by Jerry Cayford

“Failure is the foundation of success, and the means by which it is achieved,” says the Tao Te Ching. The current competition between our two parties to gerrymander the country—Texas, California, Virginia, Florida—is a stunning failure for democracy reform efforts. Gerrymandering transfers power from the people to the parties, and Americans hate it. By the time this year’s mid-term elections are over, huge numbers of us will have representatives who, we feel, don’t represent us and won unfairly. Many of us will live in states without a single official in Congress from our own party. Nevertheless, we all support this district grab, because we can’t let the other party seize power by gerrymandering more districts than we do. Where are the means to success in failure this big?

Spilt Milk

No one is feeling more defeated than the good-government activists who have worked so long to end gerrymandering and make our elections more fair. The need to respond to extreme gerrymanders has forced them to support the torching of their own work. They are “backpedaling furiously,” as one such activist bluntly puts it: “Decades of reformer work is going up in smoke.” Renewing forward movement will require understanding what happened. Alarmingly, there are signs that the reform community will learn nothing, that it will interpret this defeat as an aberration rather than a refutation of its past work and will return stubbornly to its failed strategy. A different response to failure, though, could build a foundation for success.

What the reform community appears to be overlooking is the golden opportunity this ugly war to gerrymander everything actually presents. It is the opportunity not only to formulate a better strategy, but also to use the power of public anger to solve the problem of creating fair districts once and for all. Redistricting has been mostly a wonkish, back-burner issue, briefly irritating to the public from time to time, but never before commanding the intensity of concern it does now. Right now—with huge amounts of money, political power, and public outrage all focused on gerrymandering—now is when reform can succeed. Read more »