The anti-gerrymandering doc Slay The Dragon is an uninspired call to action
Film Reviews documentary
That the American electoral system does not privilege the interests of ordinary voters will not come as a surprise to anyone who follows state-level or national politics. But Chris Durrance and Barak Goodman’s documentary Slay The Dragon nonetheless offers an accessible (though hardly involving) explainer on the storied American institution of gerrymandering, with a special focus on REDMAP, the number-crunching project that was behind an assortment of successful Republican efforts to take control of state legislatures in 2010.
At its core is the concept of redistricting—which, like the electoral college, the caucus, and the primary system, mostly serves as a way to turn ostensible representative democracy into an elaborate board game in which the party with the most votes is not necessarily the winner. After every census year, states redraw the boundaries of their election districts to reflect changes in population. In the vast majority of states, the job of creating these new maps falls on state legislators. This effectively means that whatever party controls a state legislature in a census year can protect incumbents and control elections for the next decade. In popular practice, this involves strategies known as “packing” and “cracking.” Packing means putting the opposing party’s base of voters into a handful of oddly-shaped districts; cracking involves breaking up these same populations in order to dilute them with your own base.
Gerrymandering is, of course, nothing new. The term itself is practically ancient, having been first coined in a cartoon published in 1812 by a Boston newspaper that portrayed the shape of one of Massachusetts’s newly redrawn election districts as a long-necked, winged monster. It was dubbed “the Gerry-mander,” a portmanteau of “salamander” and the name of the state’s governor, Elbridge Gerry, who would soon become the fifth vice-president of the United States (and second in a row to die in office). Nor has gerrymandering been limited to election districts. One of the more extreme examples was the 1889 admission of the Dakota Territory as two separate states in order to give the Republican Party more seats in congress—even though the newly created South Dakota consisted in large part of Sioux reservation territory.
The fact that gerrymandering has also been practiced by the Democratic Party is mentioned only in passing in Slay The Dragon. Durrance and Goodman are hardly the first to suggest that the Republicans’ 2010 project, with its extensive investment in state-level races and its use of computer models and data mining, represented a new approach to gerrymandering. To lay out this story (which mostly ignores the history of gerrymandering before the start of this century), they employ a stolid combination of infographics and talking heads; among the latter are David Daley, author of a book on REDMAP, Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, and the architect of REDMAP himself, Chris Jankowski.
Understandably, these parts of Slay The Dragon suffer from a total absence of colorful personalities. Despite its attempts to introduce this or that shadowy figure as a “rockstar” in the field, the world of redistricting consultants is populated exclusively by subspecies of wonk and dweeb; the most interesting thing about them is who gives them money and what they do in secret. But this narrative is still more engaging than the film’s diffuse attempts at profiling two anti-gerrymandering activist groups, the Michigan-based Voters Not Politicians (VNP) and the Wisconsin lawyers and academics behind Gill v. Whitford, which attempted to take gerrymandering to the Supreme Court.
Durrance and Goodman, who are both veterans of PBS’s American Experience, are obviously more comfortable with the informational interview format; these sections of Slay The Dragon are competent, though they never rise to the pizzazz of something like a Vox video. But they seem to be out of their depth when it comes to the watch-and-follow documentary approach. It doesn’t help that, in focusing on Katie Fahey, the founder of VNP, and Ruth Greenwood and Nick Stephanopoulos, a married couple who are involved in Gill v. Whitford, they seem to have mostly come up with footage of speeches, press conferences, and networking events—much of which feels like fundraiser material. One hears variations on the same phrases and soundbites: “The political system no longer works for the average person,” “a new assault on democracy,” and so on.
Has it ever worked for the average person? Slay The Dragon is meant as an urgent call to action ahead of this year’s elections, and it is here that it really falters. It belongs to the school of liberal activism that, like so many campaigns of social conservatism, appeals to a specious imaginary past—a return to normalcy, complete with some lip service to the illustriously useless values of bipartisanship. It rightly addresses Republican-backed voter ID and registration laws, while overlooking other problems of disenfranchisement in the system—like the fact that prison populations factor in the gerrymandering of election districts. For the generation that came of age in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, it is hard come to the conclusion that this country’s electoral process is fundamentally sound without employing some degree of pretzel logic. But meaningful change involves questioning the whole American project and the undemocratic business of this particular and peculiar democracy. When it all comes down to it, Slay The Dragon has little to contribute aside from a few graphs and moments of teary-eyed celebration.
21 Comments
The problem with Gerrymandering is it goes both ways. When one side does it they say it’s to better represent the new political demographic makeup of a community, but when the other side does it they say it’s oppressive gerrymandering and the have’s are once again oppressing the have not’s. It’s literally the same thing, the only difference is how many pieces end up on your side of the board once the new lines are drawn. “Fairness” doesn’t have a GD thing to do with it. I say we should just overlay a grid system onto the map composed of equal boxes that will make up districts, and let the votes fall where they may. Math and geography don’t give a damn about politics, so there’s no way to argue one side is unfairly disadvantaged to the other.
You really don’t see the problem with the whole “equal boxes” on a map scenario? This would lead to wildly uneven districts where one has 8 million people while another could end up with 800. And now those 800 people have the same representation as the 8 million. It’s the people that vote, not the land.
Districts need to have roughly the same amount of people in them, something that can’t be done by putting a grid on a map.
Seconding this.
It’s basically the same issue we have now with the electoral college – thanks to how people are distributed in the country, people in big cities would see their votes reduced to literal chump change while votes in some of the so-called flyover states would carry considerably more clout in turn.
This, in turn, then effects which states are more actively courted (or ignored) come campaign season.
By making it a matter of pure math/maps, you’re basically rewarding or punishing people based on where they choose to live.
Which is why the whole idea of the electoral college has to go and elections are done by some form of popular vote. I know the bugger argument against this is “what about the smaller states, they will have no power” but like you said it’s the people that vote(and matter) not the land
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Yeah? Tough shit. A district is a district, whether it has 800 or 8,000. Each District gets 1 vote, and THAT is how you prevent one area from overpowering another while completely negating the Gerrymandering argument.
You’re ignorant as hell. No need to tell me “tough shit”, as I understand what’s what. But keep shouting “Fake news” and “it’s a hoax” at the sky. I’m sure no one gives a shit.
And there we have it: you hate this solution because it’s too much like the Electoral College. You HATE the idea of equal representation regardless of population density, and you LOVE the idea one part of the city/state/country dominating another simply because it has more people.
You support the political process until it doesn’t go your way. Let me guess: you flip the game board anytime you’re losing, don’t you?
I think this view of both gerrymandering and the electoral college is just not taking into account the way populations work. You say “equal representation,” but for what and/or who? How is it equal that the far fewer number of people in a state like Rhode Island get a bigger say than all the people in a state like Texas? The thing is, there are a lot of Democrats in Texas whose vote in a presidential election is essentially nullified, because we’re counting electors instead of individual votes. There’s a whole swath of Republicans in Long Island who are discounted and never catered to (apart from through their financial influence). People seem to suggest that New York City and LA would be the only places candidates campaign in without the electoral college, but the most populous states and cities still don’t add up to a majority of the country. Rather than focusing on large swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania, we could see candidates actually reaching out to rural Illinois Republicans, urban Democrats in states across the country, the aforementioned wide swathe of Republicans in states like NY, California, and Colorado. Switching to a popular vote means that you don’t have to care about the handful of swing states, but can actually campaign to each individual person around the country.Gerrymandering is a slightly different issue and it’s pretty simple, in my view. It is absurd for the people who run in elections to also design the maps that decide who can win an election. Racial gerrymandering has been considered onerous for decades and, although this documentary doesn’t cover that, rules and maps in North Carolina were recently struck down for that exact reason. Why? Because it’s just blatantly unethical to draw a map with the intention of diluting a community’s vote. Democrats and Republicans have done this for decades, as mentioned above, and I think it has always been bad. To not have an independent group or some sort of direct voter say in the drawing of these districts is just foolish and allows politicians to draw maps that benefit their own self-interest again and again. Another option is multimember districts, which is somewhat similar to your “just draw equal squares” idea. In that system, practiced around the world by parliaments, those geographic squares would be given a varying number of representatives depending on population. This allows third party candidates to win more often and caters to the aforementioned Republicans in blue districts/Democrats in red districts. And one final point is that although Democrats have gerrymandered for centuries, REDMAP and what happened in 2010 is fundamentally different than past efforts. One important aspect is that in some ways, Republicans were just lucky. The previous redistricting in 2000 came before big data, before computerized statistics and technological advances could have been used to juice the process. I think if Democrats had the electoral success Republicans did in 2010, they would likely have produced maps that were similarly novel in their ability to draw skewed districts. However, it’s also important to understand that the incentives were different for both parties. After 2008, the narrative around Republicans was that they had a shrinking base of support and Democrats had a demographic advantage. This reality meant Republicans were more inclined to dilute the opponents’ vote, whereas Democrats could have comfortably drawn slightly more balanced maps on the strength of their advantage. In 2010, with REDMAP, Republicans produced districts through advanced software to give them the precise advantages they wanted, with intent that has been repeatedly demonstrated in court. In Wisconsin, a state that Republicans had just flipped, this means that even if Democrats get a larger vote share than their biggest victories in Wisconsin history, Republicans would still retain over 60% of seats due to the way districts were drawn. This type of dilution of votes, this gerrymander, is historic in its effectiveness. This is very much about what’s fair. It is not fair to repeatedly rig the system around the country, in a coordinated effort, to silence the voices of millions of voters. There is every possibility that if Democrats sweep in 2020, there will be voices in the party clamoring for a BLUEMAP project and they will be wrong. The partisan valence this has right now hasn’t always been there and will likely change at some point in the future. But the severity of the problem, which is unique to our time, may roll on into the future as we get used to the new status quo of egregious gerrymanders and Democrats decide that the advantage the practice gives them outweighs the deleterious effects it has on democracy and voter power.
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