One of the most annoying and hypocritical complaints I’ve heard from Democrats is about gerrymandering.
“It’s an assault on democracy!” they say. “It’s voter suppression!” they insist. “It rigs the system!” they claim. Any sinister accusation they can make, they’ve made.
Whatever legitimate complaints there are about partisan gerrymandering (and yes, there are plenty), the Democrats are in no position to claim any moral authority on the issue. In truth, they love gerrymandering—just not when Republicans do it.
The Democrats’ rhetoric on gerrymandering is different from that on the filibuster. When George W. Bush was president, Democrats abused the filibuster to block highly qualified judicial nominees to the courts. Then, when they had the majority, they couldn’t stand it when Republicans did exactly what they had done, so they nuked the filibuster for lower-court nominees. For Democrats, what’s good for the goose is not good for the gander.
And the same thing goes for gerrymandering.
In fact, a Nevada Democrat is blasting her local party leaders for screwing up redistricting in the state and accidentally making her seat competitive.
“I totally got f***ed by the Legislature on my district,” Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) said at an AFL-CIO town hall. Titus represents Nevada’s 1st Congressional District, historically a safe seat for Democrats.
“You read that the Republicans are using gerrymandering to cut out Democratic seats, but they didn’t have to in this state,” Titus said. “We did it to ourselves.”
Titus said the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was also “stunned.”
“They couldn’t believe a Democratic Legislature and governor would do this to themselves,” she said. “They could have created two safe seats for themselves and one swing. That would have been smart. [U.S. Rep.] Steven [Horsford] and mine and then a swing. No no, we have to have three that are very likely going down.”
They say the newly drawn maps will worsen the already tough midterm elections, as there are now three competitive districts in Nevada instead of one solid Democrat and two swing districts. However, not everyone believes the new redistricting actually hurt Democrats at all. The Nevada Independent reported last month that “[t]he maps are expected to make it easier for Democrats to win two congressional districts that have flipped to Republicans at times in the past decade.”
The report said that the new maps are “also expected to make it easier for Democrats to win supermajorities in both legislative chambers; without those, Democrats have struggled to pass tax increases because the Nevada Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to raise taxes.”
Regardless of how one interprets the maps, Titus accidentally said the quiet part out loud when she acknowledged that she and the DCCC expected the state legislature to create two safe seats for Democrats and one swing district.
They expected it.
We’re never going to have an honest conversation about gerrymandering until Democrats admit that their problem isn’t with partisan gerrymandering; it’s when they’re not the ones benefiting from it that it’s suddenly a huge problem. What’s the solution? Who knows? Democrats will always claim to be victims of the redistricting process if they don’t gain an advantage from it. But it’s time for Democrats to stop pretending that they don’t love gerrymandering. The truth is that hey hate it when it doesn’t work in their favor.
Related:Democrats Only Hate Gerrymandering When the GOP Does It
