Illinois currently has 18 representatives in the U. S. Congress, 13 Democrats and five Republicans. And Monday we learned that, due to a population decrease in the state of more than 18,000 people, or 0.14%, from the 12,830,632 people reported as residents a decade ago, that number of representatives will drop to 17 for the next election cycle.
The current ratio gives disproportionate power to the Democrats. They have 72% of the House seats in our delegation even though their party won just 57% of the overall number of votes cast for U.S. Congress in the 2020 election and 58% of the votes cast for president.
A 10-8 split in favor of the Democrats would better reflect the state’s political divide. And going forward, a 10-7 split (59% to 41%) would come close to mathematical perfection.
What about 13-4? Democrats are in charge of the ongoing process to redraw the state’s district boundaries for the next 10 years, and speculation is that the new map will carve up the Republican vote in a way likely to cost the GOP one of its five seats.
That would mean 76% of Illinois’ representatives in the U.S. House would be Democrats — far greater than the 62% of representatives they have in the state House and 69% of members of the state Senate.
These out-of-balance results are due largely to Democrats drawing boundary lines to protect their members and dilute the votes for the opposition — gerrymandering. And they’re offensive to the very concept of democracy.
Therefore they’ve given rise to organized efforts in Illinois to cede mapmaking authority to an independent redistricting commission charged with drawing maps that don’t favor any political party. The idea is popular — 2 in 3 voters supported the idea in a 2019 statewide poll by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute — and politicians of both parties routinely pay lip service to the idea of nonpartisan maps.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker, for instance, promised during his 2018 campaign to push for an independent commission and to veto any map “drafted or created by legislators, political party leaders and/or their staffs or allies.” Yet at a news conference Tuesday he indicated that since that didn’t happen, he would simply examine the upcoming legislative proposal “for its fairness.”
I’m hoping he’s finally seeing the big picture here. Because if you look through the keyhole just at Illinois, the arguments of the “fair maps” folks are strong. But if you broaden out to look at the nation as a whole, their arguments fall apart.
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Nationally, Republicans benefit more from gerrymandering than Democrats. The overall advantage is about 16 seats in Congress, according to “Extreme Maps,” a 2017 report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. An Associated Press analysis in 2017 estimated that net advantage at 22 seats, and a Center for American Progress report in 2019 put it at 19 seats.
Illinois doesn’t appear in the top 10 in various rankings of the most gerrymandered states.
Usually on those lists is Wisconsin, where the GOP got 62% of the seats with 51% of the vote in the 2020 U.S. congressional election. And North Carolina, where Democrats won a narrow plurality of votes for U.S. Congress but only 38% of the seats.
At the state legislative level, we see similar patterns. A University of Southern California study of 2018 elections showed that 45% of Wisconsin voters voted for a Republican in state House elections, but the GOP won 65% of the state House seats. In Pennsylvania those numbers were 46% and 54%; in North Carolina, 48% and 54%.
In Kentucky, according to the USC data, 58% of voters chose Republican state Senate candidates in 2018, but Republicans won 89.5% of the races. In Hawaii, Democrats won 60% of the votes but 90% of the seats.
Talk about rigged elections!
Democrats already labor under the nonrepresentational quality of the U.S. Senate, where, according to a recent analysis by Vox, the 50 Democratic senators represent 41.6 million more people than 50 Republican senators.
Suggesting that Illinois Democrats should set a good example for the nation, wave the white flag and agree to a “fair maps” system likely to give Republicans three or four more seats in a House of Representatives now narrowly controlled by Democrats along with greater influence in the General Assembly is … charming. Idealistic. A “reform” cloaked in liberalism likely to impede liberal goals.
Gerrymandering is a national disgrace that demands a national solution. The U.S. Supreme Court punted on the matter in a 2019 decision holding that mapmaking monkey business poses “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”
This means that lawmakers and do-gooders in Washington, not Springfield, need to put a stop to it.
Twitter @EricZorn
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