Arizona Independent (sic) Redistricting Commission Brazenly Hijacked By Partisan Republicans

Voters across the country have enacted Independent Redistricting Commissions as a good government reform to take partisan gerrymandering (in which politicians select their own voters to create “safe” districts) out of the redistricting process, hoping that a nonpartisan commission would produce competitive districts so that voting actually matters. It was a good concept, but it hasn’t worked out as hoped because partisan politicians have ignored the will of the voters to protect their own power.

The New York Times reported in September, Voters Had Their Say. Partisans Ignored Them.

Democracy has been tested this year by divisive voting and election administration laws in states like Georgia and Texas.

But those are not the only state moves that are putting strains on our democracy. From Arizona in 2000 to California, Michigan, Colorado, Missouri, Utah and Virginia since then, voters took it upon themselves via ballot initiatives to put independent commissions in place for the 2021 redistricting cycle. The clear message: to keep politicians and partisan operatives as far away as possible from drawing districts and tilting state legislative and congressional maps in their party’s favor for the next decade.

Yet as a new cycle begins, the ballot-initiative efforts and independent commissions on redistricting appear to have been undermined by partisans. Operatives have managed to exploit loopholes and, in some states, shredded the very notion of fair maps before a single line has been drawn.

Those discouraging efforts to thwart the people’s will — combined with congressional inaction on the Freedom to Vote Act and the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision to close the federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims — suggest there could be few brakes on gerrymandering run amok.

To secure our democracy and fair elections, there may be only one path available — reforming the very structure of House elections.

In recent weeks, efforts in Arizona, Ohio, Michigan and Virginia have been a cruel awakening for those who had hoped commissions might bring balance.

Arizona

The weak construction of a five-member Independent Redistricting Commission has left it vulnerable to partisan hijacking. The Republican effort to pack it since Gov. Doug Ducey took office in 2015 has been particularly brazen. The commission has two Republicans and two Democrats. The tiebreaking chair is a registered “independent” (and former Republican) who has nevertheless donated tens of thousands of dollars to mostly Republican candidates (including Mr. Ducey) in the past decade. Major decisions by the board have typically resulted in a 3-2 vote, with the chair siding with Republican members, including the hiring of a mapmaking firm that has come under harsh criticism for drawing lines unfavorable to Latino communities (the firm has denied the criticism).

Oh, it got a lot worse after this report. The so-called “independent” chair of the AIRC, Erika Neuberg, voted with the Republicans to create a congressional district for a Gov. Ducey pal to run in as a political favor – otherwise known as public corruption. This is what partisan gerrymandering is all about, and it spits in the face of the will of Arizona voters who tried to end this. Will Arizona’s redistricting panel really draw a congressional district for a Ducey pal? (excerpt):

District 6 could be a gift for Juan Ciscomani

And if you’re a specific Republican by the name of Juan Ciscomani, you’re absolutely beaming as the commission considers drawing a district just for you.

The new Congressional District 6 in southern Arizona will be an open seat, with the retirement of Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick. The draft map approved by the commission in October would have made the district basically a toss-up, where either party could win.

But this week, Republican Commissioner David Mehl proposed moving juuuust enough Democrats out of the district to tip it slightly toward Republicans.

More specifically, toward Ciscomani, a former senior adviser to Gov. Doug Ducey.

Though Arizona’s commission is drawn by an “independent” panel of citizens, backroom politics still play a big role here.

Plan came from commissioner with ties to him

Ducey spent several years stacking the Commission on Appellate Court Appointments, the nominating panel that screened and finalized a short list of candidates for the redistricting commission.

Stacking it with people like Laura Ciscomani, the wife of a top Ducey aide who this summer decided to run for Congress in Tucson.

Now comes Republican Redistricting Commissioner David Mehl, with a plan to take a proposed toss-up congressional district and make it more favorable to Ciscomani.

It’s worth noting that Mehl’s son, Jonah – who works as vice president of Mehl’s development firm – has donated $5,800 to Ciscomani’s campaign.

It’s all quite cozy.

The candidate’s wife had a hand in fashioning the panel that now may create a congressional district for her husband – a candidate who is supported by the son of one of the commissioners she helped put on the panel.

A candidate who until recently was a top aide to the governor.

* * *

No wonder voters have few real choices

But it appears the Republicans will win out when the maps are finalized, likely on Dec. 22.

Commission Chairwoman Erika Neuberg is the lone independent on the five-member redistricting panel and serves as the tie-breaking vote.

Thus far, she has sided mostly with the two Republicans, locking in Republicans’ control of the Legislature and probably, the congressional delegation, for the coming decade through strategic use of the gerrymander.

But Neuberg says her decisions have been based not on politics but on merit.

[As] for doing what’s right for the state?

On what planet, Chairwoman Neuberg, would it be considered right to take a true toss-up congressional district – where voters are in charge and anybody could win – and gift wrap it for Republicans?

But the so-called “independent” chair of the AIRC, Erika Neuberg, wasn’t done. She voted with Republicans to turn another swing district into another leans Republican district. Roll Call reports, Arizona map boosts GOP in two districts Democrats hold now:

Arizona’s independent commission finalized a congressional district map Wednesday afternoon that could give Republicans the chance to pick up two seats in the state.

Democrats hold five of the state’s nine congressional seats, but two of them, Rep. Tom O’Halleran’s and Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick’s, will become considerably more Republican. Kirkpatrick is not seeking reelection.

The map also puts more of the Phoenix suburbs into Republican Rep. David Schweikert’s Scottsdale-based district.

The Arizona Democratic Party criticized the map before its passage Wednesday, arguing that Republicans leaned on the process.

“As the Arizona GOP has become a proving ground for far-right extremist politicians, Independent Redistricting Commission Chair Erika Neuberg has delivered them the gift of the most imbalanced, gerrymandered congressional map that Arizona has seen in a generation,” the party said in a statement.

[T]he Arizona map could produce a 6-3 Republican split in a state where Democrat Joe Biden beat Republican Donald Trump by 0.3 percentage points in the presidential race last year. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project graded Arizona’s map a “C” for its Republican advantage and for splitting political subdivisions like counties and towns.

Two congressional districts now held by Democrats will favor Republicans if the new map goes into effect. There has been no massive shift to Republicans in recent years, quite the opposite. Democrats won statewide offices in 2018 and Democrat Joe Biden won the presidential vote. The Arizona Legislature is nearly evenly divided, with Republicans holding a one seat edge in both chambers. Arizona is becoming a purple state, not more red. There are no factors to justify this map by the Independent (sic) Redistricting Commission. This was purely a partisan Republican power grab which disregarded the will of the voters.

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1473726844839112705

The @ArizonaIRC has disregarded a legacy of fairness & catered to Republicans at every turn—at the expense of Arizonans. The Chair has a duty to ensure a fair process and not side with Republicans or push a partisan agenda. Anything less than maps that are fair will be challenged https://t.co/kUWkdVZbCo

— Eric Holder (@EricHolder) December 21, 2021

As The New York Times observed, “A gerrymandered congressional map in Arizona, for instance, could hand Republicans as many as three additional congressional seats and bolster the party’s rapidly shrinking edges in the State House and Senate.”

Despite anti-democracy Republicans demonstrating utter contempt for the will of the voters who have enacted Independent Redistricting Commissions in states like Arizona, Ohio, and Michigan, there was some hopeful news this past week.

Eric Levitz writes at New York magazine, Democrats Are Doing Weirdly Well in Redistricting:

The Democratic House majority was supposed to die in redistricting. For months now, pundits and political forecasters have predicted that Republicans could win back the House next year without flipping a single voter. After all, the GOP controls far more state governments than the Democrats, and this is a post-Census year, when states redraw their congressional maps. Republicans boast sole authority over the boundaries of 193 congressional districts, while Democrats command just 94. Given the slimness of Nancy Pelosi’s majority, several analyses projected that GOP cartographers would generate enough new, safe “red” seats to retake the House through gerrymandering alone.

This has been a foundational premise of much of my own commentary. And it’s an assumption that’s animated the progressive movement’s push for a package of democracy reforms that would, among other things, forbid partisan redistricting.

But it’s starting to look wrong.

The new House map is more than half finished. And in many states where maps haven’t been finalized, the broad outlines are already visible. Taken together, the emerging picture is far more favorable for Democrats than most anticipated. As of this writing, it looks like the new House map will be much less biased in the GOP’s favor than the old one. And according to at least one analyst, there is actually an outside chance that the final map will be tilted, ever so slightly, in the Democrats’ favor.

For proponents of equal representation, the key criterion for congressional maps is partisan fairness: Is each party’s share of a state’s congressional delegation roughly proportional to its share of the statewide vote? Right now, in many closely divided states, it isn’t. And typically, Republicans mine disproportional representation from the inequities. For example, in 2020, Joe Biden won more than 50 percent of the two-party vote in Wisconsin — but Democrats claimed just 37.5 percent of the state’s House seats. That discrepancy did not reflect widespread ticket-splitting but rather, the concentration of Democratic voters within three heavily urban congressional districts.

On a national level, a fair congressional map would be one in which the “tipping point” congressional seat — the one that puts either party over the top in assembling a majority — has a partisan lean roughly similar to that of the nation. In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by about 4.5 points. Thus, on a fair map, about half of all House districts would have voted for Biden by more than 4.5 points, while the other half would have either given him a smaller margin than that, or else gone for Trump.

In a recent analysis for the progressive think tank Data for Progress, Joel Wertheimer applied this criterion to the 25 states that had finalized their House maps. In the chart below, a House district “leans Democratic” if its voters supported Biden by more than 4.5 percent in 2020 and “leans Republican” if Biden’s margin was smaller than that (or nonexistent). Across all the revised maps, the number of seats to the left of the nation as a whole increased by 16.

In the days since Wertheimer’s post, two more states have finalized maps. In New Jersey, Democrats won the tie-breaking vote on the state’s redistricting commission. As a result, the partisan breakdown on the Garden State’s House map remained constant, at least by Wertheimer’s criterion: On both the new and old maps, nine of the state’s districts are more Democratic than America writ large, while three are less so. (That said, New Jersey currently has ten Democratic House members and two Republican ones, and under the new map, one Democrat-held district gets redder, so the party will probably lose a seat from the changes.) In Arizona, meanwhile, a supposedly nonpartisan commission process has ultimately produced a 6-3 Republican gerrymander. Add those to the pile, and the 2022 map still has 14 more “left of the country” seats than the 2020 map did.

Now, just because the emerging map is an improvement on the old one doesn’t mean that Republicans won’t still boast a structural advantage. After all, the existing House map was drawn in the aftermath of the 2010 “Tea Party” wave. In 2011, Republicans had sole discretion over the borders of 219 House districts, while Democrats dictated those of just 44. An unanticipated leftward drift among suburban voters mitigated the severity of the 2011 map’s biases by decade’s end. But it remains a very pro-Republican baseline. In all probability, the new House map will still favor the GOP.

Nevertheless, the new map is going to favor Republicans by less than the old one, which wasn’t a given. From the beginning, it was clear that Democrats would have more input into redistricting in 2021 than they’d had in 2011. But the GOP was still poised to dominate the process, and had an opportunity to adjust their old gerrymanders to better fit their new, post-Trump coalition.

There are a few reasons why things didn’t work out as progressive pessimists had feared. One is that — contrary to partisan stereotypes — Democratic trifectas have arguably mustered more ruthless party discipline in redistricting than Republicans have. Illinois, Oregon, and New York have all pursued aggressive partisan gerrymanders that have subordinated the job security of some incumbents to maximizing the overall number of Democratic-leaning seats. By contrast, Texas Republicans took the opposite approach, opting to fortify their incumbents’ hold on power, at the cost of leaving 13 Democratic-leaning seats on the map. Meanwhile, many red states have no room to improve on existing gerrymanders.

To be sure, blue states have probably left more gerrymander-able seats on the table than red ones, simply because some of the nation’s most Democratic states have outsourced redistricting authority to independent commissions. Fortunately for Team Blue, California’s nonpartisan commission is poised to finalize a quite pro-Democratic map. As of this writing, California’s House map is likely to feature 44 seats to the left of the country, and eight to its right. If Democrats boasted full control over California redistricting, they probably could have produced a 50-to-2 Democratic gerrymander. But still, not a bad haul.

There are two big wild cards left in the redistricting fight: Ohio and North Carolina. In both those states, Republican trifectas have prepared extreme partisan gerrymanders that are currently facing legal challenge. North Carolina’s Supreme Court has a 4-3 Democratic majority. Ohio’s has a 4-3 Republican majority, but one of the GOP justices is a relative moderate. And at oral arguments, the Ohio justices seemed displeased that the Republican map blatantly ignored the state’s constitutional amendment against gerrymandering.

According to Wertheimer’s calculations, if both of those gerrymanders are rolled back, then it is actually possible that the “tipping point” seat in the final, nationwide map will be one that was slightly more Democratic than the nation as a whole in 2020. Which is to say: The House map could end up having a tiny pro-Democratic bias.

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post adds, Surprisingly, there has been a redistricting turnaround:

As one analyst after another noted, Republicans control more state legislatures and more redistricting processes, while in many states controlled by Democrats, redistricting is done by independent commissions. As a result, Republicans might be able to win the House through redistricting alone, even without increasing their vote share in the 2022 midterm elections.

At least that’s what everyone thought. Until now.

Just in the past few days, the conventional wisdom on redistricting has undergone a dramatic shift. The most informed redistricting experts now say it appears that this process will look more like a wash, or even that Democrats might gain a few seats.

How did this happen? Here are the key factors:

• • • Republicans had already gerrymandered so aggressively in the post-2010 redistricting that they had limited room to add to their advantage.
    • In the relatively small number of states where they had the opportunity, Democrats are gerrymandering with equal vigor.
    • In some places, Republicans opted to consolidate their current position rather than take a riskier path that might expand their seats.
    • Independent redistricting commissions wound up not hurting Democrats in the way some feared they would.

[It’s] still too early to say how all this will turn out, and the 2022 elections are also an uncertainty. But the big picture, as Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report says, is that “redistricting is shaping up to be close to a wash.”

And as Joel Wertheimer predicted at Data for Progress, “when redistricting is finished, more districts in 2022 will be to the left of Joe Biden’s 4.5-point national margin against Trump than in 2020.” This is about as good an outcome as Democrats could have hoped for.

But there’s still a way that this round of redistricting should be considered a serious problem, no matter which party you belong to: The number of competitive seats has been drastically reduced, from 34 down to 19 among states that have completed their processes, per Wasserman’s calculations.

Which means that chances are your representative has been chosen for you before Election Day comes. You might be fine with that — perhaps you’re happy to live in a place dominated by your party and are comfortable choosing only which member of that party should win the primary.

But for millions, it means their neighborhood will be shoehorned into a district the other party controls, and they’ll feel as though they have no real representation and no chance to ever win it. If you care about democracy, that’s not a good place to be.