It comes just once a decade, but strongly shapes the politics and policymaking in the decade that follows, says University of Illinois political scientist Brian Gaines. Call it redistricting, or call it gerrymandering, it’s the often-contentious process of redrawing state legislative and U.S. congressional districts following each U.S. Census. The new maps for Illinois are now headed for the governor’s desk following approval Tuesday by the state senate. Are the new maps fair? And how much do voters care about district boundaries? Gaines was interviewed by News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain.
Just in political terms, how would you say these maps stack up in terms of fairness?
If you equate fairness with a bipartisan or non-partisan process, these maps certainly fail. They were crafted by partisan insiders operating mostly in secret, and they passed by straight party votes in both chambers. Democrats control the state government, and they’ve used their power to the full, especially in the redrawing of congressional districts. In terms of fairness of outcomes, in the short-term, people focus on incumbents, and how much their districts change. In the longer term, the question is how the new districts, which will be in use until 2020, stack up in terms of their normal voting tendencies. How many districts appear to be safe, and how many competitive? In brief, these maps were plainly designed to harm Republican incumbents and to reduce the number of expected Republican seats.
Assuming Gov. Quinn signs the new maps into law, and there’s no successful challenge in the courts, who are the biggest losers in the U.S. House?
There are 11 Republicans and eight Democrats in the Illinois delegation at present. The 18 new districts (down from 19) were ruthlessly drawn to confront at least five Republicans with hugely different districts and unappetizing options: move, face off in a primary against a fellow GOP incumbent, or run in a very tough seat, wooing unfamiliar voters. Adam Kinzinger, Bob Dold, Judy Biggert, Randy Hultgren and Joe Walsh are all affected. Tim Johnson was not “paired” with another downstate Republican, but he was drawn into a district that little resembles the old 15th.
How does this differ from the last congressional redistricting, in 2002?
Last time, with divided government, the two maps differed dramatically. The U.S. House map was a bipartisan construction and was, in political science parlance, an “incumbent protection act.” The General Assembly map was a Democratic creation and was designed to inflate small advantages in Democratic vote shares into much larger advantages in seat shares.
If redistricting is so important, why do you think it gets so little attention?
Drawing legally valid districts is a fairly technical matter, and the entire process is shrouded in jargon and legalese. It suits politicians in power to pretend that it is impossible to get serious, broad input on maps because of the technical difficulty of constructing legally valid districts. Media accounts too rarely distinguish between different kinds of “gerrymander” and leave voters confused.
You co-directed a rare survey of voters last year on the issue of redistricting. Do they care as little as we’ve been led to believe?
We found that very few registered voters knew how the last maps were drawn, but that they had strong preferences for a non-partisan process and for simple shapes. Voters are not well informed about redistricting, but they know that it is important and they know what they’d like to see in maps.
Based on that survey, how do voters judge the fairness of redrawn districts?
Among their top priorities is compactness, or the simplicity of the district shapes. It is very popular with ordinary voters because they rightly suspect that twisty, elongated districts arise because they were constructed to serve some political purpose – to help or harm a given party or particular politician, or to achieve some desired level of racial segregation of voters. The latter is unpopular with voters, but is also more or less understood to be required by the Voting Rights Act at present. Even strong partisans say they like simple shapes and do not like gerrymanders designed to help their own party.
The least compact district on the new map is the 4th congressional in Chicago, and it strongly resembles its immediate predecessor: It is a claw-shaped district constructed to be majority-Hispanic. Given where Spanish speakers live in Chicago, the only way to construct such a district in Illinois is to throw compactness standards out the window. But elsewhere, the map is also full of suspicious jots and zags. The mapmakers clearly did not prioritize simple shapes.
More about fairness in redistricting and Illinois voters’ views on the issue can be found in Gaines’ contributions to “Rethinking Redistricting,” a report produced by the university’s Institute of Government and Public Affairs.
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