Republicans Scatter, Smother, And Cover Democracy
It's not appetizing.
It wasn’t long after the Supreme Court vivisected the Voting Right Act that Republican-run legislatures in the South started eliminating Democratic seats by cracking, slicing, dicing, smothering, and covering majority Black districts.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry cancelled an active primary election, where 42,000 voters had already cast ballots, so Republicans could get a jump on racial gerrymandering. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis thinks he can wring out some more red from the state’s current map, which was already gerrymandered to near death.
In South Carolina, Republicans are working fast to remove the one remaining Democratic House district in the state. That means Rep. Jim Clyburn might have to spend the rest of his life with his family. His grandkids will throw balls at him in the park, and he’ll just sit there, repeating the words “reclaiming my time.”
Tennessee state Rep. Gino Bulso boasted last week during a Jim Crow special session, “To paraphrase Nathan Hale, I only regret that we have but one seat to take from the Democrats.” That guy should travel with his own maniacal laugh. (Watch below.)
Republicans aren’t hiding their motivations. They aren’t redrawing maps to make them more competitive or ensure better representation for their constituents or any crap like that. They are openly taking seats from Democrats and cementing GOP rule.
As Semafor’s David Weigel put it, Republicans’ “goal isn’t just winning seats in the next few elections; it’s to make a House majority impossible for the current version of the Democratic Party.”
Even with all this skullduggery, Democrats are still favored to win the House. That’s just how much Donald Trump sucks. Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries has vowed to respond to Republicans in kind, which could mean eliminating remaining Republican seats in Democratic-run states, such as New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Colorado. However, a potential Democratic House majority in 2027 could look very different.
Once upon a time, Democrats believed “demographics were destiny.” Even in 2012, when President Barack Obama won re-election with just 39 percent of the white vote (a worse performance than Dukakis), he crushed Mitt Romney in the Electoral College, and Democrats picked up eight seats in the House after their 2010 shellacking and two seats in the Senate. Hillary Clinton sunk to 37 percent of the white vote in 2016 but still won the overall popular vote. Democrats picked up six seats in the House and two in the Senate.
Yet, destiny started to unravel in 2020. During the pandemic, which Donald Trump had botched, Joe Biden narrowly won the Electoral College with just 41 percent of the white vote. Although Democrats flipped the Senate through a Georgia miracle, they lost a shocking 13 seats in the House, where the safest seats were majority-minority districts. Those seats often had Black voters packed into their districts, so while they were able to weather harsh political winds, the representatives never faced competitive general elections, and since primary challenges — especially against Congressional Black Caucus members — aren’t exactly encouraged, the representatives pretty much stopped having true elections. It’s why so many have remained in office long enough to die there.
Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke from New York, chair of the CBC, made an interesting comment during a press conference hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“With this decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court has opened the door to a coordinated attack on Black voters across this country,” Clarke said. “This is an outright power grab. It’s about silencing Black voices, dismantling majority Black districts and rigging the maps so that politicians can choose their voters instead of the other way around.”
However, politicians from majority-minority districts have actively chosen their voters. An inconvenient reality is that many, if not all, majority-minority districts served as Democratic voter dumps that helped keep the state’s other Republican districts solid red. The larger question was whether literal minority representation in the House was better than more competitive seats that Democrats, of any race, might actually win. We know where Clyburn stood: ProPublica reported that Clyburn secretly worked with Republicans in 2021 on a redistricting plan that would dilute Black voter strength in exchange for keeping his seat intact and safe. The result was that Black voters were packed into Clyburn’s district, which came at an obvious cost: Republican Nancy Mace had narrowly defeated Democrat Joe Cunningham but Clyburn’s secret deal put a permanent GOP lock on her district. (Given Mace’s opportunism, this likely also explains her full-bodied MAGA embrace, as she no longer had to worry about winning a general election. Only the primary mattered.)
Even though Clyburn had served in Congress for more than 30 years, he feared even the possibility of a competitive election (after all, no Democrat would ever dare primary him), so he helped Republicans put a former swing seat out of reach for Democrats in exchange for making his seat safer.
Now, the same Republicans who brokered the backroom deal are publicly rewarding Clyburn with retirement. It’s well-deserved.
In 2020, Joe Biden won 43 percent of the vote in South Carolina to Donald Trump’s 55 percent. That’s hardly a rout. Kamala Harris would later manage 40 percent in an overall bad year for Democrats. There’s a limit to how much you can gerrymander Democrats out of existence, especially without majority-minority districts as convenient vote dumps. In some maps that are similar to the proposed South Carolina gerrymander, at least three districts had to drop below R+13 to send Clyburn back home. One was as low as R+10. As others have noted, Democratic overperformance in special elections since Trump slithered back into the White House has been +14 so far. That definitely puts Republican seats at risk during a wave election, and how many South Carolina House Republicans are truly prepared to even run a campaign in a general election that’s actually competitive? Their only setting for years has been catering to the mad MAGA king. Now, in even slightly less partisan districts, they might have to spend actual money to hold their seats.
One could argue that Clyburn’s seat was a reasonable trade for six extremely safe seats where the primary was the only real election. You might have to debase yourself to Trump but you don’t have to thread the needle to a general election, where voters might hold you accountable for your sycophancy. Ironically, Trump’s own gerrymandering push might weaken his (or any future Republican president’s) influence over House members. This is the sort of basic math that’s not covered in those cognitive exams.
I hope that you are right that all of this gerrymandering will backfire on the repubs. They know that they, their G̵o̵l̵d̵e̵n̵ ̵C̵a̵l̵f̵ president, and their policies are unpopular, so have given up upon persuading Americans to vote for them. All they care about is holding onto power.
As for Clyburn, if he loses because SC repubs gerrymander him out of his district, he does deserve it, for conspiring with them in the first place to keep his district safe for HIM, and believing the repubs will keep their word on anything.