2018, and The Political Stakes for The Next Decade

February 27, 2017

By Joe Rothstein

Sorry to do this to you so soon after the ghastly 2016 election season, but it’s time to consider the importance of the 2017-2018 election cycle.

Once every ten years the U.S. government conducts a census. As a result of population adjustments required by the 2020 census, 7 or 8 states will lose congressional seats. How the surviving districts are reapportioned will affect dozens of congressional districts and many more seats in state legislatures.

So why is the 2018 election important to a 2020 census-triggered reapportionment? Because governors who are elected in 2018 will still be in office to influence the post 2020 district maps. So will many of the legislators elected in 2018 who preside over the drawing of those maps.

Reapportionment maps in most states are designed by Republican and Democratic Party partisans, whichever party happens to have majority control at the time. Those decisions distort state and national politics for the next decade. As an example, in 2016 the national vote for Republican congressional candidates was slightly under 50%, yet Republicans won more than 55% of 435 seats. If the seats had been apportioned by voter preference, Republicans would hold about a 10 seat majority instead of the 47 seat advantage they have in the current Congress.

The imbalance is even more pronounced in state legislatures. Michigan, for example. In 2016 Michigan voters gave about equal numbers of their votes to Democratic and Republican candidates, yet Republicans have a 63-47 advantage in the state House. Why? Because they used the 2010 reapportionment cycle to redraw the state’s 110 legislative districts, herding Democratic voters into a small number of districts. The process is called “stacking and packing,” and has been legally challenged with various degrees of success. North Carolina Democrats currently are in court fighting a particularly egregious redrawing of districts that minimizes the impact of African-American voters.

Two states elect governors in 2017, Virginia and New Jersey. Thirty-four governors will be decided in 2018. Of all those seats, Republicans will need to defend 27, including state houses in the deep blue states of Massachusetts, New Jersey and Illinois, and states that have been historically competitive for Democrats, like New Mexico, Florida and Wisconsin. All told, district lines of 186 congressional seats will be influenced by the winners of 2017-2018 governors’ races. So will thousands of seats in state legislatures.

Texas, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Oregon and Montana are states where population growth is likely to net more congressional seats. Those seats are likely to come at the expense of New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin and Alabama. Elections in all of these states will be pivotal.

In addition to the reapportionment question, control of the individual states has a bearing on potential constitutional amendments. Right wing Republicans for years have been advancing their dream of calling a new Constitutional Convention. At the top of that agenda is a balanced budget amendment. It takes little imagination to divine what else would happen if the Constitution were to be in play in the current political environment.

A pipe dream? Not if thirty-four states demand it, independently of Congress. Thirty-three already have. And you thought a radically conservative Supreme Court was the worst outcome possible from Republican control.

There’s a lot of energy and activity out there hoping to reverse the right’s political successes of the past few years. But before we get to the 2020 presidential campaign there will be the 2018 elections that will determine the balance of U.S. politics for the next decade.

It’s important to rally, march, go to town hall meetings and otherwise be active in the cause of bringing political sanity back to U.S. government. But to really make a difference, all of that work and enthusiasm needs to be channeled into 2018 candidates and campaigns that will make change in 2020 and beyond more likely.

(Joe Rothstein is a regular columnist for USPoliticstoday.com and author of the acclaimed political thriller “The Latina President… and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her.” Mr. Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com).