While the community of political junkies was absorbed yesterday with either the Huckabee theater or (for the advanced-level junkies) the West Virginia primary, there was another potentially big story brewing out West.
That Nevada's Republican Governor, Brian Sandoval, would veto the new maps created by the Democratic state legislature came as no surprise. And while his explanation for doing so was not necessarily a surprise, either, it is nevertheless very interesting:
In his veto message, Sandoval cites the fact none of the four congressional districts in the Democrats? plan are made up of a majority of Hispanic voters.?With Hispanics accounting for 46 percent of the total population growth in our state over the last 10 years, this transparent effort to avoid creating even one additional district where this community would be likely to elect its candidate of choice is simply not acceptable,? Sandoval wrote.
For those who don't know any better, this could be interpreted as a prominent Hispanic politician looking out for his community. That, as it actually happens, would be an uproariously poor little bit of analysis.
The data is unambiguous: if only Latinos voted in the state of Nevada, Rory Reid would be the Governor of Nevada right now. Indeed, despite his surname, Brian Sandoval snagged just one-third of the state's Latino vote. Reid took 65%, but was defeated for office when he could not offset Sandoval's enormous advantage among white voters in the Silver State.
The existence of that Democratic dominance among Latino voters (and, for that matter, African-American voters) informs the sudden display of concern for minority political power, whether it be Latino political ascendancy in Nevada or preserving minority districts in the Deep South.
As it relates to Nevada, the situation couldn't be more clear: this isn't about empowering Hispanics. It is about empowering Republicans.
Hispanic activists have argued the Republican version of the maps pack Hispanic voters into a few districts, diluting their strength in the rest of the state. Democrats, they argued, created many districts with Hispanic strength.
The agenda for the Republicans here is transparent, and politically shrewd. If you can craft a Latino-majority district in Nevada, you will have a district that presumably will be close to 2-to-1 Democratic. In a state where Democrats have a narrow registration edge (roughly five points), shoehorning such a heavily Democratic constituency into one of four districts is going to necessarily strengthen the GOP hand in the other three districts.
To put it another way, the Democratic maps, as written, would seem likely to send three Democrats to Congress, and one Republican (the current delegation is 2 R, 1 D). If the Republican dream of a majority-Latino district were to be realized, the best the Democrats could hope for would be a 2-2 split.
The Democrats have already started to work on revision of their maps, though the process could easily end up in court. In a must-read piece at Daily Kos Elections two weeks ago, community member Roguemapper laid out the relevant legal issue at stake:
Packing is most subject to successful legal challenge when it can be shown that ?unpacking? a majority-minority district can result in the drawing of two majority-minority districts in its place. So, for instance, in 2006 the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Bone Shirt v Hazeltine ruling struck down South Dakota?s legislative redistricting that featured a 90% Native American district alongside a 30% Native American district because one could draw two 60% Native American districts instead.What is far less clear is whether a challenge might be successful in cases where ?unpacking? a majority-minority district would result in so-called ?influence? districts in which the minority group would create a substantial plurality, but not a majority.
While the potential legal merits of such an argument remains unclear, what is becoming increasingly clear is that a Democratic challenge to the notion of "majority-minority" districts is imminent. The epicenter, however, might not be in Nevada. It might be a few thousand miles to the east, in the state of South Carolina:
Richard Harpootlian, the South Carolina trial lawyer who is, again, chairman of the Democratic Party here, said today that he will fight to loosen the Voting Rights Act's restrictions on the role of race in drawing district lines in a bid to remake southern politics.State politics from Florida through much of the South are characterized by districts like James Clyburn's in South Carolina, gerrymandered to be as heavily African-American as possible, and required to stay that way under a legal doctrine that bars "retrogression" -- that is, lowering the black share of a district.
If Harpootlian follows through on his threat to head to court, he will actually his one of his Republican colleagues as evidence. Harpootlian specifically cited Republican Congressman Tim Scott (an African-American elected with substantial white support), along with President Obama, to suggest that majority-minority districts are no longer necessary to bring racial balance to elected bodies.
Whether that will fly as a legal argument remains to be seen (some experts are dubious), it puts the issue of the VRA, as it relates to racial-based redistricting, on the front burner.
In the South, above all other locales, the Republican embrace of the idea of "majority-minority" districts is based on the overwhelming political advantage that they derive from it. In a disastrous 2010 midterm cycle, the Democrats still hung onto 37% of the House vote in South, according to exit polls. Yet they clung to only a small handful of seats in the South, far fewer than their proportion of the vote might suggest.
Indeed, in four states in the Deep South (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina), Democrats were able to claim just four districts--one per state. Meanwhile, the GOP claimed a total of 20 districts. The four seats claimed by the Democrats were the seats drawn to elect African-American representatives. The Democrats lost, by varying margins, five seats that were in their hands in those four states.
Therein lies the most intriguing part of the debate, politically if not necessarily legally. Are African-American and Latino interests better served by a circumstance which goes a long way to perpetuating a permanent Republican majority, if the trade-off is a substantial mass of seats represented by members of those communities? Or would their interests be better served by having more Democrats in those legislative bodies, even if the potential trade-off would be fewer members of those communities in elected office?
Whatever the outcome of future litigation on the subject, this discussion promises to be a very enlightening one in the near future. Republicans, for their part, are likely to follow Sandoval's shameless lead. Their faux concern for the political fortunes of Latinos and blacks in America is the most nauseating by-product of this incredibly interesting political debate.
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