[image_credit]MinnPost photo by Peter Callaghan[/image_credit][image_caption]Democrats will hold the House and the governor’s office; Republicans will hold the Senate.[/image_caption]
In many states, such results are evidence of gerrymandering: the practice of drawing often comically-shaped districts to give advantage to one party; that it doesn’t seem right that a party can win more votes statewide but not control both, and sometimes neither, of the chambers of the Legislature.
Often the evidence that something potentially sinister is afoot comes from next door: In 2018, Wisconsin Democrats won a majority of the statewide vote and swept statewide offices. And yet Republicans saw the size of their state House delegation reduced by just a single seat, going from 64 to 63 seats (of 99 total). In fact, because of the way the state’s legislative districts are drawn, as the Brennan Center for Justice has written, “Republicans are a lock to win 60 percent of statehouse seats even if they win just 48 percent of the vote.”
So is the same thing happening in Minnesota?
Probably not. Wisconsin’s legislative district lines, after all, were drawn by Republicans after a 2010 election in which the party won control of the state House and Senate as well as the governor’s office. That gave the GOP all three seats at the redistricting table, a trifecta that partisans dream of. Minnesota, by contrast, hasn’t experienced a similar trifecta in decades. When redistricting has been an issue in Minnesota, both parties have been involved. And while that could create an atmosphere for compromise, more often it has meant stalemate. And when the parties haven’t agreed, the state courts have stepped in.
That has provided a relatively non-gerrymandered map, one with more competitive districts than typically occurs in states with one party control, a phenomenon that is likely to reach its fifth decade next year when the 92nd session of the Minnesota Legislature convenes. Democrats will hold the House and the governor’s office; Republicans will hold the Senate.
Todd Rapp, a political and business consultant, has tried to analyze Minnesota’s penchant for divided government. In 15 of the last 16 presidential elections, Minnesota favored the Democratic nominee, the nation’s top ratio for blue electoral performance. But in 15 of the last 16 state elections (which happen every two years), voters gave each party control of at least one branch of state government. That too is tops in the United States over that period.
[image_credit]Rapp Strategies[/image_credit]
But the concentration is more stark in DFL districts, Rapp said. Of the 70 House seats won by DFLers in 2020, 25 were captured with more than 70 percent of the vote, with 10 by more than 80 percent of the vote. Among Republicans, just 15 of their 64 seats were won by 70 percent of more; none were by 80 percent or more.
In the Senate, the DFL has five 80-percent-plus supermajority members while the GOP has none.
[image_credit]Rapp Strategies[/image_credit]
“When I look at the map, and the map has stayed basically the same since the 90s; the only way you could probably create more-competitive districts is to gerrymander,” he said. “How do we create more-competitive districts without literally building these starfish districts? You’d have to take tentacles out of the inner cities and reach out into the suburbs.”
[image_caption]Todd Rapp[/image_caption]
But there are legal rules and standards that would endanger such a plan when it inevitably is taken into court by the party disadvantaged by it. The U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court have set down standards for interpreting the provisions on redistricting: districts should have equal population; they should be contiguous and compact; no attempts should be made to either congregate or divide minority groups; and efforts must be made to keep cities and towns and communities of interest together.
But last year, the Supreme Court rejected requests to rule that overt partisanship in protecting incumbents or drawing lines to advantage one party over the other is unconstitutional. Those are political questions, not judicial ones, a 5-4 court ruled.
Instead, Minnesota and other states fought it out in the 2020 election in hopes of either controlling the process or keeping the other side from controlling it. After Republicans succeeded in taking a majority of statehouse in the 2010 election and used it to draw favorable congressional districts, Democrats vowed to not ignore those races this time. Yet despite spending hundreds of millions, Democrats made not a single gain around the country, not even what was considered the lowest-hanging fruit — the Minnesota Senate.
But while the GOP kept the Senate, it can only use that position to block DFL-leaning plans, not hope to succeed in passing one of its own.
A long history of court involvement
If the House and Senate can’t agree on restricting plans — one for legislative districts and one for congressional districts — they don’t go to the governor. Even if the Legislature does approve maps, as the GOP-controlled House and Senate did in 2011, a governor can disagree and veto, as DFL Gov. Mark Dayton did that year, and once again the courts stepped in.
In a paper looking at the history of Minnesota redistricting, House Research analysts Senate attorney Alexis C. Stangl and House research analyst Matt Gehring note that the courts have intervened in the legislative maps after each Census since 1970, and in each congressional map since the 1980 Census.
Some states turn the task over to non-partisan or bipartisan commissions. Fourteen have created commissions to do the job, six others have commissions that advise the Legislature and five have backup commissions that step in if the elected politicians fail. But even commissions can be partisan, with the parties involved either as staff or as commissioners who take voting data and incumbency into consideration.
Minnesota has talked about creating a commission but has never adopted one. Many of the states with commissions are also states with initiative powers retained by voters, and commissions have come from voters, not legislators.
The Princeton Gerrymandering Project was formed to help states understand and eliminate partisan gerrymandering. “The American people nationally as well as locally seem to prefer divided government, which, as a nonpartisan organization we do notice that when government is divided among various parties, gerrymandering tends to go down,” said Jason Rhode, national coordinator for the project. “It doesn’t mean it’s eliminated, it just means people are more-likely to be considerate of where they draw the district lines.”
Zachariah Sippy, an analyst with the Princeton Election Consortium (which is related to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project) said even if courts draw lines, there could be standards established to look at and address over-concentration of party votes in single districts. In Minnesota, DFL candidates for the Senate gathered more votes collectively than GOP candidates but are still in a slim minority there.
“Even non-partisan maps can sometimes not actually be fair,” Sippy said. The court-plan didn’t gerrymander in favor of the GOP, he said, but it had a bias toward drawing the most-compact districts “it is possible you could create a rural bias and an urban disadvantage.”
One measure of this phenomenon — over-concentrating one party’s votes in a handful of districts so as to limit their impact on neighboring districts — is called the efficiency gap. Created by a University of Chicago law school professor and a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, the metric measures so-called wasted votes as a means of determining the partisan fairness of a state’s map. By that measure, the current Minnesota lines are relatively fair and wouldn’t meet the test of a gerrymandered map.
The Princeton Gerrymandering Project had pushed legislative candidates to sign a pledge to support a fair process. But because it anticipated that the DFL would win the Minnesota Senate, it concentrated on winning pledges from a handful of DFL challengers. Six signed, but only two of them won, and the DFL did not win a majority.
So it appears that Minnesota will once again employ its most familiar weapon against gerrymandering: divided government. “We’re strange,” Rapp said “I can’t prove to you that Minnesota likes purple government. But somehow we keep ending up with it.”
Let’s not forget the movement to urban districts since 2011. A new redistricting may very well mean lesser influence outstate. But most important is that we do not assume any legitimacy to political party domination of redistricting. It’s undemocratic, pure and simple. Citizens need to do this because of the conflict of interest on the part of legislators.
But that doesn’t take into effect population demographics. Outstate has, and continues to bleed population, a good portion of it TO the metro. As legislative districts must be proportional to population it means that there will be an inescapable trend toward smaller (geographically), more numerous, and more Democratic urban and suburban districts and fewer, larger rural ones.
Minnesota has been “relatively non-gerrymandered” but only by comparison to places like Wisconsin and North Carolina which have been subjected to blatant partisan gerrymandering. It’s true that Minnesota courts have mitigated the effects, but that is not for lack of trying by the political parties in the Legislature since 1970. The courts have admitted that they are incompetent to perform what is an inherently “legislative function.” The problem is that the legislature has never committed itself to be bound by any rules which would honor the fundamental principle of “one voter/one vote” as well as other principles like compactness, contiguity and community of interest. Any fair voter map principles would rule out what the legislature has done over the past several decades of using voter data to draw district boundary lines to maintain incumbents and party power.
The legislature failed to adopt legislation in the last two sessions that would have moved toward creation of an redistricting advisory commission, where the legislature would have retained the final authority to approve new district maps drawn from “scratch” rather than adjusting the one from 10, 20 or 30 years ago. They would have to at least explain their reasons to voters for such changes. The pandemic pretty well halted any efforts by citizens to persuade and convince legislators of the need for his legislation. It’s not too late for the new legislature to make redistricting reform a priority in 2021. Failing that, Governor Walz could empanel an advisory commission of his own that might have some influence in the legislature (or the courts should it come that again) in shaping the new districts for 2021-2030. In any event, the fact that Minnesota is only “relatively nongerrymandered” to some unknown degree now doesn’t speak to how much worse it could become in the next election if fair and neutral voting maps are not drawn up in 2021. If Minnesota waits for some debacle like Wisconsin’s in 2010, it may take decades to undo the damage of partisan gerrymandering.
I am not a Trump supporter. However, there are several democrats, who are having the opposite effect, of what I’m guessing they are intending. Not referring to Gov. Waltz. He is doing an outstanding job, in an a very demanding position. As the cynics say, ” if they didn’t exist, the Republicans would have to invent them”
Its not anyone’s job to cater to the desires of those in opposition. Ask yourself why you choose to demand that Democrats moderate THEIR position, assuming that the conservative position is unchangeable.
Its not the opposition you have to cater to – its the swing voters. The “defund the police” movement was an albatross for outstate Dems. And while some of it is racism and islamaphobia, Ilhan Omar’s words and actions are part of the reason she appears in Republican hit pieces against Democrats all over the country.
Both sides should, obviously. Will they, who knows.
I strongly agree with the efforts of recently retired high-ranking legislative staff that are pushing for an independent commission to draw the lines. In the past, concepts such as “compactness” and “communities of interest” have been heavily weighted for redistricting. Now, I feel strongly that preservation of more highly competitive districts (especially in the Congressional races) is the top priority – essential for restoring civility and preserving democracy. We have some extreme lawmakers who ignore majority sentiment, and others who are forced to cater to extreme views because low-turnout primaries (in both parties) decide the election – and moderates get voted out by the more-extreme partisans.
Yes. You nailed it Mr. Robins.
In comparison, as this article documents, Minnesota is relatively free of pernicious gerrymandering. What it is not free of is the ridiculous squatting in the middle of the highway by the opposition party. They usually do not resist for logical reasons. They resist for purely personal political reasons. Look at the squabbling over the Governor’s Covid mandates. He is logical, many conservative legislators are not. WE need legislators who attempt to modify policy proposals to their points of view for logical reasons, not just political. WE CAN move forward without assigning scurrilous labels to legislation. We can work together, but legislators have to learn to say “maybe” and “perhaps.” Committee chairs must plan to hear proposed legislation instead of maneuvering to table proposals from the other party. Minnesota needs a working legislature to improve things. WE DO NOT need a legislature that acts like the dysfunctional Congress!