When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering was OK while racial gerrymandering wasn’t, it raised the tricky question for how the judiciary would be able to tell the difference in locales where race and political affiliation are intertwined.
Such as in the South.
Last week, six of the nine members of the Supreme Court said they could tell the difference in South Carolina, where a congressional redistricting map by that state’s GOP-controlled Legislature had been thrown out by a lower federal court. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court reinstated the map, saying that the lower court was wrong to presume that those who drew the lines had race, rather than politics, on their mind.
It’s nice of the Supreme Court to give state lawmakers the benefit of the doubt, but the fact remains that in South Carolina and most Southern states, including Mississippi, race and political affiliation are nearly indistinguishable.
Blacks, ever since regaining their long-denied right to vote in the South, have been almost monolithically Democratic. Although the GOP has made some inroads in winning Black support, including predictions that Donald Trump this year could get as much as 30% of the vote of Black males, for the most part these inroads have been minor and temporary.
Whites in the South, meanwhile, have been trending in the opposite direction for decades. The so-called Yellow Dog Democrats have long gotten over their aversion to the “party of Lincoln,” and conservative white Democrats have all but disappeared from the ranks of both the electorate and the elected.
As a result, any lines with an acknowledged partisan slant are inherently going to also have a racial one, even if unspoken, in most every Southern state as well as in several other parts of the country.
The only way to avoid racial gerrymandering is to ban gerrymandering of any kind. The Supreme Court erred in 2019 by allowing voting boundaries to be manipulated to aid the election of candidates who are affiliated with the majority party. Such partisan gerrymandering only strengthens the majority party’s control and weakens the two-party system, since the process further stacks the odds against challengers from the party not in power.
In the case of South Carolina, the legally condoned tilt helps Republicans. In states with a Democratic majority, it works in the opposite direction.
Neither is desirable. The two-party system can only thrive if neither party has an undue advantage. Gerrymandering, whether motivated by race or party, is undemocratic, making some voters count more than others.
