District Lines and Battle Lines
Image description: Closeup of an atlas of the United States with a focus on state borders. There is a blue overlay. White text, framed by stars and stripes, reads, “Gerrymandering: Let’s fight it together.” The blue, turquoise, purple, and red Sister District Project NYC logo is at the bottom.
by Alec Appelbaum
We all know that state legislatures conduct a mix of governing and posturing. Unfortunately what happens when the legislators come into office through a system of one-party control, they do more posturing than governing, and the people suffer.Consider recent exploits in Arkansas.
Arkansas features a huge, well-regarded university, along with a massive retail-focused employer whose needs have drawn thousands of immigrants working in tech, logistics and services. The legislature there took up a measure in March to ban transgender athletes from high school sports teams. The bill’s authors chose to do this as the state recovers from a pandemic because...well, you know why. The legislation (link opens in new window) careens from three pages of quotes on the inherent “biggerness” of males to two pages of conditions under which the law’s victims can sue the state. They never expect this ban to change long-range policy. They just want to lash out at women, and at progressives- constituencies they don’t need to win seats in their weirdly drawn districts. (See comments in Sunday’s New York Times from our alum, Virginia Delegate Danica Roem (link opens in new window), on why Republicans in gerrymandered areas let loose with this kind of bile.
Compare that conduct with what lawmakers did in Washington, where Sister District supported winning candidate Manka Dhingra in a close 2017 race. When you look past its big coastal cities, Washington fits the same description as Arkansas, with Amazon instead of Wal-Mart. This spring, Senator Dinkra, who is now the Deputy Majority Caucus Leader, and her colleagues passed a bill targeting a shift to all-electric vehicles by 2030 (link opens in new window) and a bipartisan law creating a database on police activity. (Link opens in new window.) To be sure, the first bill seems aspirational and the second looks procedural. But neither seems designed to poke those of opposing views in the proverbial eye. Instead they attempt to create a Washington state that’s safer and more prosperous for everyone. And the police reform drew 143 yes votes against three nays.
How does bipartisanship break through? It happens when officials feel an obligation to govern. That’s starting to happen in Washington in part because Sister District helped mobilize a true majority to sustain a Democratic leadership. It’s floundering in Arkansas because that state, like many so-called “red states,” sustains its partisan edge by toying with district lines and suppressing turnout. State legislatures evolve into funhouse mirror images of their states when they pass measures that redraw legislators’ districts. Experts call this process “gerrymandering.” It explains why Pennsylvania and Georgia, which elect Democrats in statewide and national races, harbor reactionary legislatures. It helps explain Arkansas’ government-by-exclusion. And it suggests why boosting turnout in competitive districts can advance the rule of law in most any state.
That’s what we do at Sister District. We hope you’ll join us for more of it this year.