Missing the Mark on NH Redistricting
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at a Concord Monitor editorial and that, has been, nice. A friend on Facebook shared this one today: “Editorial: Working toward a fair map,” and there are just so many things wrong with it … where to start?
First, it gets the process completely wrong …
“According to a Monitor analysis published in December, if the electoral map hadn’t been redrawn after the 2010 census, Democrats would likely hold a 13-11 majority in the Senate. The redrawn map allowed Republicans to maintain their 14-10 majority.“
Here’s the Monitor analysis, which I’ll reference later: “Capital Beat: Republican led redistricting helped set table for GOP majority in N.H. Senate”
As everyone knows, populations changed between 2000 and 2010 so much that the districts HAD to be redistricted in order to create better population balance, within 1 percent of each other, a legal requirement, or what a 2006 Constitutional amendment called “the smallest political sub-division” possible. This happens every 10 years because populations shift and they did in New Hampshire. Even the biggest of speculators realizes that one can’t just take districts that were designed in 2002 and plop in the election results of the future – in this case, 2008 and 2016 – to get a hypothesis of the makeup of a political body for today. There are too many dynamics in play.
Why didn’t the editorialist go back into the previous political coverage and eye the debate about the numbers before making such a ridiculous, fact-less hypothesis, in an effort to understand why we even redistrict in the first place?
Having covered the previous redistricting fights quite extensively for Patch — close to 20 stories — I can say that it did seem that some consideration was given to protect incumbents with the Senate seats. One might surmise that some protections were strategized by Republicans in order to preserve their party’s standing even if there is no proof of that.
One example was the Concord state Senate seat (District 15) which was gerrymandered to be made less competitive for potential Republican candidates because it was presumed that a Democrat — a very liberal one, actually — would always win. Shifting Pembroke out of that district and adding Henniker and Warner made it more liberal while District 8 and District 17 weren’t changed much (Republicans have always served in those seats, I believe). It also forced then-state Sen. Andy Sanborn, R-Henniker, into a seat he would never be able to win (wonder why the GOP would do that to one of their own incumbents). This prompted Sanborn and his wife, Laurie, a state representative, to move to Bedford.
In the December analysis done by the Monitor (see link above), they mention this being done for the Portsmouth seat, too. Those are legit complaints — but showing Democrats probably winning those two seats anyway doesn’t necessarily make the surrounding seat more or less competitive … in fact, it’s a complete unknown what the other seats would look like. Such a presumption, with so many moving parts, is just … dumb. Opinionators don’t realize that for every change made to one Senate seat, other changes are made to the other seats; in other words, you can’t just say, “Move these towns over here so that my personal political preference can win,” because it makes drastic changes to other nearby seats, changing the entire dynamic nearly everywhere.
While the Senate was under Democrat control between 2009 and 2011, it has consistently been under Republican control before and after. As well, the current seat districts have been exceedingly competitive regardless of any minor tweaks that could have been made to make the seats, supposedly, “fairer,” if that is even a possible outcome at all.
“…tools now exist that can apportion electoral districts fairly and pinpoint districts that were created to gain or preserve political advantage.”
Umm, yeah, and tools existed six years ago to play with the district maps when the Monitor (and Patch, too) had more reporters but you know what? The Monitor’s then-two Statehouse reporters didn’t bother to attend most of the hearings or play with the map … but I did … I can state that, yes, there were ways of making a FEW of the seats more regionally coherent.
The editorial challenges readers to look at the state Senate map. Do, here’s the link.
As you can see, most of the seats look regionally coherent; District 9 and possibly District 5 are a bit odd. But the rest? They don’t look gerrymandered at all. And there is no guarantee of changes in outcome based on tweaking the maps because there are a multitude of hypothetical district changes that it’s a complete unknown whether Democrats or Republicans would hold onto control of the Senate.
These kinds of editorials and groupthink have nothing to do with “fairness” and everything to do with just not liking the outcome of an election, and nothing more. It is, frankly, getting tiresome.
The House seats are so tiny that there isn’t change to them that could make them fairer; although lumping my Ward 5 Concord seat in with Hopkinton still remains, in my mind, as silly and stupid.
