The Voting War In North Carolina | VICE on HBO
Summary
TLDRThe video script delves into the contentious issue of gerrymandering in the United States, particularly focusing on Asheville, North Carolina. It illustrates how the city's liberal population was split between two conservative districts post-2011 redistricting, diminishing its political influence. The script explores the historical origins of gerrymandering, the strategic 'REDMAP' project by Republicans to gain control over state legislatures, and the use of modern tools like Mapp titude for redistricting. It also discusses the techniques of 'cracking' and 'packing' to manipulate voter influence and highlights the bipartisan support for ending gerrymandering, including the potential impact of the efficiency gap measure before the Supreme Court.
Takeaways
- 🗺️ Asheville, known for its liberal population, was split into two conservative districts following the 2011 redistricting, altering its political landscape.
- 🔄 The redistricting was part of a broader strategy called 'REDMAP' aimed at giving Republicans control over state legislatures to influence congressional redistricting.
- ⚖️ Gerrymandering, the practice of manipulating district maps for political advantage, has been used to ensure conservative majorities in North Carolina despite a balance of registered party voters.
- 📊 The efficiency gap, a statistical measure, was developed to quantify partisan advantage in redistricting, which could be used in Supreme Court cases to assess gerrymandering.
- 🏛️ The U.S. Supreme Court's decisions on gerrymandering cases could set precedents affecting the balance of power in Washington DC.
- 🤝 Bipartisan support is growing for ending gerrymandering due to its negative impact on representation and the performance of Congress.
- 📉 Gerrymandering has led to a decrease in competitive elections and increased political polarization, as seen in California before redistricting reform.
- 👥 Strategies like cracking and packing are used to manipulate voter influence by dispersing or concentrating voters to favor one party over another.
- 🏫 North Carolina A&T State University is an example of cracking, where the campus was split between two districts, diluting the impact of student votes.
- 🗳️ The redistricting process is legally necessary for equal population representation but has been exploited to extreme partisan ends without clear legal limits.
Q & A
What is the main issue discussed in the video script?
-The main issue discussed in the video script is gerrymandering, which is the manipulation of district voting maps for the advantage of one political party, and its impact on the political landscape, particularly in Asheville, North Carolina.
How did the 2011 redrawing of congressional districts affect Asheville, North Carolina?
-The 2011 redrawing divided Asheville's liberal-leaning population into two conservative districts, which altered the political landscape and made it difficult for Democrats to win in areas that were previously competitive.
What is the historical origin of the term 'gerrymandering'?
-The term 'gerrymandering' dates back to 1812 when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry's Democratic-Republican Party manipulated district lines to gain an advantage in the state Senate. A cartoonist satirized one of the salamander-shaped voting districts, leading to the coining of the term 'gerrymander'.
What is the REDMAP project mentioned in the script?
-REDMAP is a strategic plan by Republicans to concentrate resources on key state legislative races where there would be a redrawing of congressional lines based on census data. The goal was to gain control of the US House of Representatives by influencing redistricting.
What are the two main strategies used in partisan gerrymandering?
-The two main strategies used in partisan gerrymandering are 'cracking' and 'packing'. Cracking disperses the other side's voters across multiple districts, while packing concentrates them in a few districts where their preferred candidates can win by large margins.
How does gerrymandering affect the influence of voters in Asheville?
-Gerrymandering has led to Asheville's liberal population feeling that their voice has been eradicated, as their influence is diluted by being absorbed into more conservative districts, reducing their impact on elections.
What is the efficiency gap and how does it relate to gerrymandering?
-The efficiency gap is a statistical measurement created by Nick Stephanopoulos to quantify the extent of partisan advantage in redistricting. It calculates the difference in 'wasted' votes between parties, which can indicate how heavily a district plan has been gerrymandered.
What is the role of the Supreme Court in addressing gerrymandering?
-The Supreme Court is expected to provide guidance on the legal limits of partisan gerrymandering. In the script, it is mentioned that the Court will hear arguments for a case involving Wisconsin State Assembly districts, which could set a precedent for using the efficiency gap to measure gerrymandering.
What is the perspective of the architect of REDMAP on the practice of gerrymandering?
-The architect of REDMAP, Chris Kowski, views gerrymandering as a strategic move to give Republicans an advantage in state governments. He does not express regret for the practice, believing it was a good thing for his party, despite acknowledging the polarization it can cause.
How has gerrymandering impacted the state of North Carolina's political representation?
-Gerrymandering has resulted in Republicans occupying 64% of the state assembly seats in North Carolina, despite there being more registered Democrats than Republicans. This has led to a distortion of representation that does not reflect the state's population as a whole.
Outlines
🗺️ Asheville's Political Landscape Altered by Gerrymandering
The first paragraph introduces Asheville, a city with a liberal-leaning population that has been politically impacted by redistricting. It explains how Asheville was once part of a congressional district that balanced its liberal views with the conservative views of Western North Carolina, represented by moderate Democrat Heath Shuler. However, after the 2011 redistricting by the Republican state legislature, Asheville was split into two conservative districts, diminishing the city's political influence. Asheville's mayor, Esther Manheimer, discusses the dramatic change in representation and how the city's voice has been eradicated by gerrymandering. The paragraph also touches on the broader implications of gerrymandering, which is the manipulation of district voting maps for political advantage, and how it has led to the replacement of moderate politicians with more extreme ones.
🔍 The Impact of REDMAP and Redistricting Techniques
The second paragraph delves into the strategy behind REDMAP, a plan by Republicans to concentrate resources on state legislative races that would oversee the redrawing of congressional lines post-census. This strategy has resulted in Republicans gaining significant map-making power, leading to a loss of over 900 state legislature seats for Democrats. The paragraph discusses how redistricting is done using modern tools like Mapp titude, which allows for precise manipulation of district lines to influence election outcomes. It explains the techniques of 'cracking' and 'packing,' where voters are either dispersed across districts to dilute their influence or concentrated in a few districts to minimize their overall impact. The paragraph also provides examples of these techniques, including the splitting of a historically black university's campus and the manipulation of a State House district to pack minority voters, thereby affecting their influence in other races.
🌐 The Broader Reach and Future of Gerrymandering
The third paragraph explores the wider effects of gerrymandering across the United States, highlighting the GOP's increased control over state legislatures and the subsequent shift in political representation. It discusses the public's growing awareness and dissatisfaction with gerrymandering due to Congress's low approval ratings and the perceived lack of fairness in the electoral process. The paragraph includes perspectives from various stakeholders, including a former governor and a scholar who developed a statistical measurement called the efficiency gap to quantify partisan advantage in redistricting. The potential for the Supreme Court to establish new standards for gerrymandering is also mentioned, as well as the views of a Republican strategist who does not regret his role in advancing his party's interests through redistricting. The paragraph concludes with a discussion on the need for redistricting reform and the possibility of taking the process out of the hands of politicians to ensure fairness and representation.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Gerrymandering
💡Redistricting
💡Packing and Cracking
💡Political Representation
💡Red Map Project
💡Efficiency Gap
💡State Legislature
💡Polarization
💡Fairness in Elections
💡Bipartisan Support
Highlights
Asheville, known for its liberal population, was made politically competitive due to a 2011 redistricting that split the city into two conservative districts.
Congressional districts are supposed to have similar populations, coherent geographic shapes, and keep communities with similar interests together.
Asheville's political influence was dramatically affected by redistricting, which divided the city's liberal population into conservative districts.
Gerrymandering has led to a perception among Asheville voters that their voice has been eradicated.
The redistricting process in North Carolina is controlled by the party in power in the State House, which has been the Republicans.
The REDMAP project was a strategic plan by Republicans to invest in state legislative races to influence redistricting based on census data.
Gerrymandering techniques like cracking and packing are used to manipulate district lines for political advantage.
Cracking disperses voters of one party across multiple districts, while packing concentrates them in a few districts to minimize their influence.
North Carolina A&T State University, a historically black college, was split into two districts, diluting the student vote.
Packing was used in North Carolina to concentrate minority voters in specific districts, affecting their influence in other races.
Despite more registered Democrats than Republicans, Republicans hold 64% of the state assembly seats due to gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering has led to historically low congressional approval ratings and bipartisan support for its termination.
California has successfully combated gerrymandering through redistricting reform, creating a more balanced political landscape.
The efficiency gap is a statistical measurement that quantifies the extent of partisan advantage in redistricting.
The Supreme Court's upcoming case on Wisconsin State Assembly districts could set a precedent for using the efficiency gap to measure gerrymandering.
The architect of REDMAP does not regret the strategy, believing it was beneficial for the Republican party and the direction they were heading.
Transcripts
[Music]
take a deep breath a good job go ahead
and bring your hands to your knees
drop your chin to your chest breathe in
welcome to Asheville take a deep breath
where are yo --ga exhale is you know
with those I was surprised to learn that
there was go yogi
evil rites petitions and a lot of
liberal people in such a conservative
congressional district yeah
well the thing about our district is it
is kind of cut up a little bit what do
you mean the way that they do our
districts Asheville would be a very
progressive district if it weren't for
the fact that they've kind of cut it
right down the middle congressional
districts in the u.s. are typically
supposed to have similar populations
resemble a coherent Geographic shape and
keep communities with similar interests
together of the 435 congressional
districts in the US North Carolina has
13 in one of those districts the city of
Asheville is large liberal-leaning
population made it competitive for a
Democrat to win until a 2011 redrawing
divided the city's population into two
otherwise conservative districts and
permanently altered the political
landscape
[Music]
Asheville mayor Esther manheimer a
Democrat has seen the city's
representation dramatically change over
the last decade the political
environment here is far outside of the
average of North Carolina I would say
after 2011 redistricting how was
Asheville affected it was dramatically
affected Asheville used to have a
congressional district that took in all
of Asheville in all of Western North
Carolina and it supported congressman
Heath Shuler who was an excellent
balance of what you get when you add
Asheville to Western North Carolina
because Asheville is very liberal but
Western North Carolina tends to be more
conservative and then with redistricting
by the Republican state legislature
Asheville was split into two very
conservative congressional districts
where there's no question these
districts don't represent where
Asheville is on the political spectrum
by splitting the city into two districts
Asheville's liberal population was
absorbed by two other more populated
conservative districts so what happened
to the influence of voters in Asheville
they feel that their voice has been
eradicated by gerrymandering
gerrymandering or the manipulation of
district voting maps for the advantage
of one political party helped ensure
that moderate Democrat Heath Shuler
would be replaced by one of the most
far-right Republicans in office today
mark meadows we caught up with Heath in
his former district well here's the city
and it once was all the 11th district
and now democratic-leaning precincts
which essentially took in the whole city
of Asheville are now in the 10th
district redistricting in North Carolina
is done by state legislators from the
party in power of the State House in
this case the Republicans when they were
drawing the lines people were calling me
would you like to have this precinct if
you'll give up this precinct I'm like
that's not the way this should work it's
not fair to the community let's draw
these lines the way they should be drawn
based upon fairness stop the
gerrymandering the product
goes back to 1812 when Massachusetts
governor Elbridge Gary's Democratic
Republican Party engineer district lines
to help his own party make gains in the
state Senate a cartoonist satirize
carries voting district as looking like
a salamander and the term gerrymander
was coined since then
voting districts have been drawn much
more precisely after 2010 Republican
state legislators took over the
redrawing process and have since been
able to make 10 of the state's 13
congressional seats safely conservative
despite there being more registered
Democrats than Republicans this GOP
success in North Carolina was actually a
part of a broader and highly effective
national strategy called red map we
spoke to its architect Christian Kowski
so you are the mastermind behind I think
what will be known as a historic in the
great 2011 gerrymandering which is still
in many ways dictating politics in our
country how did you decide to pursue
that well really started after a wait
and Obama's historic win where he really
shifted a number of political dynamics
in the country and so as Republicans we
were looking at okay what's the path
back and one of it was obviously how do
we get control of the US House of
Representatives what is red not red map
is a strategic plan to pull money on the
national level and invest it into the
key state legislative races where there
was going to be a redrawing of
congressional lines based on the census
data and focusing on the states that
were either going to lose a
congressional seat or gain a
congressional seat to have maximum
impact the direct results of the red map
project on the state legislative level
was to put Republicans at the table to
draw the lines people ask me about red
map and is it wasn't it so unfair what
you did and I said well we took the
rules that applied we told them what we
were gonna do and we did it and it we
did it in a year that was obviously
historic in itself since red map
Democrats have lost more than 900 state
legislature seats across the country
these state House wins have given the
Republicans unprecedented map making
power
scholar and lawyer Nick Stephanopoulos
showed us one of the modern tools
legislators can use to redraw districts
so this is Mapp titude for redistricting
map titude will give you information
about the populations of all of the
districts you're constructing that would
let you forecast how different districts
would perform under different
configurations in future elections the
city of Asheville for example is split
in two because if it were kept whole it
might have been enough for a Democratic
congressional district so what are you
doing right now
I have told matta two that I want to add
counties to district 11 and I want them
to come from district 10 you highlight
as many of them as you want to assign
click the assign button and all of a
sudden those counties will now be in the
district you put them in and they will
no longer be in the old district you can
see all of a sudden district 11 just
swallowed up to two-thirds of district
10 in 30 seconds exactly no Democrats
can do winning those districts it's a
good computer game it's a fairly easy
computer game and the two main
strategies to win that game and state
elections are called cracking and
packing partisan gerrymandering always
takes place through these two techniques
of cracking and packing tracking refers
to dispersing the other side's voters
across a relatively large number of
districts and packing refers to over
concentrating the other side's voters in
a few districts where their preferred
candidates consistently win by enormous
margins so just to be clear this process
is legal and it's necessary across the
country so what's the problem it's
necessary because we need to make sure
the districts have the same populations
but there is effectively no legal limit
whatsoever to how extreme their partisan
gerrymandering can be
and some of the most extreme examples
can be found in urban areas which tend
to have dense liberal populations to see
the effects of cracking we went to North
Carolina A&T State University North
Carolina A&T is a historically black
college and university there about
10,000 students here so if you take
10,000 students that's definitely enough
especially in a smaller congressional
election to swing a vote Oh auntie was
actually split into two different dishes
right now we're in congressional
district 13 this street is Laurel Street
and this is the street that divides the
campus for voting purposes their vote is
now correct
so that building right there is a
different congressional district than
where we're standing yes 50 feet away
right so now that vote has been divided
exactly and have 5,000 students still
significant but when you put this campus
in the broader map of the district is a
much smaller much weaker vote so while
cracking is used to break up votes
packing clusters voters of one party
together we saw our Republican
legislators applied this technique to
smaller State House races
[Applause]
morning Thomas stand before you you
think Republican mapmakers packed
thousands of new minority voters into
State House Democrat garland Pierce's
district a move that pulled minority
voters out of other races that they
would have had more influence in so
what's this here
this is House District 48 in the yellow
in the yellow and I say this starts this
is on the way to Greensboro North
Carolina 220 and this is the furthest
point in the south which is Fairmont
limited representative Pierce's district
now weaves in and out of four counties
across a hundred miles in the southern
part of the state so why is the district
shaped like this to stack impact my dogs
do you think that the makeup of the
state legislature right now
represents the North Carolina population
as a whole no ma'am no ma'am
a neighborhood should never be split
precincts and they would be split they'd
use the power of opinion to really put
themself in a position to leave for a
while that effort has now led to
Republicans occupying 64% of the state
assembly seats despite there being more
registered Democrats than Republicans in
the state this isn't just happening in
North Carolina the GOP went from
controlling 14 state legislators in 2010
to 32 this year and as districts have
been redrawn over that same time maps
that once contained blue are
consistently turning red with
congressional approval ratings at
historic lows there's now bipartisan
support for the termination of
gerrymandering this is a very dynamic
office you have here well this is the
predator that fought see the video real
stud like me then you fight the predator
with your bare hands and wipe them out
then here the Terminator they're
traveling through time cause if I could
do this in real life I will travel back
to 1812 and wipe out the gerrymandering
in the movies will be easy because it
just would you know go in the room
where they draw the mats and blow up the
room so everyone out of the room burn
the maps and then have honest people
draw the district lines gerrymandering
sucks because it's all designed for
helping the politicians but not the
ordinary citizen do you think that
voters know that their voter influence
is in some cases being taken away or
that their votes are being manipulated
because it's a very complicated issues
and very hard to kind of it's not the
sexy issue that people can jump on and
get involved with so only recently it
has now come out because there's such a
lack of performance and Congress is such
a low approval rating that people say
wait a minute we got to do something
about it when you first took office as
governor of California how bad was the
gerrymandering here it was like
Republicans were all locked into one
district and Democrats were all locked
into one district so the Republicans had
to be as far to the right as possible in
order to win the Democrats had to be as
far as possible to the left so how do
you get them together to agree to
something or the least compromise to get
something done I remember before we did
the redistricting reform in California
we had 265 congressional elections and
only one in 10 years changed party hands
only one think about that we in
California went all out and declared war
and gerrymandering and we have done away
with it but it's not gonna ever be
perfect unless you literally take it
away from the legislators altogether
that's the ideal thing is to take it
away from them and have ordinary folks
create a commission there is no interest
in the party and the key thing now is is
is for the Supreme Court to really
understand the complexity of the issue
until now the Supreme Court didn't have
a way to mathematically determine the
extent to which a district had been
gerrymandered by party but Nick
Stephanopoulos may have
pollution you created a statistical
measurement called the efficiency gap
what is that
so the efficiency gap is meant to be a
measure of the extent of partisan
advantage the key here is to realize
that both cracking and packing produce
what political scientists call wasted
votes so it'll tell you in a single
number the direction and the magnitude
of a plans partisans you in October the
Supreme Court will hear arguments for a
case about Wisconsin State Assembly
districts that could open the door for
the efficiency gap to be used across the
country any precedent set in this case
could also affect the balance of power
in Washington DC if they do that that's
still a subjective standard and you can
be assured that they'll just be more
lawyers in lawsuits challenging these
lines do you have any regrets
for something that you hope to create no
I just don't I did it because I actually
think that putting Republicans in charge
of state government is a good thing
do I like polarization know what I like
compromise depends but I don't feel bad
at all about giving my party advantage
because I believe ultimately and what
we're trying to do and it looks like
they're the Democrats they're gonna do
it themselves
so it there's become an arms race
quality to it which I don't like but I
don't we don't tend to lose
you
you
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