Looking forward into the new year, most Americans are likely to remain focused on their prospects in a still-fragile economy. Political leaders across the country, however, will be consumed with something else – the congressional redistricting that will occur following the release of the 2010 Census date.
It’s not the population gain over the last decade that has politicians biting the bit. The country’s 9.7 percent population growth to 308,745,538 in that period was, after all, the slowest rate of growth in a decade since the Great Depression in the 1930s. Rather, it is the population shifts, from northern, eastern and rust-belt midwestern states to the South and West, that suggest political gains for Republicans and losses for Democrats.
Republicans seem well positioned, at least on the surface, to take supreme advantage of those shifts. For starters, they have rising party majorities in Congress and in the state legislatures in most of the southern and western states where populations are growing most rapidly. In seven of the eight states whose booming populations will give them a total of 11 new congressional seats in congressional redistricting, Republicans are in control of the legislatures that will draw the new congressional district maps.
States gaining seats include Texas, with four new seats; Florida, with two more; and Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina and Utah, each with one new seat. Washington, the eighth state to get a new congressional seat, has been trending Democratic.
By contrast, most of the 10 states losing a seat (or two) have leaned Democratic. New York and Ohio will each lose 2 seats. The others are New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and Louisiana.
With their mighty sweep in the 2010 mid-term elections, Republicans’ congressional gains provided a strong coattail ride to their respective state legislatures and governors. Republicans now control the governor’s office in 29 states, vs. 20 with Democrats. Republican-controlled legislatures will fix the boundaries of 196 congressional seats, while Democratic-controlled legislatures will hold the reins for just 49. Boundaries for the rest of the 91 seats that will be decided by legislatures lie in states in which party control is split. (The rest lie in states with split districts or with appointed commissions for redistricting).
The GOP’s redistricting advantages, however, still must confront the realities of their population gains. Most derive from an influx of minorities, mainly Hispanic. Fully 85 percent of Texas’ population growth, for example, is due to growth in the Hispanic population.
Though some such growth may be illegal, most is not. The enormous growth in the nation’s population by 2050, for instance, is due mainly to expected growth in the nation’s native-born or legal-immigrant Hispanic community.
Fair representation for minorities is mandated under the Voting Rights Act. And since many in minority communities tend to vote Democratic, it may well turn out that some new congressional districts in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida will not be delivered automatically to Republicans.
Democratic leaders, as well, are rightly poised to make legal challenges against the sort of odious gerrymandering that courts have outlawed but that parties in control of redistricting generally still try to accomplish, usually by squeezing incumbent opponents and their party’s supporters into competition with each other.
It may be a new year, but some political tricks and battles seem destined to remain as political, parochial and partisan as ever.