For Democrats, Power to Remap Is a Tricky Tool

The Supreme Court’s ruling Wednesday in the Texas redistricting case has delivered a surprising opportunity to Democrats plotting ways to even the partisan score in Congress: an invitation to redraw House districts to elect more representatives from their party, just as Rep. Tom DeLay did in Texas to help the GOP.

But unlike DeLay and the Republicans, Democrats are ill-equipped to take advantage -- hampered by long-simmering racial tensions and other structural problems that make it harder for them to agree on new maps.

Democratic leaders in Washington said the high court’s ruling that upheld the rights of state officials to redraw congressional districts, and to do so anytime they wanted, could spur a flurry of map-drafting as early as next year in states controlled by Democrats.

By some estimates, this could mean at least five new House seats for Democrats, along with a host of newly competitive Republican seats -- an outcome that would inject parity to a political map that has tilted in the GOP’s favor for more than a decade.

Given that Democrats need a net gain of 15 seats to take control of the House -- and that polls suggest they could make progress in elections this year -- redrawing the maps in Democratic-run states such as North Carolina, Illinois, Louisiana and New Mexico could put them over the top in 2008 or strengthen any majority they might win this year at the ballot box.

The same could happen in bigger states such as California and New York, should Democrats win power in Sacramento and Albany.

“This decision is barely a day old, but it will immediately impact people’s thinking and planning,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic committee that sets strategy for House campaigns.

But even as Democratic officials in Washington salivated at potential gains, several experts and state-level party leaders said the prospects were not so bright.

That’s because the Voting Rights Act, which was changed in the 1980s to require that more districts be drawn to elect minority lawmakers, also has led to a so-called whitening of surrounding districts that, in effect, guarantees the election of greater numbers of Republicans. An element of Wednesday’s high court ruling faulted the Texas plan for diluting Latino voting power in one district.

Creating more Democratic seats could require shifting African American voters from districts designed to elect black lawmakers into neighboring districts more likely to elect a white candidate. In California and New York, and across the South, Democrats who want to redraw the maps would be forced to confront black leaders who have long advocated electing minorities to Congress even if it means handing the majority to the GOP.

In the early 1990s, Republicans made gains -- leading to their 1994 takeover of the House -- after GOP lawmakers across the country teamed up with civil rights leaders to draw maps creating more minority seats than had been proposed by the Democrats, who held power in many places at the time.

Wednesday’s ruling forces Democrats to face that uncomfortable political reality once again.

“It requires a very solid Democratic coalition, with white Democrats and black Democrats together, to be willing to strike a bargain where both sides take some hits in hopes of capturing more seats,” said David Epstein, a Columbia University political scientist and co-editor of a forthcoming book on the Voting Rights Act. “There’s a great tension between the emotional tradition of voting rights politics on the one hand and the more strategic gerrymandering calculus on the other.”

In Illinois, Democrats face other obstacles that might prevent the party from creating new seats -- the prospect of losing a competitive governor’s race, thus handing power to the Republicans after the November elections, and a general wariness of appearing to engineer the ouster of the state’s most powerful Republican, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert.

In New York, the state’s Democratic candidate for governor, state Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer, has opposed the practice of political gerrymandering -- meaning that he would have to alter his position to approve any newly drawn map designed to help Democrats.

“Redistricting is sufficiently painful and tortured that the Legislature won’t do it again unless doing it would be relatively painless. And it won’t be,” said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who as a state lawmaker in 2001 supported ways to increase the number of Democratic House seats in North Carolina.

One influential Democratic state lawmaker in New York said the party’s Washington leadership was not always sensitive to local nuances, such as the support among many in that state for an independent nonpartisan commission to handle district maps, rather than letting politics dominate the process -- even if the Supreme Court allows the GOP to redraw lines in conservative states.

“When I talk to people in Washington, they view this as a basketball game where we have a chance to make a four-point play,” said state Sen. Eric T. Schneiderman of New York City, who has worked on redistricting issues. “And when you get back here, there are a lot of people who have much deeper concerns.”

Still, Schneiderman conceded that should Democrats retake the New York Senate and the governor’s mansion, the pressure would be intense to help the party secure a lasting majority in the U.S. House.

He said that by eliminating some Republican districts and making marginal Democratic districts safer, his party could gain an additional four seats in New York.

“If the Democrats are down two or three seats in the House [after 2006], and we can save the day, that’s tough to ignore,” he said. “If Rahm Emanuel and his guys start phone-banking us, it’s going to be hard to say no.”