Redistricting in Ohio: I've been wrong. Possibly very wrong.

 If you have not been paying attention to the redistricting process in Ohio, it is time to start.  It is not just bad, but potentially a harbinger.  Several forces are colliding, and in fact, colliding with some of my published research.  Here is what is happening.  A few years ago, Ohio passed a reform intended to limit partisan gerrymandering by doing as follows.  In order to establish a set of district lines for a full, 10-year cycle, a plan must secure bipartisan support.  If one party pushes a plan through the legislature on a 50%+1 partisan vote ahead of the electoral deadline, against the opposition of the minority party, the plan will sunset.  When the reform was proposed, I... shocked myself.  I supported it.  I tend to oppose any goo-goo* reform.  Most are misguided at best, and likely to backfire.  This one, I liked.  My work on redistricting has led me to advocate bipartisan gerrymanders, wherein we eliminate marginal districts and create proportionate numbers of heavily Democratic or Republican districts within a state, such that a state is proportionately divided between safe Democratic districts and safe Republican districts with no competitive districts.  What I don't like, and what nobody likes-- except fuckin' cheaters-- is a partisan gerrymander, in which the party attempting to manipulate the process uses district lines in order to win more seats than their share of the vote within the state.  My original assessment of the proposal here in Ohio was that it would create pressure towards bipartisan gerrymanders and make partisan gerrymanders difficult by giving the minority party in the legislature the ability to stop a partisan plan.

I... seem to have been wrong.  Democrats are the minority party in the legislature, and increasingly the minority (odd phrasing...) in the electorate, and they're gettin' fucked hard.  Which is not the phrasing I used in my mathematical analysis of redistricting, but I'm going to go through a bit of the math, while referencing my papers here.  This is some hardcore fucking, though.  Avert your eyes, kids.  This is way worse than anything you've seen before.  This is redistricting.  Adult material.  Not appropriate for all ages, and certainly not safe for Democrats.  (I just invited a bunch of spambots to try to comment on this post, but you'll never see it.  You're welcome.)

Anywho, let's first have a bit of math and theory.  Just a bit, but we need this.  Don't worry, nothing heavy.  No hardcore math or any of that creepy shit, you fucking sickos.  Anyway, imagine a simple electorate with 33 voters to be divided between 3 districts.  21 Democrats, 12 Republicans.  What kind of fun could we have?  Two plans are particularly interesting.  Consider the following, which is the plan I like:  District (1) has 11 Democrats, 0 Republicans, District (2) has 10 Democrats, 1 Republican, and District (3) has 11 Republicans, 0 Democrats.  This plan, I like.  Why?  It gets you the 2-1 ratio of proportionality.  No competitive districts, but who the fuck cares?  I care about outcomes, and the outcomes here are the right outcomes.

Now, though, what if the GOP controls the process, and they try to get douchey?  District (1) may have 11 Democrats, 0 Republicans, District (2) gets 6 Republicans and 5 Democrats, and District (3) gets 6 Republicans and 5 Democrats.  Catch that?  In this plan, the GOP has a majority in two out of three districts, despite only having 1/3 of the electorate.  How?  We call this a pack-and-crack strategy.  They "pack" the Democrats into District (1), inefficiently.  The Democrats are wasting a fuckload of their voters.  You only need 6 to win a district, but they've wasted 11 in District (1).  Then, they "crack" the rest of the Democrats, 5 into District (2), and 5 into District (3).  Those 10 Democrats would have been enough to win another district, were enough of them allocated somewhere, but because they are "cracked," and spread out, they are all effectively wasted.  Because Democrats are all wasted these days.  Sober up, you fucking druggies.  Anyway, instead, the GOP gives itself thin majorities in two out of three districts, and they can win two out of three districts.

That's how a partisan gerrymander works.  You give yourself thin majorities in as many districts as possible, and you pack-and-crack the opposing party.  Got it?

OK, do you see how this can go wrong?  Imagine some minor change.  A plan normally lasts 10 years, between Censuses.  Cens... i?  Censi?  Yes, Censi.  [Bows.]  If just two voters switch party affiliation because voters have fickle passions and such (see: Madison, James), the GOP goes from two districts to zero.  They'd have been better off with the bipartisan gerrymander.

Bernie Grofman and Tom Brunell call this eventuality a "dummymander."  Which is fucking awesome.  And occasionally, it happens.

This actually leads to an empirical question.  How much of a partisan advantage can you safely claim?  Well, funny story.  I did the math, and published it.  "Population Equality and the Imposition of Risk on Partisan Gerrymandering," Case Western Reserve University Law Review (2012).  So here's the deal.  If you want to make sure you don't lose a congressional district at some point over the next decade, you don't want a 50%+1 majority.  Empirically, you want to put yourself at around 65%.  At that point, you're pretty much safe within that district.  But, when you are crafting a plan where your majority districts are 65% rather than 51%, you can't grab quite as many districts.  That's the tradeoff.  If you want to avoid a dummymander, you don't get so grabby.  Don't grab a state by the pussy.  Just because you run the legislature, they may not let you do that.  Oh, who am I kidding?  They'll let you do anything.  I'm getting to that.

Anyway, what happens when you take a state the size of Ohio, with a small majority, and try to craft a partisan gerrymander without doing a dummymander?  I argued in that paper that what you can do is basically about what the GOP did in the last redistricting cycle, which was consolidate the gains from 2010, which put them at 72% of the House delegation.  Any attempt to go further than that would have risked a dummymander.

OK, so what's happening now?  Several things.  First, the GOP is attempting to go further.  They are pushing through a plan that, while I ain't countin' chickens before they hatch, would go further than that 72% figure.  There is plenty of analysis elsewhere of how many seats they'll win, and how many gains they'll make, but the basic point from my math is that if they're winning more than 75% of the House districts in Ohio, there's no way to do that for a decade without risking a dummymander.  I'm not absolutely confident in the analysis of how many seats they'll win, but they're going further than my math says they could, for a stable, decade-long plan.  But we're getting to that.

Now of course, the Democrats oppose the plan.  They're-a-votin' no, but this is a GOP-run state, so if the GOP wants to go it alone, they can.  It's just that the plan sunsets.

OK, so here's where I was wrong, and possibly very wrong.  And short-sighted.

If you go back to that article I wrote in our law review here, the limitation on partisan gerrymandering was that if you leave a plan in place for 10 years, having attempted to grab more pussies asses seats than you can reasonably expect to win, you incur risk.  Not of a lawsuit for sexual assault, but of a dummymander.  But... what if that plan doesn't stay in place for 10 years?

And in fact, the whole structure of this reform is that a partisan plan sunsets!

Holy shit, was I wrong!  The thing you need to do to keep a dummymander from fucking you over is to redraw the lines.  And this reform forces you to do just that.  So right now, the GOP here in Ohio is putting through a completely over-the-top partisan gerrymander, indifferent to the risks of dummymandering, because they know that the lines will have to be redrawn by the structure of the law, and the whole point of a dummymander is that it only punishes you if you don't redraw the lines!

Fuck!

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The only check on mid-decade redistricting has ever been this thing called "shame," and I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but these people gave up shame long ago.  In principle, one could have done a partisan gerrymander, and kept doing corrections, year after year, but here's what might have happened.  Let's say you have a party that reaches for 85% of the districts, then sees the winds change, and redraws the lines the next year to circle the wagons and pull back to 60% of the districts, ensuring a majority having seen its share of the electorate drop to 40%, or something like that.  If you are sufficiently shameless and willing to keep redrawing lines every fucking year, you can do that.  Grab, grab, grab, just like Donny showed you.

This reform?  If fucking forces you to follow that strategy of mid-decade corrections!  It is mandated shamelessness!  Before this stupid, fucking reform, which I now oppose (oops), if a party came along and said OK, we're redrawing lines mid-decade, there would have been at least some minor hullaballoo over the fact of the thing.  Do a partisan gerrymander, see the numbers change, and redraw the lines to protect the partisan gerrymander mid-decade?  It at least would have been a story.  Now?  They're fucking required by law!

Godfuckingdamnit, I'm an idiot.  I supported this thing.  I looked at this reform and thought, OK, this creates institutional pressure towards bipartisan gerrymanders, and I like bipartisan gerrymanders, fuck competition, fuck the goo-goos and their "blah-blah-competitive-districts" bullshit.  I saw a reform that added a minority party veto point, and thought, hey, cool.  Nope.  Here's what I missed.

It never occurred to me that a party might do a partisan gerrymander, then redraw the lines every couple of years to prevent a dummymander.  That would have taken Trumpian shamelessness.  Of course, I wrote that paper back in 2012, which was pre-Trump.  I don't know if I would have thought of this strategy had I written the paper in the Trump era, but the reform passed during Trump's reign, so I should have been thinking "total shamelessness."  Bad on me.  But once you recognize the possibility, recognizing that the reform forces you to redraw the lines basically tells the party in power, go as far as you want.  There's no longer a risk of a dummymander because the only way to get punished for a dummymander is to have the plan stay in effect for too long, and you are required to redraw a partisan plan after a couple of years.  So go as far as you want.  Run roughshod over the minority, knowing that the only punishment for a partisan gerrymander has been taken off the table.

The Ohio redistricting reform is terrible.  It is worse than having done nothing.  Get rid of this fucking thing.  This state is getting fucked by an unintended consequence that even I-- an anti-goo-goo and skeptic if ever there were one-- did not foresee.  Holy shit.

And let this be a general lesson in the concept of classical conservatism/law of unintended consequences.  Whatever effect you want or intend to create?  May not happen.  Somethin' else will.  Even those of us prone to prod, question and reject may not see it.  I didn't, and I fucking hate goo-goo reforms.

Yet make no mistake.  This is not merely about the GOP's shamelessness and commitment to taking power at all costs.  Yeah, that's what's going on, but this is structural too.  The risks of dummymanders have prevented parties from doing this in the past.  Yet now, they know they can't be punished for a dummymander because they have to redraw the lines!  So instead of a scandal for a mid-decade redistricting plan to shore up any potential losses, they're just gonna be followin' the law.

Fuck the goo-goos, and fuck me for not seeing this coming.

Also, we're all fucked.  Grabbed and fucked.

Ani DiFranco doing "Shameless," live.  The original studio version is from Dilate.  If you don't play acoustic guitar, you may not get how fucking amazing she is, but there's a reason guitarists worship her.  I forgot to post jazz yesterday, busy and all, but I just have to post Ani for this one.  I'll use a jazz clip tomorrow.

*Derisive term for "good government" reform or its advocates.