Democrats Regret Creating Independent Redistricting Commissions After Supreme Court Ruling | UNW

Not long ago, Democrats had dreams of restoring fairness to America’s grotesquely gerrymandered political maps.

Their party began a major push for independent commissions to draw congressional districts after President Trump and Republicans swept into power in 2017. Democrats, panicked about Republicans’ structural gains after the 2010 census, succeeded in enacting such commissions in Colorado, Michigan and Virginia, while Republicans mostly kept politically minded state legislators in charge of drawing maps in red states.

Now Democrats are finding that their old good-government policies have become bad politics.

Their idealistic push for fairness is, it turns out, no match for the Republicans’ maximalist redistricting effort. The independent commissions that Democrats pushed for eight years ago, along with ones in Washington State and California that predated Mr. Trump’s rise, have complicated the party’s redistricting fight.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday to further weaken the Voting Rights Act, a decision likely to lead to a rush of new maps before the 2028 election if not this year, blue-state Democrats are finding themselves regretting that they had sought to give away redistricting power to outside commissions.

“One of the lessons of the Trump era is a failure of imagination about how many norms they would break,” said Phil Weiser, the Democratic attorney general of Colorado who backed his state’s independent redistricting referendum in 2018 and is now supporting a ballot initiative to undo it. “You could say we should have been thinking ahead. We didn’t foresee this.”

At Mr. Trump’s urging, Republican lawmakers in the last year have redrawn congressional maps to help their party in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina. Democrats responded in California and Virginia by asking voters to undo past referendums that created independent redistricting bodies. In both blue states, voters agreed.

Then came the events of this week, when the Supreme Court ruling appeared to give Republicans new opportunities and Florida Republicans passed a new map designed to flip four Democratic seats.

Some Democrats who backed new redistricting commissions in the 2010s now look back on those efforts as tying one hand behind their back for the future.

“It seemed like a pitchfork moment. It did seem good,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The lesson is that there are some states that are never going to be able to do this. If you’re not going to do it nationally, you’re going to have an unlevel playing field.”

The California and Virginia referendums to let Democrats seize redistricting power represented mea culpas about political idealism that could spread to other blue states.

One of the nation’s oldest redistricting commissions is in Washington State, where voters in 1983 adopted a provision to shift map-drawing power from elected officials. Now Shasti Conrad, the state’s Democratic Party chairwoman, said that it could be undone if Democrats were to flip a handful of seats in the State Legislature and seize supermajority control next year.

If they do, Ms. Conrad said, Washington voters are likely to be asked in 2027 to allow lawmakers to enact a new congressional map. Now, Democrats hold eight of 10 House seats in the state.

“People have been asking, ‘What can Washington do with redistricting?’” Ms. Conrad said. “They’re seeing other states like Virginia do it, so why can’t we?”

Democratic regrets over their redistricting hurdles tend to quickly morph into the party’s most reliable political stance over the last decade: blaming Mr. Trump.

“Our efforts in Colorado and elsewhere rebalanced the national congressional map,” said John Bisognano, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which pushed for independent redistricting commissions before the 2020 census. “This current redistricting crisis is an inevitable response from Donald Trump and an authoritarian-curious political party facing accountability from the voters.”

The vestigial good-government ethos of Democratic voters was noticeable in the campaigns to redraw maps in California and Virginia. In both places, Democratic proponents emphasized that their proposals were meant to be temporary, with the previous voter-approved commissions set to return after the 2030 census, when Mr. Trump is out office. The Colorado proposal backed by Mr. Weiser, who is now running for governor, would also expire after 2030.

“We cannot just sit back and let this happen to the country,” said Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state — who, like Mr. Weiser, backed the 2018 amendment and now supports redrawing the state’s map in time for 2028. “I very much support the concept of independent redistricting and I still support it, not when it means being a death pact for democracy.”

In Colorado, Mr. Weiser and others who supported independent redistricting eight years ago now view it as an unforced error. Indeed, one of the Democratic strategists who helped orchestrate the 2018 referendum is now working for the group vying to undo it.

“In retrospect, yes, it was a mistake,” said Curtis Hubbard, a former Denver Post editorial page editor who has been involved with both Colorado efforts. “We underestimated just how far Trump was willing to go.”