The last time New Mexico engaged in a redistricting brawl and free-for-all was a decade ago after the 2010 U.S. Census. Republican Susana Martinez was the governor. But the Democrats had sizable majorities in both the state House and Senate. By my count, at least five lawsuits were filed. Ballotpedia reports that “initially four judges in three different courts were assigned to the lawsuits.” The governor vetoed legislative redistricting proposals two times.
Eventually, a single district judge presided over a trial in December 2011 to determine the boundaries of New Mexico’s three Congressional districts. The issues were complex and included worries over diminishing the number of Republican voters in conservative southern New Mexico and underrepresentation of Native American voters in all three congressional districts. A new map was finalized and had bipartisan approval but changed very little from the map drawn in 2001. Minority voters and some Democrats still had concerns about fairness and proportion and took the matter to the New Mexico Supreme Court. The issue wasn’t settled there until February 2012. The Congressional districts we have today were the result of that messy process. From start to finish, it cost New Mexico taxpayers some $8 million.
There’s a very good chance that we could see an encore performance of 2011 this year when legislators choose among recommendations made by a Citizen Redistricting Committee.
Redistricting as a process doesn’t light the fires of curiosity for many of us in much the same way that legislative budgeting can leave us yawning, at least until we find out that our pet projects have been scrapped or the fairness of the voting process has come into question. But as New Mexico political scientist Richard Fox explains, both redistricting and budget-making are the fundamental ways of “allocating power and values” in the democratic process. That’s why the competition is always so fierce.
Both budgeting and redistricting are the essence of partisan politics, and partisan politics is largely a zero-sum game, with winners and losers decided by votes from discrete districts that lean in one partisan direction or another, according to the political persuasion of the majority of the district’s population.
A helpful way to think of politics in our country is to consider it a kind of language with a specific grammar. Philosopher Ernst Cassirer considered politics, religions, cultures, mythologies, moral systems and ideologies all as kinds of languages with their own internal rules and structures. The principle grammatical mechanism of politics is partisan competition and fairness. Political competition has many dialects, if you will. Chief among them are the war dialect and the sport dialect. We sometimes confuse politics with these lingos, often with disastrous consequences. Using a sports dialect leads to triviality because politics is not a game, though there are “teams” and “team players.” And using the war dialect can lead to chaos and worse because politics is not a war or an “anything goes,” “all is fair” contest.
The language of politics describes an open-ended competition. It is zero sum, with winners and losers, but the victory must be fair, which means that the losers can live to fight another day. The language of politics also embraces a third dialect, the language of game theory. The most successful gaming strategy follows this pattern: start out nice, respond tit for tat, do not escalate and then return to nice. That’s what has to happen in American elections and always has in the past, and must again if we are to continue to avoid Trumpian insurrections and the foul play of “alternative” truths and spinning Big Lies. When you escalate, you end up with situations like the Treaty of Versailles, in which at the end of WWI, the French and her allies imposed what the defeated Germans considered horrendously unfair sanctions and outrageous reparations designed to keep them permanently down, which some historians feel set the stage for a boiling over of German nationalism and the rise of Hitler and Nazism, and the horrors of WWII.
When we engage in redistricting during the 2022 legislative session, everyone as usual will be worried about fairness and the appearance of that dreaded demon gerrymandering, or tricky and sometimes outrageous manipulations of boundaries to favor one party over another. But isn’t that what elections are all about, one party winning over another? Isn’t it politically rational to support your own party’s interests over the opposition’s? Of course, it is. It just has to be done fairly. By that I mean when it comes to redistricting, the boundaries have to be set in accordance with commonsense, on-the-ground reality. Gerrymandering would entail, for instance, drawing a map that doesn’t “naturally fit” the traditional demographics and terrain of an area and using what’s called “partisan data” to back it up. That’s what will be at stake with the four proposed maps that the Redistricting Committee came up with this year, or with a legislative option, should there be one. This is the same situation that resulted in such a rancorous dispute a decade ago.
One map represents the status quo. Another two offer minor changes that don’t profoundly impact the current distribution of votes in the state — a Congressional District in the north that naturally leans Democratic, one in central part of the state that also leans naturally to the Democrats and one in the south that leans naturally Republican. A final option “concept H” as it’s known, seems the most “gerrymandered” of the lot, a torturous contortion that moves Albuquerque’s Westside and the South Valley into the southern district.
Granted, “concept H” might seem like a good idea to some, for it waters down the Republican majority in Congressional District 2, a natural stronghold of Republicanism for decades. But the West Mesa and the South Valley belong in Albuquerque, culturally, historically, politically. By no stretch of the imagination are they “naturally” a part of southern New Mexico.
We’ll have three or four months to contemplate what might turn into a redistricting donnybrook again. And those who follow those goings on will learn a whole lot more about what fairness, partisanship, gerrymandering and demographics mean in the raucous world of contemporary New Mexico politics and post-Trumpian sabotage of the American electoral process.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
As a reader remote from the scene, I’m confused by the ‘maps’ presented at the top of this piece. I’m guessing that they’re more readily understood by those “on the ground”. My take on much of political activity it that it’s most clearly related to the forming of social clubs … just like high school. When, years ago, I volunteered for military service, my conception of the USA made it – to me – seem a rational act; I wouldn’t do it today.
Just a reminder that there are some traditional districting principles laid down through state and national laws and SCOTUS decisions. These are:
There are two major requirements for line drawing under the U.S. Constitution—equal population and the prohibition on racial discrimination. Additional criteria are;
–Compactness (a measure of a district’s geometric shape)
–Contiguity (all parts of the district must be connected)
— Preserving “communities of interest” (such as neighborhoods or regions where the residents have common political interests). Common political interests may include cultural, racial, ethnic, social, and economic interests that are probable subjects of legislation. “
— Preserving the cores of prior districts (to provide continuity of representation)
–Protecting incumbents (by avoiding contests between incumbents that could result if a new district included residences of two or more sitting representatives).
There is great variation in applying (or ignoring) these principles from state to state, and the situation with regards to using political partisanship as a factor is in a state of flux. All 50 states have their own state-level legal requirements for redistricting in addition to the federal requirements. Further, states may have different requirements for the redistricting of congressional districts and state or local election districts.
In a case slated for this fall, the Supreme Court will address a potentially groundbreaking theory that seeks to define partisanship—how much partisanship tilt is too much to pass constitutional muster?