The Redistricting Prisoner's Dillemia

Virginia's roadsides are jammed with signs about the April 21 redistricting referendum.¹ From the slogans alone, it's hard to tell what they're advocating. Can you decipher these without looking at the answers?²

• "Because Democracy is Worth It"
• "End Gerrymandering"
• "Save Democracy in America"
• "Save Democracy in Virginia"
• "Level the Playing Field"
• "Unfair Maps"

How can both sides use the same language to advocate for opposite positions? Ignore the blatently deceitful campaign mailers³ for the moment. If we all want to "save democracy" and have "fair maps," why are we fighting?

The Situation Before Us

The Commonwealth is trapped in a nationwide prisoner's dillemia between Red States and Blue States:

The key insight here is that we're all better off cooperating, but both parties have an incentive to gerrymander if they can get away with it. There are basically three possible outcomes here.

1. High Functioning Democracy: Both parties cooperate and we get fair districts everywhere. Communities elect representatives that represent them well. The representatives fight over legislation knowing that they need to deliver for their whole district, not just the most extreme partisans they can draw a line around.

2. Unearned Party Dominance: A single party defects and gerrymanders their states. They win a huge unfair advantage at the national level by strategically ignoring large parts of their electorate. They use this power to drive extreme policies that get their base excited, because that's the key to reelection.

3. High Stakes Gridlock: Both parties defect and gerrymander their states. The overall balance of power remains tight at the national level, but now every every congressperson represents a nightmare fractal district. They all shun compromise and push extreme agendas to get the base turn out they need to win.

The April 21st Choice

It's best for Virginia if we and all the other states have fair maps. If we have fair maps and Red States gerrymander, we're screwed. Key question then: do the other states have fair maps?

Not so much.

Texas, Ohio, Montana and North Carolina recently gerrymandered themselves to five additional Republican seats in congress (+5 R). California's Prop 50 creates five Demcoratic seats (+5 D). Ohio redistricted under court order for +1 D; Florida is heading towards a +3 R gerrymander.

So what happens if Virginia comes in swinging? Democrats control our gerrymander, and they've figured out how to get +4 D.⁴ You can just about pull that off by cramming huge amounts of rural VA into a single R district in the southwest and then splitting Northern Virginia into shards that each suppress a big swath of central Virginia:

treemap-beta
"Current Map":::cont
    "Democrats": 6:::classD
    "Republicans": 5:::classR

classDef classD fill:blue, stroke:blue, color:white;
classDef classR fill:red, stroke:red, color:white;
classDef cont fill:none, color:black;

treemap-beta

"Proposed Map":::cont
    "Democrats": 10:::classD
    "R": 1:::classR

classDef classD fill:blue, stroke:blue, color:white;
classDef classR fill:red, stroke:red, color:white;
classDef cont fill:none, color:black;

The new districts objectively suck at everything you generally want electoral districts to do.⁷ They unabashedly excel at exactly one thing: electing Democratic Party members to Congress.

Ok, so it's terrible for Red Virginia, but it's at least good for the blue-voting citizens of the commonwealth, right? Could these new maps impeach Donald Trump, tax the billionares, fix health care, etc?

Also no.

The net effect of Virginia's aggressive gerrymander is nothing more than treading water.⁸ You still need a Blue Wave in other states to get the numbers to change things in Washington.

This Sucks For Everyone

So here's what we're actually voting on:

• YES lands us in the High Stakes Gridlock scenario.
• NO defaults into the Unearned Republican Dominance scenario.

Neither vote will get us to High Functioning Democracy. Nor are we likely to reach Unearned Democratic Dominance from here. We're just suppressing Republican-voting Virginians because Democratic-voting Floridians and Texans are being suppressed.

Virginia's democracy gets worse even as we take extreme measures to preserve national balance.

• We lose our current districts which are quite good.⁹
• Rural Virginians are rightfully pissed that thier congressional votes are being suppressed, which won't help relations between NoVA and the rest of the state.
• NoVA's Blue communities are split up and tied to vast swaths of low density countryside with very different needs

What can we do?

It's been very difficult for me to decide how to vote on this.

Factors for NO

I'm proud of our current redistricting process and still angry with the Democratic Party of Virginia for opposing it at the last minute in 2020.¹⁰ I think the proposed maps are bad for Virginia in general and my community in particular.

Factors for YES

I'm very concerned about the SAVE Act, the "Ensuring Citizen Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections" executive order, and related efforts by the governing party to make it harder to vote. I believe that the Unearned Republican Dominance scenario would severely undermine American democracy in the medium term, particularly given the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack.¹¹

I appreciate that the amendment is timeboxed. The Redistricting Commission comes back for 2030, which is when we update districts based on fresh census data. I also appreciate that the amendment doesn't mess with districts for state-level office.

I'm voting "YES, AND"

I'm voting YES on redistricting because I think the High Stakes Gridlock scenario is less bad than the Unearned Republican Dominance scenario, AND I'm calling for national redistricting reform. Virginia is losing our solid districts because other states are gerrymandering unfair advantages for their ruling party. Just stop. Nobody gets to gerrymander.

This probably needs a Constitutional Amendment, so let's lead there. Regardless of how this vote goes, I want every memember of Virginia's congressional delegation to endorse a non-partisan redistricting Constitutional Amendment. I want the Virginia statehouse to be the first one to sign onto it.

Sources