An interesting Politico poll will force the Democrats to rewrite their narrative on gerrymandering.
Democrats are fond of calling anything Republicans do with congressional district lines "gerrymandering," racial or otherwise. When Democrats do the same thing, it's done to "empower" voters.
A new Politico poll shows both Republicans and Democrats supporting the idea of redrawing congressional districts for partisan advantage as long as their side comes out the winner.
Among voters who plan to vote in the midterm elections next year, 54% of Democrats say they support drawing maps that favor their party over the GOP. At the same time, 53% of Republicans say the same thing.
The percentage of Americans "who support redrawing congressional districts to neutralize the other party — and those who support doing so to gain a midterm advantage," according to the question asked in the Politico poll, is even greater than that of midterm voters. The poll shows 68% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans "support or strongly support" sticking it to the opposing party in redistricting.
“We’ve seen an extraordinary public outcry in favor of fighting back against Donald Trump’s overreaches in basically every forum,” said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
“Redistricting and its excesses are at the top of the agenda of most of the public,” said Kareem Crayton, vice president of the Washington office of the left-wing advocacy group the Brennan Center for Justice. Indeed, “everybody now understands what the stakes are," says Crayton.
While prominent voices in both parties increasingly view redistricting as the best way to lock in an edge ahead of next year’s midterms, they’ve also encountered resistance — both from lawmakers in their own ranks and the courts. The battle over who ultimately stands to win has become increasingly unclear.
Republicans have suffered serious setbacks this week alone. A panel of federal judges struck down the redrawn Texas map, throwing it into flux as the GOP appeals to the Supreme Court. And Indiana Republicans, repeatedly pressured by Trump and his allies to draw new maps, bucked him and punted the issue to January.
The court ruling gave Democrats, at least for now, a slight advantage in the redistricting war, following California’s Prop 50 and picking up one other seat in Utah. They could pick up two more seats next year if Virginia moves forward with its redraw plan, which would need to be approved by voters.
"Missouri and North Carolina both passed maps that give Republicans one red-leaning seat each, while Ohio approved a map that makes two Democratic seats redder (though lawmakers there were required to redraw under state law)," reports Politico.
The blue states of Maryland and Illinois have also been discussing whether or not to redraw their districts. Their biggest problem is that they've already gerrymandered their states to the point that they've rung every last partisan advantage they can from the redistricting process in previous years.
Florida has the same problem. Gov. Ron DeSantis would love to help his party, seeing that he is a likely entrant in the 2028 Republican presidential sweepstakes. Florida is still under the thumb of the ancient Voting Rights Act, and any redistricting effort that subtracts black or Hispanic voters from a district will be challenged in court.
As polarized as the nation has become, the redistricting wars have made the United States even more partisan and unruly.
Another poll released Wednesday differed in some important ways on the issue of redistricting.
However, a Marquette Law School poll released on Wednesday found that 71% of all voters said they were opposed to states redrawing their congressional maps mid-decade. Meanwhile, only 28% of respondents said they favored mid-decade redistricting, according to the Marquette Law School survey.
A minority — 38% — of Americans backed drawing political maps through an “independent, politically neutral” process, according to the Politico poll.
Framing a polling question is an art, and it's pretty clear that the Marquette poll was going for less partisan responses.
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The U.S. is becoming ungovernable, not due to redistricting but because the tribal conflicts between left and right make compromise of any kind impossible. As long as that's true, presidents will govern like kings, issuing decrees and executive orders to get anything done, and Congress will bury itself in partisan fury.
