Gerrymandering's Surprising History and Uncertain Future

NARRATION: It’s one of the darkest arts of electoral politics. And it’s perfectly legal.

CARTER WRENN: This is like original sin. Both sides are infected with it.

NARRATION: Gerrymandering. It has a surprising history and an uncertain future, as the nation awaits a ruling by the Supreme Court.

DALLAS WOODHOUSE: What it has become to mean is districts that I don’t like, because somebody else drew them.

NARRATION: The former steel town of Tarentum in western Pennsylvania is a mix of working-class Republicans and Democrats. Former congressman Jason Altmire says that’s given him a close-up view of how gerrymandering works.

JASON ALTMIRE (FORMER U.S. REPRESENTATIVE, D-PA): When I was in office, if you lived in this house you were my constituent. But if you lived on this side, your congressman was 60 miles away in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. It’s a small town; they’re in the same school district. They’re one community, except for the fact they were represented by two different members of Congress.

NARRATION: In the decade after each new census, states redraw their congressional and legislative districts. The party in power, whether Republican or Democrat, typically draws maps to protect its own members.

FORMER CONSTITUENTS OF JASON ALTMIRE:
WOMAN: Well, if you’re right there on that line, on that border, and if it’s a crazy district, it can become very confusing.
MAN: But gerrymandering isn’t a partisan problem. We see this in other states like Maryland where it’s been the Democrats in power and the Democrats drawing the map to essentially marginalize Republican power.

JEFFREY TOOBIN (STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER): Gerrymandering doesn’t just determine how many Democrats and Republicans will serve. It determines what kind of Democrats and Republicans. It contributes to polarization. It makes the more liberal Democrats more likely to win. It makes the more conservative Republicans more likely to win. And they are less likely to cooperate with each other, and that gets us to the politics we have now.

JASON ALTMIRE: If you’re a member of Congress representing that type of district, you don’t hear different points of view. You hold a town hall meeting and all you ever hear is, “Right on, keep doing what you’re doing. And don’t you dare compromise.”

NARRATION: Both parties have long played the redistricting game. But today’s hard-fought battles have their origins thirty years ago, when the Supreme Court rendered a decision that upended the political landscape.

ARCHIVAL (ABC, WORLD NEWS TONIGHT, 6-30-86):
PETER JENNINGS: And in one unanimous decision today the court said that North Carolina’s redistricting plan violated the 1982 Voting Rights Act by reducing black voting power.

NARRATION: The court ruled that under the Voting Rights Act, minority groups should have the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates to Congress.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, EVENING NEWS, 10-1-92):
MEL WATT: I Need your help!

NARRATION: The remedy? New majority-minority districts, where minority residents of voting age made up more than 50% of the population.

ARCHIVAL (ABC, WORLD NEWS TONIGHT, 9-16-92):
REPORTER: In several states, new snake-like district lines were drawn, linking together small pockets of black voters.

ARCHIVAL (CBS, EVENING NEWS, 10-1-92):
MAN: I feel like things are changing in the right direction.

ARCHIVAL:
EVA CLAYTON: Just wanna say hello to you. I’m running for Congress.

NARRATION: In the 1992 elections, the new majority-minority districts achieved their goal, and 17 new black representatives were elected to Congress.

ARCHIVAL:
REPORTER: The new Congress looks more like America than any other Congress in history.

ARCHIVAL (C-SPAN,1992):
EVA CLAYTON: Hello America!

NARRATION: One of them was a North Carolina lawyer and activist named Eva Clayton.

EVA CLAYTON: From 1901 to 1992, no Afro-American had ever represented North Carolina. So that was a beautiful historic moment.

ARCHIVAL (C-SPAN, 1992):
EVA CLAYTON: We too sing America.

EVA CLAYTON: I felt privileged, I felt honored, and I felt humbled and blessed.

NARRATION: But for the Democrats, who still controlled the redistricting process, there was a price to pay. By packing black voters into a limited number of districts, there were fewer Democrats everywhere else. And Republicans saw an opportunity to divide and conquer.

ARCHIVAL (CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE, C-SPAN II, 1992):
BEN GINSBERG (CHIEF COUNSEL, REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE): Let me tell you that The Voting Rights Act has the potential to really shake things up and frankly it is frightening to the Democrats.

CARTER WRENN (REPUBLICAN CONSULTANT): Very quickly, the Republican politicos figured out that if you drew three minority-majority districts, it meant there were three incredibly Democrat districts, which meant there were more Republicans in the other eight or ten districts.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: So the Republicans went to the African-American community largely Democratic and said, “Let’s make a deal.”

ARCHIVAL (CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE, C-SPAN II, 1992):
BEN GINSBERG (CHIEF COUNSEL, REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE): In South Carolina, blacks and Republicans are already talking about a crescent-shaped district through the southern part of the state.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: The alliance when it comes to redistricting between the Republicans mostly in the south and the African-Americans mostly in the south has been called “the unholy alliance.” Certainly, the Republicans knew what they were doing. The first sign of what a big deal the unholy alliance was was the 1994 elections.

ARCHIVAL (1994):
NEWT GINGRICH (FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER, R-GA): We will keep our commitment to keep our half of the contract with the help of the American people.

ARCHIVAL (CNN, 1-1-95):
RICK SANTORUM (SENATOR, R-PA): There’s a new wind blowing, and it is a majority for Republicans.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: You saw the white Democrats in the south losing seat after seat.

ARCHIVAL (CNN, 1-1-95):
BERNARD SHAW: Voters sweep Democrats from power in midterm elections and give Republicans control of the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years.

CARTER WRENN: So it’s an irony. More African-American districts meant less Democrats were elected.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: I don’t think the African-American community was out to destroy the Democratic Party but they were out to get the representation they thought they were entitled to. What happened was, it led to complete Republican dominance of virtually every state south of the Mason-Dixon line.

ANGELA BRYANT (NORTH CAROLINA STATE SENATOR): So it’s sort of like taking our fight against racism, and the advancements we’ve made and the laws we’ve used and literally turning them around on their head and saying “These are the laws you want and you fought for? Fine. We’re going to implement them a hundred and fifty percent and see if you like that.”

ANGELA BRYANT (DRIVING IN HER CAR): Let me hold the map.

NARRATION: Angela Bryant served in the North Carolina legislature from one of the carefully-drawn majority-minority districts.

ANGELA BRYANT (DRIVING IN HER CAR): And what’s on the left side is in my district. It’s one of the few trailer parks that’s still in the city.

NARRATION: The lines can get complicated, even for a seasoned legislator.

ANGELA BRYANT (DRIVING IN HER CAR): So I’ma stop here and get my bearings. This road is sort of the boundary. And this is what I can’t tell, if these are in or out.

NARRATION: By filling her district with African-American voters, Republicans, who were now in control, were able to claim everyone else.

ANGELA BRYANT: It always bothered me, in terms of gerrymandering, that there was what I call ‘a finger’ that scooped down into what was otherwise my district, that interrupted the compactness, and scooped out the wealthier households which are more white and Republican. In a micro sense both me and my community benefited from the racial gerrymander, in that I got to represent them. However, in the big sense, it rendered us powerless in that the surrounding white communities and representatives didn’t need us, and they could label our party as the black party.

NARRATION: Having lost their voting strength, Democrats now contend that majority-minority districts are no longer fair. But they’re running up against the reality that Republicans are firmly in control of mapmaking in a majority of states.

ARCHIVAL (NORTH CAROLINA CONGRESSIONAL REDISTRICTING HEARING, 2016):
DAVID LEWIS (NORTH CAROLINA GOP STATE SENATOR): To the extent possible, the map drawers create a map which is perhaps likely to elect ten Republicans and three Democrats. I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander, which is not against the law.
FLOYD MCKISSICK (REPRESENTATIVE): Come up with something different. It could be five Democratic seats.

DALLAS WOODHOUSE (EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, N.C. REPUBLICAN PARTY): Democrats don’t like the fact that Republicans took over a lot of State Legislatures, and what we’ve seen with Democrats across the country is to look for bogeymen under every rock they can to explain their electoral failures. And of course it is my opinion that Democrats want to use the courts to do what they can’t win at the ballot box, and that is elections.

NARRATION: Across the country, gerrymandering is facing challenges in court. In North Carolina in 2018, the courts ruled that Republicans had packed too many African-American voters into too few districts.

ARCHIVAL (CNN, 1-10-18):
DON LEMON: North Carolina is really ground zero for gerrymandering…

NARRATION: It was a victory for Democrats, but Angela Bryant’s district was a casualty. It was more compact now, but also much more Republican. Bryant decided not to run for re-election.

ANGELA BRYANT: People say, oh they pushed her out. They didn’t push me out. It’s a shift we helped design and we pushed for. The Republicans, they said, “You realize if you fight this you lose your district,” you know. And so I’m saying, somehow you’re missing the point. I say, it’s not my district that’s important to me. I’m against racism. We’re insulted to have a district based on racial discriminatory practices.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Black people are overwhelmingly Democrats. So the question is, is it in the interest of African-Americans to have African-American legislators elected? Or is it in the interest of African-Americans to have the party they belong to have power? You may not be able to have both.

NARRATION: Regardless of election outcomes or court decisions, America’s political divisions are unlikely to go away anytime soon. It has to do with where Americans live.

JASON ALTMIRE: The problem that Democrats have is they have sorted themselves into like-minded communities, and it makes it very easy to draw lines that advantage the Republican Party because you can put all the Democrats into one single area, and that’s not something that’s going to change. That’s a social trend that is greater and more impactful than just gerrymandering.

DALLAS WOODHOUSE: Here’s what the Democrats need to do to fix their problem. They need to go when people back over in areas they lost, or they need to get the ones they have to move to other places….. A Democrat would draw it differently. They would probably come here to Cumberland, divide it up, and do something like this. Try to find a district by combining all over the state. I mean they have lost voters and they don’t have voters in the right areas. I mean that’s just what it is.

EVA CLAYTON: In a democracy, what we have as a final tool are our votes. That’s how people express themselves.

NARRATION: Fifty years ago, before the days of majority-minority districts, Eva Clayton ran for Congress and lost.

ARCHIVAL (12-13-68):
EVA CLAYTON: When you find people who are tears because you lost, then you know that you have not only stirred the emotions but also the hope.

NARRATION: Today, Clayton feels that a minority candidate like herself can appeal to everyone.

EVA CLAYTON: I have hope that America has moved far enough that an Eva Clayton could get elected. Now I don’t know why Eva Clayton would want to run right now. But anyhow, I think I can make my case to anyone. I just need the opportunity to do that.

(END)