Texas decided a while back to gerrymander its congressional delegation. And of course, not for the first time, or for that matter, the last. In an effort to defy history, Texas republicans have attempted to protect their narrow House majority by engineering an additional 4 or 5 republican seats from their congressional delegation.
Laughably enough the Republican argued that (1) both sides engage in this type of activity (true enough), but then (2) failed to anticipate that Democratic strategists would act precisely the way they did and gerrymander their Congressional delegations to squeeze out a few marginal seats. That kind of elementary miscalculation would earn any graduate student in Game Theory a solid F.
Since modern politicians are in the outrage selling business, all this was accompanied by the usual hysteria about “threats to our democracy” defined roughly as tolerating a system in which Republicans occasionally win elections.
Enter Virginia and its new Governor Abigail Spanberger. Ms. Spanberger spent a good deal of time (before Virginia’s gubernatorial election) casting herself as a “moderate”. She was, for instance, an apparent advocate for “fair” and nonpartisan voting maps. Now however, she has signed a redistricting bill that will in all probability change the composition of Virginia’s Congressional delegations which is currently split between 6 Democratic seats and 5 Republican ones. The new split, all things equal, will probably be 9 or 10 Democratic seats and 1 or 2 Republican ones. And Virginia, it is worth noting, is a swing state.
Northern Virginia provided the margin of victory, particularly the Reston area which went for the ballot measure by about 3:1. The state as a whole voted for the measure 51% to 48.5%. We will have to wait and see if there are repercussions to this.
Spanberger claims, with a straight face, that the change in redistricting authority is only “temporary”. Sure. Temporary until the party needs the votes. Then all the alleged high-mindedness goes out the window. And does anybody realistically think that any political party will willingly sacrifice seats if it doesn’t have to? That would represent a naiveté that simply defies belief.
Also note that the vote in Virginia was not accompanied by the rhetoric about “losing our democracy”. Apparently “our democracy” is only threatened by Republicans.
Ms. Spanberger has nevertheless provided a valuable public service. She proved beyond dispute that the Republican’s claim that “everybody does it” is correct. And she has demonstrated that anybody who believes the bit about so-called “moderate” Democrats is hopelessly naive. Not that that will matter in the slightest to believers.
JFB
