The collapse of Common Cause’s vision for US democracy

And a real dilemma for reformers. State-by-state redistricting reform led to "unilateral disarmament" for Democrats. That's a warning to Pro Rep advocates

[Dear readers: DemocracySOS survives through reader support. Can you toss a few coins into the hat? Here is a link to our $5/month subscription page. Donate any amount, no amount is too small. Thank you.]

More than Texas Democrats have been fleeing to escape the mid-decade redistricting nightmare that is gripping the nation. Political reformers, who for decades have pushed redistricting reforms, are suddenly backpedaling furiously. Decades of reformer work is going up in smoke.

No organization has led the effort for redistricting reform more than Common Cause. I have known many Common Cause leaders, both nationally and in California where I live. They have all been good and admirable people who cared deeply about safeguarding and improving US democracy. But from my perspective, Common Cause has often been the “conservatives” in the political reform movement, pushing tepid reform that really didn’t accomplish all that much, and usually refusing to support more fundamental reform, such as instant runoff voting/ranked choice voting or proportional representation. It took a number of years for Common Cause to come around on other commonsense reforms, such as automatic voter registration and public financing of campaigns, which it now supports but in my experience their support often has been lukewarm and unreliable, with occasional exceptions.

Still, their leadership for redistricting reforms, especially nonpartisan independent redistricting commissions (IRCs), has been unwavering. Passing political reform is hard work, yet Common Cause leaders plugged away at it year after year, decade after decade, and for that they deserve praise. IRCs have been their signature reform for making US democracy more fair and representative, their leadership on display across many campaigns. In a recent policy statement commenting on this unfolding mid-decade debacle, Common Cause leadership declared: “Independent redistricting commissions are still the best mechanism we know of for achieving fair representation.”

And now that strategy is in utter tatters.

Political reform before the current partisan polarization

One of the weaknesses of the Common Cause strategy was that it never built strong enough bipartisan support for redistricting reform. It mostly pursued these reforms in prior years and decades when the politics between Republicans and Democrats was not so polarized and poisonous. Few imagined today’s scenario, and reformers were able to attract to their banner some well-meaning Democratic legislators and leaders. So its victories occurred predominantly in blue Democratic states, like California, Illinois and New York.

Another mistake was that redistricting reform leaders never recognized that the real problem with US democracy is not who actually draws the lines – it’s the fact that there are district lines to draw at all. The single-seat district “winner take all” electoral system is at the core of what is hurtling the US towards post-democracy. These reform leaders imagined that if you changed who drew the legislative district lines, you could fundamentally transform US politics. But at this point the evidence is abundantly clear that is not the case. As long as the “winner take all” system remains intact, the poison injected by our two-party, “if you win, I lose” system will find its way through, just like water passing through a net.

A reform that changes who gets to draw the lines, especially when it’s not done on a national scale but state-by-state, is only re-shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. While I have been a strong supporter of nonpartisan independent redistricting commissions in most situations, it has always been apparent that IRCs, even when driven by the right criteria for how the lines should be drawn, was a pretty limited reform. As just one example, it has always clashed with the Voting Rights Act mandate to draw the districts to maximize minority representation. That’s because in our two-party system minority representation has become a proxy for partisan representation. The way to maximize minority representation, via the drawing of majority-minority districts or minority-influence districts, has been to allow a Democratic-controlled legislature – such as in California, Illinois and New York – to gerrymander the hell out of the districts to effectuate that goal.

So what did Common Cause do? It targeted those same blue states to pass independent redistricting commissions, resulting in the unilateral disarmament of the largest Democratic states in the ongoing gerrymandering wars against an increasingly extreme right-wing MAGA Republican Party.

Certainly it’s not Common Cause’s fault that partisan polarization has reached a zenith to the point where Trump-led Republicans are incorrigible authoritarians who care little beyond lip service about “good democracy” values like fairness and equal representation. However political reformers, like all do-gooders which I count myself among, are bound by the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm.” It’s not like what is happening today was entirely unpredictable yesterday.

Unfortunately, the vision of Common Cause and other redistricting reformers has backed the nation into this corner in which we now find ourselves in which – check this out – the GOP controls redistricting in 19 states and 41% (177) of House districts while the Democrats control it in only seven states and 11% (49) of districts. That’s pretty lopsided, and illustrates the root of this meltdown-in-process as the same blue states of California, Illinois and New York contemplate scrapping their IRCs. That’s because, under the scolding of Common Cause and other reformers, blue state Democrats have disarmed themselves.

The bitter pill

Certainly it’s a bitter pill to swallow that Democrats in a number of states who tried to do the right thing by supporting nonpartisan independent redistricting are discovering that their genuflection toward “fair democracy” has now backfired colossally. But let’s get more granular. There is a crucial distinction that Common Cause and other reformers failed to make that would have prevented political reform from ending up face against the wall in a dead-end alleyway. And other reformers who are pushing more fundamental reforms like proportional representation, such as organizations like FairVote, Protect Democracy, New America and Fix Our House, need to learn this lesson so that they don’t repeat the same mistake as Common Cause (full disclosure: I am a former director at both FairVote and New America).

Here is that important distinction: redistricting reform overseen by an IRC makes a lot of sense within a particular state for the state legislature, since all legislative district lines in that legislature would be subject to the same rules. A fair redistricting based on solid analysis of partisan demographics and good government criteria like compactness, competition and more does not advantage either major political party.

But from a national perspective when it comes to federal elections, guilt tripping well-meaning (nearly always Democratic) politicians on a state-by-state basis to use IRCs for drawing lines for the US House of Representatives has amounted to unilateral disarmament. And now Democrats, as well as political reformers and conscientious Americans who are trying to stop the Trump stampede of our democratic rights, are paying the price. The warning signs have been there for a while about the potential damage that could happen because IRCs have caused Democrats to fight with one hand tied behind their back. And now here we are, standing on the brink of a tragedy in the making.

California Über Alles grapples with redistricting

I watched this dynamic play out in California. In 2008, California Common Cause led a coalition that drafted and passed a statewide voter initiative, the Voters First Act, which stripped California’s state legislators of the power to draw their own state legislative districts. Instead the line-drawing was handed over to a Citizens Redistricting Commission (CRC). I supported this ballot measure both individually and organizationally as director of the political reform program for New America. If a state legislature must be elected by the defective, unrepresentative and antiquated “winner take all” electoral system, then a criteria-driven IRC makes a lot of sense because in that context the process should not advantage one political party over another. There is a high likelihood that the IRC will be able to engage in a fair line-drawing.

But then in 2010, California Common Cause tried again with a second voter initiative, the Voters First Act for Congress, that added US House districts to the CRC’s oversight. This is where the mistake happened. I was more hesitant about supporting this second ballot measure precisely because we had not successfully engineered a national redistricting truce. In taking away the ability of this heavily Democratic state to do what the GOP was doing in its red-dominated states, the impact was devastating. Ironically blue California was disarmed by well-meaning liberal reformers, most of them Democrats.

In the November 2022 election, using the new lines drawn by the CRC, California Republican candidates won four House seats by five points or less. If California Democrats had been left a free hand to draw their version of an adventurously partisan Picasso redistricting map, in all likelihood, given the power of today’s computers and infinite data collection, all four of those seats would have been won by a Democrat. A swing of just those seats would have changed California’s House delegation from 40-12 to 44-8, and a slim 222-213 GOP majority in the US House would have shrunk to an even slimmer 218-217 margin.

But IRCs in other states also aided the Republicans’ efforts to take over the US House. In New York, long-standing attempts to create a fair and nonpartisan redistricting process backfired. The state court appointed a special master to draw the districts, who unwound the Democrats’ gerrymandered congressional map. According to the Brennan Center, “The effect was to make three Democratic districts competitive, whereas the original map had none.” In November 2022, GOP candidates in New York won four seats by five points or less (two of those seats by less than 1%). In just New York and California, it’s likely that Democratic gerrymanders could have clawed back enough seats to keep their House majority.

The map drawn by another independent commission in Colorado was considered one of the “fairest” in the country. In the Centennial State, in which the Democrats held a trifecta controlling the governor’s mansion and both houses of the state legislature, an IRC map resulted in a Republican winning the closest House race in the country by fewer than 600 votes, a margin of 0.16% (the odious, election-denier Lauren Boebert, no less). In 2024, that same map resulted in two Republicans winning by five points or less (one of those seats by less than 1%), even as the MAGA GOP held a slim 220-215 House majority.

In this war of unilateral disarmament, a “fair map” only meant that one side of the partisan divide was forced by a commission to restrain its partisan gerrymanders while the other side merrily line-drew its way to domination. Indeed, looking at the national gerrymandering landscape and the impact of IRCs, the Brennan Center concluded “if Republicans have a path to a majority, they can thank courts and commissions that drew two-thirds of all competitive Biden districts nationwide and 9 of 11 of the most competitive.”

Without this IRC interference, the Republican path to a House majority likely would have been blocked. In other words, independent redistricting commissions caused the Democrats to lose a House majority in 2022 and 2024. Of course, this is not the only factor that one can point to for the Democrats failing to retain the House majority they held starting in 2020. But certainly it is one of the most obvious factors that could easily have turned out different.

Would proportional representation in blue states also result in unilateral disarmament?

But let’s not be too hard on Common Cause. Political reform is hard work and you grab for victories wherever and whenever you can. I certainly have been prone to that path of least resistance in my own reform career, trying to pass instant runoff voting/ranked choice voting wherever possible. Yet it’s suddenly apparent that there is an important lesson to be learned here for political reformers working for multi-seat proportional representation (PR).

With PR, a political party wins representation in the legislature in proportion to its share of the popular vote. If a political party wins 60% of the vote in a five-seat district, it will win three of the five seats instead of all seats; if a party wins 40% it will win two seats instead of nothing. Under PR, there are fewer legislative district lines and they play a mostly meaningless role in who gets elected. Sounds good, right?

For that reason, the organization that I have been long associated with as a co-founder and its second staff person, FairVote, has pushed for decades for federal legislation that would create a “local option” for any state to use multi-seat districts instead of single-seat districts, but only if elected by proportional representation. Currently, single-seat districts are mandated by a federal voting rights law from 1967 that was passed, ironically, to facilitate more minority representation via the gerrymandering of district lines to create “majority-minority” districts. Now that the US Supreme Court has nearly dismembered the Voting Rights Act, arguably multi-seat districts elected by a method of proportional representation would be more effective at electing the broad racial diversity that the Voting Rights Act sought to prioritize.

Yet the various FairVote attempts at passing this federal legislation has never come close to succeeding. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have shown much appetite for tinkering with the rules that elect “their highnesses.” But let’s imagine for a second what might have happened if we had succeeded.

Suddenly, on a state-by-state basis, it would have been possible for states to elect their House delegation with a much fairer and more representative PR method, and move beyond the antiquated single-seat “winner take all” system. But that means in a state like California, where Republicans make up about 25% of registered voters but only 17% of Congressional members, Republicans would likely win another seven or eight seats. In a blue state like Massachusetts, where Democrats occupy all nine congressional seats and Republican candidates typically earn 30% to 40% of the vote, GOP candidates would likely win two or three of the nine seats if elected by PR.

The same could be said for GOP-dominated states, like North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where their extreme gerrymanders made sure that Democrats won a much lower percentage of House seats than the popular vote. In those states and more, a PR system would reduce distortions in the votes-to-seat ratio and better ensure fair representation.

If all Democrat- and GOP-controlled states opted in for using PR to elect their congressional delegations, that truly would be an enormous stride toward better, fairer and more representative elections. I can imagine the possibility that, at some point, a Democrat-controlled blue state might seriously consider enacting this kind of revolutionary change. After all, many Democratic leaders and their allies have been on a mission for electoral fairness and diverse representation which is what led them to support nonpartisan redistricting commissions. And PR would accomplish this much more effectively than a redistricting commission.

But is it likely that any red GOP states would exercise this option? I think not. Let’s not forget that when the House Democrats overwhelmingly passed HR 1, the “For the People Act,” which among other worthy political reforms expressly outlawed partisan gerrymandering and required states to use independent redistricting commissions, not a single Republican supported this legislation. After passing the House with only Democratic votes, HR 1 was strangled in the crib by a filibustering GOP in the Senate. The Republicans knew that passing that bill would have interfered in their efforts to gerrymander the hell out of the greater number of states they control.

So without GOP participation, enacting proportional representation for federal elections on a state-by-state basis would likely result in a similar dynamic that we see playing out right now with mid-decade redistricting. If blue state Democrats were to pass legislation to adopt PR, or even just passively stand by while election reformers pass our voter initiatives, it would take away the Democrats’ ability to gerrymander the hell out of their states and maximize the number of elected Democrats. With Republicans declining to follow the same PR pathway in red states, then the net effects would once again result in a kind of unilateral disarmament on the part of Democrats. Blue states would facilitate an increase in the number of GOP representatives, while red states would continue to maximize their gerrymandering opportunities.

Note that, like with redistricting reform, this dilemma could be avoided by focusing on enacting PR for state and local legislative races only, and staying away from trying to reform federal elections for the US House until it can be done at the national level so that it applies to all states.

Reformer’s dilemma

As organizations like Protect Democracy and Lee Drutman’s Fix Our House work toward enacting PR for federal elections on a state-by-state basis, it seems likely that they are going to run into the exact same buzzsaw dynamic that Common Cause just got mowed over by.

FairVote’s latest iteration of its “PR for Congress” federal legislation, called the Fair Representation Act, seemingly deals with this problem. Rather than creating a state-by-state based option, it would actually mandate use of PR in 2 to 5 seat districts in all states that have more than one House representative (six states have only a single seat). So the FRA would not result in a state-by-state implementation that would be undermined by the same unilateral disarmament dynamic that has unfolded with redistricting reform. That’s the plus side. However it seems extremely unlikely that the Fair Representation Act will pass anytime soon, since most elected Democrats and zero elected Republicans are committed to it.

This presents quite a dilemma to political reformers everywhere, no matter if they favor redistricting commissions or proportional representation: the most successful strategy for federal elections, that is most likely to lead to victories at the ballot box, would be be a state-by-state rollout where reformers can get their arms around smaller campaigns that require less money and grassroots organizing can be more impactful. Yet whichever states enact such reforms, whether blue state or red, or whichever party doesn’t try to block reform, will be handcuffing itself and its attempts to win a majority of the US House.

But an alternative strategy based on winning majority support to pass reform through both chambers of the Congress seems unlikely to succeed anytime soon, unless first some kind of national blue ribbon commission composed of bipartisan leadership paved the way with a strong endorsement and a compelling rationale for political reform. That’s the pathway that allowed New Zealand and South Africa to successfully transition from “winner take all” elections to PR, and the United Kingdom to put a PR system on the national ballot (though it failed to pass).

So the crucial lesson to draw from Donald Trump’s latest anti-democracy travesty in Texas, and the Democrats’ reaction in California and elsewhere is that, when it comes to federal elections in the House, unless IRCs can be mandated nationally for all states so that all partisans are equally stripped of this potent gerrymandering weapon, IRC proponents will undermine the cause of national fairness and better democracy. Better targets for IRCs will be, not federal House elections but state and local legislative races, since the rules for line-drawing will apply equally to everyone and not disadvantage any partisan side.

But this lesson apparently applies to the effort to enact PR as well. Now that we better understand this dynamic, proponents of proportional representation must grapple with this reality and adjust our strategies accordingly.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776