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gerrymandering
North Carolina Woman Running 'Can't Win' State Senate Campaign Against Gerrymandering
"In a gerrymandered state like North Carolina, it means representatives are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives."
Oct 17, 2024
A North Carolina woman is running a self-described "built to lose" campaign for a state senate seat in a bid to draw attention to anti-democratic partisan gerrymandering.
Kate Barr, a 42-year-old mother of two, is a Democrat running for North Carolina's 37th Senate District, a seat she says she cannot win because it "is so gerrymandered that I don't stand a chance."
"But we deserve to have two names on the ballot," Barr
says on her campaign website. "If I'm going to lose, we might as well have a little fun, raise a little hell, and shine a light on the impacts of gerrymandering along the way."
Barr's
platform includes protecting abortion rights, fully funding public schools, and "common sense gun laws."
"All of those would be achievable in our purple state if we had a representative democracy instead of this gerrymandered nonsense," she asserted.
"Why am I losing?" Barr asked during a recent campaign speech covered by The Washington Post. "In a gerrymandered state like North Carolina, it means representatives are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives."
As the Post reported last month:
Barr centers her pitch on the principle of giving voters an option, even in deep-red districts where the outcome is all but predetermined. Having Democrats campaign in those conservative areas also gives a political boost to [U.S. vice president and Democratic presidential candidate] Kamala Harris in a state where the presidential race is seen as a toss-up and could prove nationally decisive if Democrats can peel off enough voters to secure North Carolina's 16 electoral votes...
Gerrymandering arrived in Barr's backyard last year when the state legislature redrew Davidson—the liberal, picturesque college town where she lives—into a state Senate district with conservative Iredell County for the 2024 election. Davidson went from being part of a district centered in Mecklenburg County—where Donald Trump lost by 35 percentage points in 2020—to being part of Iredell, which he won by about the same amount.
Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in favor of partisan gerrymandering in what voting rights advocates called a "blatant attack on democracy."
Barr said in an opinion piece published Tuesday by the Courier that the court decided that "basically, we, the voters in North Carolina, have a right to free elections but not to fair ones."
"That's some real bullshit," she wrote.
Anderson Clayton, who chairs the North Carolina Democratic Party, told the Post that "gerrymandering is a form of voter suppression in every single way, shape, and form."
Clayton added that many North Carolina voters "go into a voting booth every November and they're like, 'Damn, I don't have a Democrat to vote for. You know that means that somebody didn't care, that my vote wasn't worth fighting for.'"
Barr said the fact that she has little chance of winning isn't the point.
"We know we can't win it, because they've made sure we can't," she told one voter, according to the Post. "But that doesn't mean we go down without a fight."
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The GOP Has Already Cheated in the 2024 House Race
A Brennan Center analysis found that gerrymandering in 2024 will give Republicans approximately 16 additional seats in the House of Representatives compared to fairly drawn maps.
Oct 03, 2024
Gerrymandering is as old as the republic. In the very first congressional election, Patrick Henry drew a map to try to keep James Madison from being elected to Congress. (That was before the word “gerrymandering” was even coined.) Today, both parties do it with gusto when they can.
And now gerrymandering may decide control of the House of Representatives.
Once, gerrymandering was an art. Phillip Burton, the legendary Democratic House member from San Francisco who served from the 1960s to the 1980s, used to draw the state’s maps on a tablecloth at a Sacramento restaurant. He proudly called one misshapen district “my contribution to modern art.” Now, however, it’s a science. Digital technology has reshaped the drawing of maps. Partisans can craft districts to quash competition in a way that lasts throughout a decade.
Gerrymandering may be as old as the republic, but so is the fight for fair maps.
Once, there was hope the courts would step in. In 2019, however, the Supreme Court ruled that federal judges were barred from policing partisan gerrymandering. And while it is still illegal to draw district lines to discriminate based on race, judges have often winked and allowed politicians to racially gerrymander so long as they shrug and say, “It’s not about race, it’s just politics.”
Rampant district rigging has blocked fair representation in many states, especially in the South. Nearly all the population growth in the United States over the past decade took place in the South and Southwest, and most of that came from communities of color—the very voters who should be represented and who are being shut out of power.
Now, we know that there are direct partisan consequences too. All the map drawing, all the lawsuits, are done for 2024. The dust has settled. And the Brennan Center’s experts have analyzed the effects of gerrymandering. Attorney Michael Li and political scientist Peter Miller have checked and rechecked the data.
Here’s what they found: Gerrymandering in 2024 will give Republicans approximately 16 additional seats in the House of Representatives compared to fairly drawn maps. That is well more than the margin of control in this Congress or in the one before it. There can be no question that this was done deliberately and with scientific precision—and comes especially at the expense of communities of color. In most of the gerrymandered states, there were hundreds or thousands of fair maps that could have been drawn.
What can be done about it?
One answer comes from Ohio. Seven times, the state supreme court there struck down unfair maps drawn by the Republicans. (The Brennan Center represented a broad coalition of Ohio voters.) Each time, partisan map drawers simply ignored the court. Then the state’s esteemed Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a prominent Republican, retired due to term limits. Now she leads a statewide drive for a ballot measure to create a strong, independent, citizen-led redistricting commission. This conservative stalwart teamed up with the progressive grassroots Ohio Organizing Collaborative. It’s a buddy movie for the ages.
Republicans tried to change the number of votes needed to pass a measure like this, but citizens rejected that sneaky move. Then state officials rewrote the language to say that the initiative was designed to support gerrymandering. No matter. Polls look strong, and there is a good chance that in Ohio, voters will untilt the legislature and congressional maps. Ohio would join Arizona, California, Colorado, and Michigan with their independent commissions. It is a prime exhibit of why voters should be able to overrule politicians.
There’s a national solution too. The Freedom to Vote Act would ban partisan gerrymandering in congressional redistricting. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would strengthen that vital law against racially discriminatory rules. Both bills came achingly close to passing in the last Congress.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), at a Brennan Center event with Democracy SENTRY in Chicago this summer, announced that Democrats would make these voting rights bills the first order of business—and that they would change the filibuster rules so they could pass. The next night, Vice President Kamala Harris pledged to sign them (the only bills mentioned by name in her convention speech).
Gerrymandering may be as old as the republic, but so is the fight for fair maps. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, James Madison insisted on the provision used to give Congress the power to override local politicians. It used “words of great latitude,” he explained, because “it was impossible to foresee all the abuses” that might come. “Whenever the State Legislatures had a favorite measure to carry, they would take care so to mould their regulations as to favor the candidates they wished to succeed.”
Meanwhile, voters will go to the polls to choose their representatives—but too often, the representatives will choose the voters. And the Congress that would consider reform will be one disfigured by biased rules and manipulative maps.
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A Broken Democracy Cannot Protect Working People
Gerrymandering and the filibuster are holding back wage increases, the right to unionize, and other benefits for workers.
Sep 21, 2024
New waves of workers are standing up and demanding fair treatment on the job — from the fast food workers of the Fight for $15 to the workers at companies like Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and Volkswagen that are fighting for a union and a fair contract.
But as these workers have made significant gains, they’ve simultaneously run into huge barriers: our broken democratic systems. That’s why one of the most important priorities for advancing worker power is democracy reform.
In particular, that means reforming the anti-democratic filibuster in the U.S. Senate and ending partisan and racial gerrymandering, which have made state legislatures unresponsive to worker needs.
Take the Fight for $15. Over the last decade, the brave workers driving this inspiring campaign have won wage increases in half the states and scores of cities. As a result, about half of our workforce will soon be covered by a $15 minimum wage — one of the highest among industrialized countries. But the other half languishes with one of the lowest minimum wages in the developed world. The federal minimum wage remains frozen at a paltry $7.25.
Despite the fact that more than 80 percent of Democratic, independent, and Republican voters want to raise the minimum wage, no Republican-led legislature has passed a genuine increase in decades. Many have not only blocked state wage increases, but also passed punitive “preemption” laws to prevent cities from stepping in to ensure fair wages. Not coincidentally, many of these are among the most gerrymandered.
At the federal level, there’s a similar dynamic: Republicans in the Senate have used the anti-democratic filibuster for years to block increases in the federal minimum wage despite strong voter support.
Workers fighting to form a union face similar roadblocks. Employees who demand a fair shake routinely face retaliation from their employers — and those who defy the odds and win a union election often endure years of stonewalling as corporations refuse to negotiate a contract. Others, such as app-based workers at Uber and Doordash, have been denied the right to unionize at all.
The PRO Act would remove these roadblocks and modernize our broken labor laws to give workers a real opportunity to join a union and negotiate with their employers over fair pay and benefits, protection against extreme heat, how AI is deployed in their workplaces, and more.
But while 70 percent of voters, including a majority of Republicans, back the PRO Act, the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate prevents it from advancing.
Fortunately, there’s new and long overdue momentum for addressing these anti-democratic roadblocks.
Senator Chuck Schumer announced recently that if they win this year, Democrats plan to prioritize key democracy reforms, including reforming the filibuster to empower a simple majority of the Senate to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Act. These crucial voting rights bills include new limits on racial and partisan gerrymandering — the practices that have made many state legislatures so unresponsive to worker needs.
But safeguarding fair elections is only the first step. The next step must be removing the filibuster — which has a long and ugly history of being used to deny people of color basic rights in our nation — as an obstacle to restoring protections for workers. In an echo of Jim Crow, senators today are using the threat of a filibuster to protect a broken labor law system that denies all workers, and especially workers of color, a fair chance to join a union and earn a decent minimum wage.
The rights of workers to earn a living wage and have a voice in their workplaces are fundamental for our democracy. The key next steps for making those rights real is to restore our democracy by ending both gerrymandering and the filibuster.
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