Brian Gaines is a professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a senior scholar at the U. of I. System’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs. Gaines, who studies elections, electoral rules and public opinion, spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about redistricting in Illinois.
The Illinois House and Senate will convene a one-day special session at the end of August to make changes to the state legislative district map that was signed into law by Gov. J. B. Pritzker in June. Why is this special session necessary?
The map passed earlier in the summer was based on population estimates rather than actual census data, which were released several months later than usual. Predictably, many of the districts are too large or too small to satisfy the requirement of the Illinois Constitution that they be “substantially equal in population.” The map is thus vulnerable to legal challenge.
That begs the question: Why did Gov. Pritzker and the Democrats, who control both chambers of the Illinois General Assembly, rush the process and use poor data? The answer is, if they hadn’t passed a map by June 30, the Illinois Constitution would have required the formation of a bipartisan commission to draw the map, and they were loath to give up control of the process. Republicans sued, and now will argue that the current map was never valid, so that revisions should be done by a commission, not through the legislative process.
Court decisions can be hard to predict, but I don’t expect the GOP to win, even though they are correct that the first map was effectively a mere placeholder, and even though the public strongly prefers that maps be drawn by commissions rather than incumbent legislators.
Other than problems with unequal populations, are the new maps fair?
There are many standards for fairness, so that isn’t a simple question to answer. The new maps in current form, and probably in the next iterations after the lines are shifted to make populations match up better, are definitely intended to exaggerate the state’s Democratic lean. If the state’s electorate is about 55% Democratic, in a normal election, the maps are expected to produce chambers with 60-70% of the seats held by Democrats. In other words, the maps are partisan gerrymanders, to use political jargon.
The current maps pay scant attention to the constitutional requirement that districts be “compact.” Judges and analysts have struggled with settling on appropriate measures of compactness, but it’s plain that the mapmakers prioritized political considerations and made little if any effort to draw simple, smooth shapes for the boundaries. I do not expect the revised maps to differ.
Illinois is losing one of its 18 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. When will the new map for those 17 districts be done, and what can we expect?
Electoral maps need to be set months in advance, when prospective candidates collect signatures on petitions for ballot access prior to the filing deadlines. Having pushed the 2022 primary back from March to June, state Democrats bought some time. But I expect new congressional boundaries to be done quickly just the same.
The 2010 election saw a strong Republican tide, even in Illinois. The 2011-12 delegation had 11 Republicans and only eight Democrats. State Democrats then crafted a map that altered the Republican incumbents’ districts far more than the Democrats’, even forcing some GOP incumbents to compete in a primary. Over the five elections fought on that map, Republicans never exceeded eight of 18 seats, and they are presently down to five.
The new U.S. House map will aim to lock in the 12-5 edge for the Democrats and will probably, again, alter the Republican-held districts the most. An interesting wild card is whether any current Republican representatives will have such poor electoral prospects with the new map that they jump into the 2022 gubernatorial contest instead of seeking reelection.
Should we be surprised at the flurry of partisan lawsuits in Illinois and nearly a dozen other states for control over the mapmaking process for state legislatures and Congress?
Not at all. Litigation is a large part of the process these days. The stakes are high, particularly in the U.S. House, which is finely balanced. Both parties have legitimate shots at gaining majority status every two years, so in states where the lines are drawn by one party acting alone, the incentives to draw maps that load the dice for their co-partisans are high. Hence, Democrats in Illinois can justify a gerrymander as necessary to counter Republican-skewed maps in other states.
Of course, that logic applies only to the U.S. House, and not to state legislatures or local bodies. Democrats who insist that voter ID laws or any restrictions on absentee voting are intolerable “vote suppression” but meanwhile produce electoral maps that distort public preferences and insulate elected bodies from swings in popular sentiment are talking out of both sides of their mouths.
Moreover, polls show that even strongly partisan members of the public, whether they identify as Republican or Democrat, dislike partisan gerrymanders. Such partisan maps are not really a concomitant of polarization or an instance of elites being responsive to their voters.
Are there any other electoral maps to watch in Illinois?
The Champaign County board map is in limbo, a bit like the maps for the General Assembly. State lawmakers were slow in providing local officials an extension on the deadline for the new maps, so it was also drawn from old estimates of the 2020 population, not the delayed census data. Accordingly, it also has large deviations from equally populated districts, and should be redone.
The districts for the Illinois Supreme Court, whose members are elected in partisan contests and thereafter retained or not, were also recently redrawn. The implementation of the new districts is temporarily on hold, for logistical reasons, and the new map is somewhat controversial. Republicans say it was crafted to try to prevent further nonretention of Democratic incumbents, after Justice Kilbride’s historic loss in 2020. Democrats counter that the districts needed to be revised to equalize populations, but don’t explain why no such revisions were made over past decades. There may be more litigation on this front, too.