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In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats. “What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.”
The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.
The consequences of redistricting in North Carolina—one of the most important swing states in the country—could determine who controls Congress and the presidency in 2012. Democrats hold seven of the state’s thirteen Congressional seats, but after redistricting they could control only three—the largest shift for Republicans at the Congressional level in any state this year.
Though Obama won eight of the thirteen districts, under the new maps his vote would be contained in only three heavily Democratic districts—all of which would have voted 68 percent or higher for the president in 2008—while the rest of the districts would have favored John McCain by 55 percent or more. “GOP candidates could win just over half of the statewide vote for Congress and end up with 62 percent to 77 percent of the seats,” found John Hood, president of the conservative John Locke Foundation.
The same holds true at the state level, where only 10 percent of state legislative races can be considered a tossup. “If these maps hold, Republicans have a solid majority plus a cushion in the North Carolina House and Senate,” says J. Michael Bitzer, a professor of political science at Catawba College. “They don’t even need to win the swing districts.” North Carolina is now a political paradox: a presidential swing state with few swing districts. Republicans have turned what Bitzer calls an “aberration”—the Tea Party wave of 2010—“into the norm.”
Republicans accomplished this remarkable feat by drawing half the state’s black population of 2.2 million people, who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, into a fifth of all legislative and Congressional districts. As a result, black voters are twice as likely as white voters to see their communities divided. “The new North Carolina legislative lines take the cake for the most grotesquely drawn districts I’ve ever seen,” says Jeff Wice, a Democratic redistricting lawyer in Washington.
According to data compiled by Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, precincts that are 90 percent white have a 3 percent chance of being split, and precincts that are 80 percent black have a 12 percent chance of being split, but precincts with a BVAP between 15 and 45 percent have a 40 percent chance of being split. Republicans “systematically moved [street] blocks in or out of their precincts on the basis of their race,” found Ted Arrington, a redistricting expert at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. “No other explanation is possible given the statistical data.”
Such trends reflect not just a standard partisan gerrymander but an attack on the very idea of integration. In one example, Senate redistricting chair Bob Rucho admitted that Democratic State Senator Linda Garrou was drawn out of her plurality African-American district in Winston-Salem and into an overwhelmingly white Republican district simply because she is white. “The districts here take us back to a day of segregation that most of us thought we’d moved away from,” says State Senator Dan Blue Jr., who in the 1990s was the first African-American Speaker of the North Carolina House.
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Democrats accounted for 47 percent of the statewide vote in Georgia in 2008 and 2010 but, thanks to redistricting, can elect just 31 percent of Statehouse members. Abrams is especially upset that Republicans pitted incumbent white Democrats against incumbent black Democrats in four House districts in Atlanta, which she sees as an attempt to divide the party through ugly racial politics.
“They placed whites who represented majority-minority districts against blacks who represented majority-minority districts and enhanced the number of minority voters in those districts in order to wipe the white Democrats out,” she explains. The new districts slither across the metropolis to pick up as many black voters as possible. Abrams says the new maps “look like a bunch of snakes that got run over.”
The same thing happened in the Georgia Senate, where Republicans targeted State Senator George Hooks, who has been in the body since 1991 and is known as the “dean of the Senate.” Hooks represented the peanut farming country of rural Southwest Georgia, including Plains, the hometown of Jimmy Carter.
Republicans dismantled his district, which had a BVAP of 43 percent, and created a new GOP district in North Georgia with a BVAP of 8 percent. They moved the black voters in his district into two adjoining majority-minority districts and two white Republican districts, and pitted Hooks against an incumbent black Democrat in a district that is 59 percent black. His political career is likely finished.
The GOP similarly took aim at Representative John Barrow, the last white Democrat from the Deep South in the US House. Republicans increased the BVAP in three of the four majority-minority Congressional districts represented by Georgia Democrats but decreased the BVAP from 42 to 33 percent in Barrow’s east Georgia seat, moving 41,000 African-Americans in Savannah out of his district.
Just to be sure, they also drew Barrow’s home out of the district as well. Based on population shifts—Georgia gained one new seat from the 2010 census—the district could have become a new majority-minority district, but instead it’s much whiter and thus solidly Republican.
As a consequence of redistricting, Republicans could control ten of Georgia’s fourteen Congressional districts, up from eight in 2010, and could hold a two-thirds majority in the State Legislature, which would allow the party to pass constitutional amendments without a single Democratic vote.
When the dust settles, Georgia and North Carolina could send twenty Republicans, five black Democrats and two white Democrats to the US House. That’s a generous number of Democrats compared with Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, which each have only one Democratic Representative in Congress—all of them black, from majority-minority districts.
In 1949 white Democrats controlled 103 of 105 House seats in the former Confederacy. Today the number is sixteen of 131, and it could reach single digits after 2012. “I should be stuffed and put in a museum when I pass away,” says Representative Steve Cohen, a white Democrat who represents a majority-minority district in Memphis, “and people can say, ‘Yes, a white Southern Democrat once lived here.’”
Unlike the Republican Party, which is 95 percent white in states like Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, the Democratic Party can thrive only as a multiracial coalition. The elimination of white Democrats has also crippled the political aspirations of black Democrats. According to a recent report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, only 4.8 percent of black state legislators in the South serve in the majority. “Black voters and elected officials have less influence now than at any time since the civil rights era,” the report found.
Sadly, the report came out before all the redistricting changes had gone into effect. By the end of this cycle, Republicans in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee could have filibuster-proof majorities in their legislatures, and most white Democrats in Alabama and Mississippi (which haven’t completed redistricting yet) could be wiped out.
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