Will Redistricting Shape the Midterms? - with Jonathan Rodden and Sam Wang

You Might Be Right

Former Tennessee governors Bill Bredesen and Bill Haslam explore the impact of redistricting and gerrymandering on the upcoming midterm elec

Key takeaways

• Geography itself can create partisan imbalances—urban concentration of one party naturally leads to disproportionate seat gains even without gerrymandering.
• Procedural fairness (e.g., using neutral criteria like county lines) doesn't guarantee proportional outcomes, complicating the search for 'fair' maps.

Main topics

• Redistricting process and its political implications
• Gerrymandering and geographic concentration of voters

Notable quotes

If we don't like the job they do, we should be able to turf them out. That's competition. And gerrymandering fundamentally goes against that.

Conclusion

While redistricting remains deeply flawed due to entrenched political incentiv

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) This game of all-out, complete gerrymandering, it will make everyone unhappy. But if things get really bad for both parties, that's the world in which I could see a bipartisan compromise emerging. Speaker 2 (0:12) What we want is representatives who are responsive to us. And one way they are responsive is the threat of turfing them out of office. If we don't like the job they do, we should be able to turf them out. That's competition. And gerrymandering fundamentally goes against that. Speaker 1 (0:31) Welcome to You Might Be Right, a place for civil conversations about tough topics, hosted by former Tennessee governors Bill Bredesen and Bill Haslam. I'm Marianne Wanamaker, Dean of the Baker School at the University of Tennessee, where members of our producer circle make this show possible. To learn more about our work, visit youmightberight.org. Speaker 3 (0:56) Phil, good to be back with you. Are you ready for this one? I am. And honestly, this is one subject where I don't think either of us has to reach very far. We've just lived through an example of this. Our Speaker 5 (1:08) own state just went through a mid-decade redraw a few months ago. But before we get going, I have some history of trivia for you. Do you know where the name gerrymandering came from? Speaker 3 (1:19) From someone named Jerry. Speaker 5 (1:23) Your half partial credit is... And Elbridge, but it's actually he said his name, Gary. Gary. Elbridge Gary. He was like us. He was a governor of Massachusetts. Unlike us, he signed the Declaration of Independence. But in 1812, he redid the voting districts in Massachusetts. And when he did it, one cartoonist said it looked like a salamander. And so gerrymander, gerry. came from, or gerrymander came from combining his name with this look of a salamander. But next time you're at a cocktail party and somebody complains about gerrymandering, say, well, actually, it's gerrymandering. Speaker 3 (2:00) I'll just tell them that I know this person who was a history major in college. Speaker 5 (2:05) And Speaker 3 (2:05) knows a Speaker 5 (2:05) lot of worthless knowledge. And it's just, you know, he's Speaker 3 (2:08) dynamite at cocktail parties with this stuff. Well, you know, this topic has really exploded this year. It used to be something that happened. every 10 years or something like that, and after the census, and many people never thought about it in between, and that's just not true anymore. Speaker 5 (2:25) No, Texas redrew its map. California quickly responded. You know, a red state redrew, then a blue state, California kind of played tit for tat on that. And then the big difference changer was when the Supreme Court disallowed or just overruled the Voting Rights Act, which totally changed the way that states could draw their districts. Speaker 3 (2:49) Well, it means that Nashville here now has three members of Congress and so on. But you have this chain reaction happening. One state moves and another moves, and the court shifts the ground under everybody's feet. And it's all happening right before this midterm election that we're really in control of the House and conceivably the Senate is at stake. So it's a very high-stakes issue. Speaker 5 (3:15) It is. What makes this different from the other topics? You know, we've covered things like filibuster, National Guard, presidential power is those feel a little removed. This impacts, I mean, a whole lot of Tennesseans who obviously woke up one morning with in a different Speaker 3 (3:29) congressional district. Right. I'm I'm I'm among them. You know, it's also a strange thing to explain to people. Politicians are supposed to answer to the voters. With redistricting, in a lot of states, it's the politician who gets to pick their voters, which is not exactly, I think, what the founders intended. It seems backward, and Speaker 5 (3:51) I Speaker 3 (3:51) think most people kind of feel that in their gut. So that's what we want to Speaker 5 (3:54) dig into today. Most people feel like, well, this doesn't feel like how it should work. And we have two guests who've spent their careers studying this. And I think the important thing for me to hear from them is this. It's the people who get elected who get to ultimately decide who decides where the district boundaries go. And so how do you change a system where the people in office now are there because of the current way it works? So that's Speaker 3 (4:22) a very practical question I want to hear. I think this should be a good session. I'm looking forward to hearing from both these people. Let's get on with it. Here we go. Bill, I want to introduce our first guest today, Jonathan Rodden, who's a professor of political science at Stanford. Jonathan spent his career studying how political geography shapes representation, works that culminated in a 2019 book, Why Cities Lose the Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide. In addition, he served as an expert witness in multiple court cases related to voting rights and redistricting, written amicus briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court, and drawn redistricting plans that were implemented by the courts. So, Jonathan, welcome to You Might Be Right. Thank Speaker 4 (5:05) you. Speaker 3 (5:05) Great to be with you. I want to just start out with, I guess, with this question. There's a lot of people who are concerned about what's going on with redistricting, but it's not clear to me what a fair map is. What do you think a fair district map is? Is it about competitive elections or communities of interest or respecting political subdivisions? What is a fair map? Speaker 4 (5:31) Yeah, I think that's a question that no one can really agree on, and that's part of the problem, right? We can think about a fair map as one where 50 % of the votes gives a party 50 % of the seats. So we could think about it purely in terms of outcome and something that gets us closer to our, you know, reasonably close to proportionality. But that's something that makes less sense in a less competitive state. It's something that kind of intuitively makes sense in a place like Pennsylvania. But in a state like Tennessee, it's kind of unclear. When I think about vote share and seat share, well, what is the correct democratic seat share in a state like Tennessee? So another very different way to think about fairness is just, is the procedure that was used to draw the districts something that we would see as fair? So we can think about procedural and substantive fairness as two very different things. And I think different people who advocate changes in the redistricting process have very different views of this. Speaker 5 (6:30) So I think most of us assume it's, you know, who holds the pin that makes the big difference here. I know you think that we underestimate the impact of geography on this. Tell us a little bit about your thought behind that. Speaker 4 (6:45) Yeah, that's one of the things, you know, I've in some ways changed my mind about over time. I came into this, it really focused a bit more on some other countries and then came around to think about the United States. I was interested in the fact that in so many places that use winner-take-all districts, really ever since the Industrial Revolution, we've had this concentration of votes. for parties of the left in urban places or places where there were factories in the early days. And that really had a big impact on the way that votes translated into seats. And the US was always a kind of an annoying case for me because the districts were drawn by incumbent politicians in ways that they were attempting to achieve partisan gains. So I had to come up with ways of trying to understand what the U.S. would look like if we didn't have partisan gerrymandering. And that's how I got interested in using computer simulations. And one of the things we then discovered is that there are lots of states in the U.S. where if you let the computer draw the districts in a way that many would say is procedurally fair, where we are looking at, you know, observing county boundaries and city boundaries and minimizing splits and things like that, we would end up with a set of districts that were really beneficial to the Republicans and would kind of look like a gerrymander, but in fact was really more the outgrowth of geography. Speaker 5 (8:11) And why is that? If you let the computer draw it that way, why would it benefit Republicans? Speaker 4 (8:18) So it's something that it's not true everywhere and it's kind of it varies from state to state but the basic logic is that if you think about a state like Wisconsin where the Democrats are very concentrated in in Milwaukee and in Madison and if you draw districts in a way that you say you you won't split the city of Milwaukee you would end up with maybe one or two Democratic seats in a state that is really very close to 50-50 because of the concentration of Democrats. Now, if you allowed yourself to split Milwaukee in a certain way, you might get a different outcome. But the basic logic is that when Democrats are very concentrated, they end up with too many of their supporters in too few seats. Speaker 3 (9:10) I want to ask a little bit of a background question here. Speaker 3 (9:16) What did the founders, what would their opinion be about how districts should be drawn? I mean, they certainly didn't address that directly except to want states to have representation proportional to population. What would the founders say about redistricting? Speaker 4 (9:35) I think that's one of the interesting fights that we're going to continue to have. I think everyone's going to be able to come up with their own views on that. But the idea of drawing small, single-member, winner-take-all districts wasn't necessarily clear, I think. And it was in the early era of the republic, there were times when states used at-large representation schemes and so forth. So it wasn't clear to me that winner-take-all districts were necessarily... envisioned as the only way to achieve representation. Speaker 3 (10:08) Well I also think, I mean, the one man one vote that we all sort of take as gospel now I think is a relatively recent innovation in the country. Speaker 4 (10:17) Yeah. So we had counties for units of representation that were kind of meaningful to folks. And so those were really used as when you look at old redistricting maps in the US going back over time, the counties were really used as the building blocks, which led to massive asymmetries in the size of the districts, which didn't really get resolved until a set of Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s, Baker versus Carr and others. Speaker 5 (10:41) And then just to confuse the issue even more, when the Supreme Court made its ruling on the Voting Rights Act this year, that threw another layer of either confusion or maneuverability into it, if you will. Talk to our listeners about just how the Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act impacted redistricting. Speaker 4 (11:04) Yes, it was the case prior to that ruling that it created a real constraint on how districts could be drawn. So that if there was a place where there was a concentration of minority voters that could be the subject of a winner-take-all district, that it was necessary to draw. that type of a district. And so what that meant, to be very clear, in a place like Tennessee, splitting up Memphis was not something that would have been among the options. Now, splitting up Nashville was an option because there was not a sufficiently large concentration of black voters. The same thing was true in Kansas City. There was never really, the Voting Rights Act didn't really have much to do with whether or not it's possible to split up Kansas City. But there are