The 24th district in the Mississippi State Senate, which is 74% African-American VAP.
Having just dispatched with a very interesting federal election in Canada, we here at Daily Kos/Daily Kos Elections are looking forward to another trip to the polls in a little more than two weeks, as a smattering of statewide and legislative contests mark Election Day for the "off year" of 2015.
If you are a regular reader then you know of our efforts here at Daily Kos to try to make serious inroads in Virginia, where Democrats are attempting to recapture the state Senate and seize several vulnerable seats in the GOP-dominated state House of Delegates. Casual readers of politics have also likely become acquainted with a very close and very interesting gubernatorial election in Kentucky on November 3 between Democratic state attorney general Jack Conway and Republican Matt Bevin, a businessman and one-time Mitch McConnell primary election foe/irritant.
Also holding elections on that day is the state of Mississippi. You can be forgiven if you didn't notice. Republicans hold all but one statewide seat, and the lone Democratic holdout (attorney general Jim Hood) seems like he has been there since shortly after Reconstruction. If there is any intrigue in the statewide races, it will be to see if Hood, as a Democrat (even a conservative one) can ride his longtime reservoir of political goodwill to another term in office (he is apparently nervous enough that he polled the race recently).
One area where you won't see much intrigue is in the Magnolia State's legislature, despite the fact that it was only four years ago that the GOP seized control of it. Redistricting by the GOP, and particularly the racial aspects of redistricting, have rendered moot any hope for electoral competitiveness in Mississippi or throughout the South. Follow me below for the statistics, and to learn how the GOP has used a law designed to benefit African-American political power in order to effectively re-segregate the South, from a political standpoint.
A cursory glance at Mississippi's 2012 redistricting plan (the old maps were in place for the 2011 off-year legislative elections) shows how the GOP-led legislature went more than a little overboard in making sure that both minority representation—and more importantly, continued Republican dominance—were ensured.
In the state Senate remap, a total of 15 districts are majority African-American, out of 52 total districts. In a state where the overall population is 37 percent African-American, a redistricting plan where nearly 30 percent of the districts are "majority-minority" makes sense.
But it is how heavily packed those African-American districts are that is the cause for some political scrutiny. Of the 15 districts in question, just three of them (SD-22, SD-29, and SD-34) have a voting-age population (VAP) less than 60 percent African-American. The most cartoonishly lopsided of the districts, the Jackson-based SD-28, had a VAP population that is 84 percent black.
The logical corollary to all this is simple—if you pack a dozen districts to the brim with Democratic-leaning black voters, you ensure that most (if not all) of the other districts are predominantly white, even in a state where over a third of the population is black. And, indeed, while 15 out of 52 districts have VAPs that are majority black, there are substantially more (24 districts, in total) where the black population is less than 25 percent of the potential electorate. Republicans, perhaps unsurprisingly, hold 24 of those 25 seats.
The packing of African-American voters has created a political circumstance where, in a state that is 37 percent black, the median Senate district has a VAP that is roughly 27 percent black.
What that does, on a very real level, is create a semi-permanent majority for the GOP not just in Mississippi, but in the South.
In fairness, the Republicans would likely have a majority in most of these states no matter what. But some of these states, at the statewide level, are at least close to competitive—both South Carolina and Mississippi were decided in 2012 by roughly 10 to 11 points, and Georgia was within single digits.
Yet by packing so many Democratic votes in these overstuffed "minority opportunity" seats, the playing field gets tilted to a critical degree.
Consider Mississippi. Now, doing a perfect presidential vote-by-LD (legislative district) is impossible to do in the Magnolia State. The state's fondness for splitting precincts on a comical level, coupled with an apparent need to redefine and rename districts on a daily basis (or so it seems) make only a rough sketch possible. But even a "back of the envelope" calculation is very telling.
Mitt Romney won Mississippi in 2012 with 55.3 percent of the vote. The median state Senate district in Mississippi is a Romney district with roughly 63 to 64 percent of the vote. What's more: only five Senate districts statewide are "swing districts" where the margin between President Obama and Mitt Romney was 10 points or less.
This cycle was repeated throughout the South, and there were two clear consequences: (1) The median district was far more Republican than the statewide presidential results would tend to indicate, and (2) the number of competitive seats, given the racially polarized voting habits, were few and far between given the packing of African-American voters.
Of course, to some extent, packing of minority voters is a matter of federal law. The Voting Rights Act, and particularly Section 2 of that act, make it a federal priority to ensure minority opportunities for political representation. As Professor Justin Leavitt puts it:
For those drawing the lines and seeking to avoid legal trouble, the usual technique involves protecting substantial minority populations in racially polarized areas, by drawing district lines so that those minorities have the functional opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.
Professor Michael McDonald
gives a simple definition to this quandary: The expectation is that a "minority opportunity" district should have a non-white VAP exceeding 50 percent. But the problem we see in Mississippi and elsewhere is that the GOP cartography squad goes well beyond that standard.
Consider one small case study: The 24th Senate district whose map is shown at the top of this essay. It was drawn with some creative lines that gave it a 74 percent African-American VAP. Predictably, the district went for President Obama with north of three-quarters of the vote, and African-American Democrat David Jordan has won there easily for nearly two decades. Next door, the neighboring 14th SD is represented by Republican Lydia Chassionol. Her district's electorate is only 27 percent black. As a result, Mitt Romney carried the district with roughly 67 percent of the vote.
If some precincts were swapped in the northeast corner of the 24th district, Jordan would still enjoy a clearly VRA-compliant district, but to do so would put the Republican incumbent in grave political danger. The political benefit for the GOP in packing this district made this an easy call for them.
Some of these districts, in all candor, would still be heavily packed with African-American voters even without obscenely gerrymandered lines. A cursory glance at the most heavily African-American district in the state, for example, shows that the district lines are actually pretty compact. It just happens to be in a densely African-American enclave in Jackson.
This, of course, will be a tough bell to unring for Democrats. Republicans already have legislative majorities in the South, and it seems highly unlikely that most of these states will have Democratic governors by 2020 that will give the party a tiny bit of leverage (and in the state of North Carolina that leverage wouldn't help anyway, since due to a quirk in state law the Governor has no veto power over the map).
At one point in recent electoral history, Republicans could count on the tacit support of African-American Democrats in these efforts. But, as Ari Berman wrote in the heat of the redistricting wars a few years back, that detente between the two groups has waned as time has elapsed:
Stacey Abrams, the first African-American leader of the Georgia House, denounced the GOP plan to create seven new majority-minority districts in the Statehouse but eliminate the seats of nearly half the white Democrats. “Republicans intentionally targeted white Democrats, thinking that as an African-American leader I wouldn’t fight against these maps because I got an extra number of black seats,” she says. “I’m not the chair of the ‘black caucus.’ I’m the leader of the Democratic caucus. And the Democratic caucus has to be racially integrated in order to be reflective of the state.” Under the new GOP maps, Abrams says, “we will have the greatest number of minority seats in Georgia history and the least amount of power in modern history.”
And those white Southern Democratic legislators that aren't getting eliminated via primary are choosing to turn to their rivals for their political salvation. An eye-popping
15 Democrats in the Mississippi state legislature have switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP since 2000. Some of those did so for clear ideological reasons, but others have left because, quite simply, they could not expect to carry 60 percent-plus GOP districts in perpetuity as Democrats. And the alternative (running in those minority-opportunity districts) was also not palatable, since their odds of survival in the primary election process was almost nil.
And thus, the Democratic Party in the South is teetering close to extinction. Even the most well-intentioned national efforts to stem or reverse the tide are perilously close to a fool's errand, unless one is suddenly confident that the Democrats could sweep large numbers of districts that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. And so, less attention is paid.
Which, tragically, creates the political scenario that Rep. Abrams spoke of in Georgia. African Americans enjoy a greater raw number of representatives in the halls of government, but their odds of actually having their agenda taken seriously, in the face of monolithic Republican majorities, is next to nil. And therein lies the greatest tragedy of states like Mississippi, which will see its election pass in a couple of weeks with barely a whisper or a sideways glance of attention.