally is Republican, both because Republicans control the drawing of far more districts than Democrats do and because demographics are shifting in Democrats' favor. |
In lawsuits, advocacy groups are still focusing largely on cities, where they have the strongest cases under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It requires mapmakers to draw opportunity districts — where a racial minority group is a majority of the voting-age population — under certain conditions when demographics make it possible. |
In the Texas suburbs, Latino communities are growing but are generally not large enough to create congressional opportunity districts, said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation at the Latino civil rights organization MALDEF, which is suing Texas officials for failing to draw Latino-majority districts in urban areas of Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, as well as in South Texas. |
The targets in the suburbs, she said, are more often multiracial communities where no single racial group could form a majority in a congressional district, but multiple racial groups with aligned interests and political preferences could. |
But state legislative districts can be a different story. |
Thomas A. Saenz, the president and general counsel of MALDEF, cited a state Senate seat held by a white Democrat in Illinois, where Democrats are aggressively gerrymandering. That district — currently the 12th, but renumbered as the 11th on the new map — is in the western suburbs of Chicago and gained a Latino majority over the past decade, and legislators redrew it in a way that eliminated the majority, a move MALDEF is challenging. |
But more often than not, gerrymanders in 2021 look like Texas' or North Carolina's: densely packed Democratic districts within cities and, outside the city limits, convoluted lines radiating into the countryside, welding racially diversifying suburbs to whiter and more conservative rural America. |
"You're really starting to see the emergence of a new multiracial America, the politics of the future," Li, of the Brennan Center for Justice, said. "And instead of deciding to compete for that future, Republicans have decided to kick the can down the road and try to gerrymander their way out of their problem." |
 | | A decision by the Supreme Court in the Mississippi case is likely to come in June or July, months before crucial midterm elections.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times |
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The politics of abortion are poised to intensify. |
With the Supreme Court now looking likely to weaken or overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, activists and both political parties are bracing for a new battle over one of the country's longest-running cultural divides. |
State lawmakers, not Supreme Court justices, would largely hold the decision-making power over abortion and determine the ease or difficulty of obtaining one. Many legislators would be forced to argue over the most intimate details of transvaginal sonograms, conception and when exactly life begins. Newer issues, like fights over telemedicine and abortion pills, could gain fresh political momentum, as patients seek out ways to circumvent restrictions by managing their own abortions. |
In the aftermath of the oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Wednesday in the Mississippi case, both sides appeared to agree on at least one thing. |
"This could be an important point, a seismic shift in the politics of this issue," said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which supports anti-abortion candidates and campaigns against abortion rights supporters in races across the country. |
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