Redistricting Nuts-and-Bolts, Part 2

As for the rest of the state, the Republicans have two major liabilities: the 7^th district and the 1^st district. They probably have the votes to shore up one of these districts, but not both. Their choice is between siphoning off Republican areas from safe seats (Districts 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 11) and sending them north to the first, or south to the seventh.

The seventh district is probably the Republicans’ better bet to hold safely in the 2012-2020 cycles. Yes, the GOP was able to flip the first district this past cycle, but that was largely a combination of the popular Democratic incumbent not seeking reelection and a wave year boosting the Republican candidate to victory in the open race. In a typical year, there are more Democrats than Republicans in the first, and as soon as the Dems find another Bart Stupak – i.e. a Blue Dog with social conservative credibility who runs ahead of the rest of the Democratic ticket – the seat should revert to the Democrats.

Geographically, the seventh district won’t be easy to stack with Republicans. The district is bounded by state boundaries to the south and Democratic-leaning areas in any other direction the Republicans might try to expand it: Ann Arbor to the east, Lansing to the north, and Kalamazoo to the west. How exactly the Republicans will try to stack it will depend on how much population the district will need to add. If the district needs to lose population or doesn’t need to add much, they can probably move GOP-leaning bits and pieces from the 3^rd, 6^th, 8^th, 11^th, and even the 15^th districts to shore up their numbers in the 7^th without giving too much away in the other districts.

The only shot the Democrats have at winning back the seventh – and it's a huge longshot – is if the Republicans really need to boost the district’s population numbers; they’ll have to move some of these Democratic areas into the seventh, and that should be enough to turn the seat into a legitimate toss-up. If the Democrats can find even a decent challenger to incoming hard-right conservative Rep. Walberg in a toss-up district, they should retake the seat in 2012. However, the only way that happens is if the seventh district has been hemorrhaging population, while the rest of the state has stayed more or less the same – and population loss tends to be more uniform than that.

The State Senate redistricting might well be the most interesting of them all this cycle. Winning a 26-12 advantage might be cause for Republican legislators to adopt an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” strategy, and if they’re smart, that’s what they will do. The problem is that 21 of the 26 Republican senators who won last month are newly elected, and none of them will want to see their reelection battle in 2014 made more difficult. The GOP certainly doesn’t have 26 – or even 21 – safe districts to go around, which means at least a few of those newly-minted senators are going to get the short end of the stick four years from now. The infighting that that might engender probably won’t keep the bill from getting through the Senate. It might, however, force the Republican leadership into giving certain members concessions to keep them on the reservation that might weaken the overall bill. Trying to defend 26 seats in 2014 is going to be difficult enough, even with their usual overwhelming money advantage. If they pass a less-than-ideal gerrymander, they might put a decent number of seats into the toss-up column. That probably doesn’t mean there’s an imminent Democratic takeover of the State Senate any time soon, but it might suffice to get the numbers back around 2006 levels.

As for the State House, the districts tend to be small enough that it’s tough to gerrymander them to any great advantage one way or another. Of all the races, Michigan House elections most closely followed the overall vote percentage trends. With districts that small, it’s tough to create safe districts in one area without making an adjacent district safe for the other party. Maybe I’m oversimplifying this one, but State House elections tend to be more about turnout than redistricting. Republicans will probably screw us out of a few seats here, though that number isn’t likely to be more than five, and certainly not ten. As long as Wayne, Macomb, Oakland, and Genesee counties remain centers of population in this state – and Democratic voters show up in at least halfway decent numbers – the Democrats will always have a shot at the State House.

The upshot of all this is that we shouldn’t sweat redistricting too much. For statewide races, Michigan is still basically a blue state: our electoral votes go to Democrats in competitive presidential elections; both our U.S. Senators are Democrats, and have been for most of the last fifty years; and our governors tend to go back and forth between the parties every eight years. Democratic voters tend to vote all the way down the ballot when they actually show up. The problem is that the rank-and-file tend only to get inspired to vote for the top-of-the-ticket, sexy races they hear about on the evening news – presidential, U.S. Senatorial, competitive Congressional, and competitive gubernatorial races. 2012 should have a much bigger draw than 2010 at the top of the ballot for even the most fickle Democratic voters. If we can get turnout to approach 2006 levels, we should see decent gains in the State House that might get us back to a majority (or, at least, close), and might be able to hold steady at 6 U.S. Reps. We get those numbers closer to 2008 levels, and we take back the State House by ten and probably get the Congressional delegation to a tie. The real point: if we spent more time doing outreach for the top of the ballot in 2012 and less time carping about the upcoming Republican gerrymander, we’d all be in a better place. Take care of GOTV for the top of the ticket, and the rest takes care of itself.