Making lemonade from the lemons of mid-decade redistricting

With federal redistricting reform collapsed, and the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act, now is the time for a new and innovative strategy

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Now that the peril of mid-decade redistricting has shown its fearsome face, threatening to further unravel America’s faltering democracy, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on how we arrived here. The period 2025-26 may end up being the year US democracy crashes like a meteorite slamming into a house in Georgia. Historians may one day look back and mark this time as Year 1 of American Post-Democracy.

If so, historians will give Donald Trump and his MAGA movement the blame, but in truth the slide toward post-democracy actually began some years before. In many ways it was preordained, because this is a natural evolution of America’s winner-take-all, “if you win, I lose” electoral system. The problem has never been simply one of who draws the district lines. Once your representative democracy is based on winner-take-all districts, you have divided the participants into winners and losers and made the contests all-or-nothing. You have upped the partisan ante and turned the act of politics – which should be about managing conflict, solving problems and providing broad representation as a vehicle toward that mission – into one of raw, naked political power.

Now stir into the cauldron the increasingly dominant communication technologies of our times, digital media platforms with their AI algorithms and psychographic profiles of each one of us, which facilitate the targeting and amplification of sensationalized misinformation, deep fakes and conspiracy scaremongering at the flick of a computer mouse. How could such a political and communication ecosystem, in which one side in an election wins representation and all other sides lose, not foster toxic division, bitter acrimony and a most un-civil war?

Amidst all the ink and electrons reporting on the partisan divisions that gnaw at America’s soul, what has been missing is due recognition of how extreme policy positions and failure to compromise are incited by certain fundamental realities of our winner-take-all system. When that is combined with the new technologies for virally spreading toxic misinformation, consensus-building and sense-making among different political tribes becomes nearly impossible.

The fundamental realities of our dilemma

The first fundamental reality is simply demographics -- where people live, and how partisan demographic tribalism naturally lines up along regional lines. In this era of the 49-49 nation and the infamous Red vs Blue America map, the nation has balkanized along regional lines with heavy partisan overtones. Like other large winner-take-all democracies, such as the UK, India and Canada, entire regions of the US have become one-party fiefdoms.

The Democrats control the cities, most of the coasts and a small chunk of the Midwest and Southwest, while the GOP dominates the South, the Plains, the Mountain West and most of the sparse flyover zones between the coasts. While a picture is worth a thousand words, the ominous-looking Red vs Blue map barely begins to encapsulate the consequences of these partisan-laden demographics.

This hard-wired reality is not something that an independent redistricting commission (IRC) will ever be able to fix. While IRCs have their merit if you must draw winner-take-all district lines, they do not address the deep underlying defects of the electoral system that are driving US democracy over the cliff. This reality also cannot be effectively fixed by single-winner ranked choice voting (RCV) used within the legislative districts. While ranked ballots are a wonder in how they liberate voters to vote for the candidates they really like without worrying about spoilers, and incentivize candidates and political parties to reach across partisan lines and build coalitions, at the end of the day if the RCV system used retains the winner-take-all districts, then that democracy will struggle from all the toxicities that come with winner-take-all (though RCV is by far the best method for electing mayors, governors and other executive offices).

Drawing racialized districts was a temporary fix that eventually backfired

There's perhaps no better illustration of the deep dilemmas of representation associated with winner-take-all districts than the 60 year effort to manipulate the district lines in state after state in order to effectuate racial minority representation. Like the recent fate of IRCs, the drawing of “majority-minority” districts also has been under attack. There is a very good chance that within a year the final arrow in the quiver of the Voting Rights Act will be broken and the VRA will be, for all intents and purposes, dead at the federal level and within most states. And the murderer will be the John Roberts Supreme Court, especially the current extremist right-wing version of it.

More on that in a moment, but first, there’s an important back story here. Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, a full court press of legal actions to enforce the drawing of black-majority districts was unleashed. A measure of long-overdue electoral justice was finally achieved, with the number of elected black House members tripling in 15 years, from 6 to 18, and continuing to climb, with fits and starts, for six decades to today’s record of 61 blacks (along with 46 Hispanics, 18 Asian Americans and 3 Native American members out of 435). Yet, despite 60 years of the VRA, whites are still vastly overrepresented, with 72% of House members despite being only 59% of the US population.

So has the VRA been a success? Certainly from the point of view of the 1960s, when minority elected officials were practically nonexistent, it has been an enormous and gratifying triumph. At the same time, it has now badly stalled before full and fair representation has been achieved. With the careful gerrymandering of legislative district lines to capture the right pockets of racially-minded voters, with districts infamously shaped like “smashed mosquitos” and the Zorro district shaped like a giant Z and other Picasso painting-like districts, the winner-take-all electoral system has been literally twisted and contorted and forced to do something that it was never meant to do – elect representatives from a minority constituency. Winner-take-all districts are meant to be majoritarian = minorities need not apply.

The VRA achievement has become an increasingly pyrrhic victory for several reasons. First, as the US Supreme Court has turned more right-wing (due to the constitutional bias that gives overweighted influence to nominee-confirming Senators from low-population conservative states), the federal courts have begun turning against the goals of racial representation. Supreme Court decisions like Shaw vs Reno (1993), Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Brnovich v. DNC (2021) and others have made Swiss cheese of voting rights jurisprudence. The only arrow left in the VRA quiver is Section 2, but the US Supreme Court has scheduled arguments for this October on whether Section 2 is still constitutional. Longtime VRA advocates fear that, within a year, there will be nothing left to voting rights jurisprudence and that will be followed by a gradual loss of diversity in legislatures.

As VRA advocates understandably circle the wagons, it is important to recognize that decades of successful voting rights actions have served to perpetuate the continued use of winner-take-all districts and their racially-tinged context. It has unintentionally reinforced the same racialized culture that has fed into the current MAGA white backlash. It is understandable why voting rights leaders have continued down this loaded path, since it has led to levels of electoral success that had not been seen since pre-Jim Crow Reconstruction. But it contained the seeds of its own undoing.

Here’s how: the packing of high concentrations of minority voters into “majority-minority” districts not only elected more minorities, it also had the effect of bleeding minority voters out of all the surrounding districts. Given that minority voters have been the most reliably Democratic voters, that made all of the neighboring districts more Republican.

Why Republicans suddenly became big VRA boosters

It was a surprise to many, myself included, when during the 1991 redistricting, GOP House minority leader Newt Gingrich embraced this strategy of drawing majority-minority districts, as did the Bush Administration’s Justice Department. Republicans had always been vehemently opposed to any kind of race-based remedy, but suddenly they were enthusiastic supporters.

The reason soon became clear. In Gingrich’s home state of Georgia, the US House delegation went from 10 Democrats -- one black -- and one Republican (Gingrich) in 1992 to eight Republicans and three Democrats -- all three black -- just two years later in 1994. The newly elected black representatives mostly were replacing white Democrats, and the increase in minority representation came at the expense of electing fewer Democrats overall. Virtually overnight, white moderate Democratic House members became an endangered species and over the next few election cycles disappeared from the South.

The regional partisan demographics expressed within a winner-take-all electoral system turned the Voting Rights Act into an effective GOP tool that allowed the party to take control of the US House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in four decades (Gingrich became Speaker of the House). The Democrats and minority voters were tripped up by a classic Catch-22: even as legislatures were becoming more diverse, they were ironically becoming less friendly to the agenda of racial minorities.

Not only that, with the disappearance of many white Democratic House members and the election of more non-white Democrats, that allowed GOP strategists to “racialize” the Democratic Party and further alienate it from white voters during subsequent elections. This racializing of the parties became one of the key ingredients that polarized the nation’s politics, its political parties, and eventually the electorate as well.

Many Republican leaders have been more than willing to shelve their allegedly “race blind” ideology when it has suited their naked partisan interests. Republicans have found the Voting Rights Act to be a great ally, and it remains to this day a potent obstacle to the Democrats retaking control of the House of Representatives.

Many analysts over-blame this partisan tilt on the extreme gerrymandering of legislative districts for partisan advantage. While gerrymandering adds a bit to this bias, especially in a handful of notorious states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina, the big culprit is single-seat, winner-take-all districts themselves, combined with regional partisan demographics. At this point in the nation’s political evolution, we have no choice but to enact new and innovative approaches that do not depend on the Courts to engineer political equality.

The way out of this winner-take-all dilemma – multi-seat districts with Proportional Ranked Choice Voting

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” said Abraham Lincoln, as the nation stood on the brink of civil war over the founders’ original sin. Honest Abe’s keen observation still applies today.

The most beneficial arrangement for the Democrats and racial minorities would be for the electoral system to evolve from the current single-seat, winner-take-all blueprint to a multi-seat system elected by Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (PRCV). With proportional voting, parties win seats in proportion to their vote share -- in a five-seat district, a party winning 40 percent of the vote wins two seats instead of nothing, and a party with 60 percent of the vote wins three seats instead of everything.

That would allow racial minorities, as well as other minority constituencies, to win their fair share of representation without gerrymandering any districts, and without hurting the electoral chances of other Democratic Party candidates. In the South, such a plan would elect more black and white Democrats, as well as some black and moderate Republicans, instead of today’s Southern gallery of nearly all white, right-wing MAGA Republicans. You would no longer need party primaries, where the most extreme candidates get nominated in low turnout elections by the party’s most extreme voters. Under a PRCV plan, representatives in the South would reflect the actual demographics of the diverse southern electorate, instead of the MAGA white Congress members that have the largest plurality and dominate there today.

Despite ample opportunity in recent years, there has been little discussion by the national punditry or most Democratic or GOP leaders about how the political mechanics and calculations of the winner-take-all system substantially drives pointlessly adversarial, race-tinged politics (another example of how, as I have previously written, the Democrats are often their own worst enemy). The logic of winner-take-all dictates a singular ambition: that you beat the other side. It is instinctual to the “us against them” knee-jerk DNA of the system.

As a result, deformed politics and policies have emerged, further confusing an already disengaged and disgusted voting public which, within the paralysis of our winner-take-all two-party system, has nowhere else to go but to the sidelines. As more and more voters abandon the field, the game is left to the partisans to wage their battles using the techniques of winner-take-all polarization, as well as the new social media technologies of polarization, which then fuel a new round of voter alienation and withdrawal, which in turn cedes even more influence to the partisans. It is a vicious race to the bottom that is gaining momentum.

At the bottom awaits -- ominously -- post-democracy. In a post-democratic future, the US will still hold elections but those democratic rituals will be increasingly meaningless as a vehicle for finding compromise or resolving the nation's challenges. When a society becomes deeply divided by race, tribe, geography and partisanship, that is a deadly combination that makes it difficult to sustain democracy. Truthfully, the racial brinksmanship and post-democratic pressures will continue their downward slide if we do not transform our winner-take-all political system into one based on a foundation of proportional ranked choice voting.

Nothing in the US Constitution requires single-seat districts for the US House or the 50 state legislatures, and support is building for trying proportional options. As has been true throughout US history, the states and cities would be exciting laboratories for trying out this new innovation. During this time of deep-seated confusion and anxiety, a government elected by proportional representation offers tantalizing prospects that should be fully explored.

We are facing a meltdown of American democracy, and inaction is not an option. Nor can we expect that, if we keep doing what we have always done, that it will somehow solve the problem. IRCs still have their place, such as within states and for local city council elections. But at the federal level, as well as for state and local legislatures, we need new tools in the democratic toolbox. Proportional ranked choice voting should be at the top of the list.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776