All Politics is Local: How Gerrymandering Gave Us Donald Trump

Every ten years, per the instructions in the US Constitution, the Federal Government conducts a census. One of the main purposes of that census is determining the populations of each state and awarding representation in Congress based upon the numbers. When that happens congressional districts (of which there are currently 435) are redistributed with some states gaining and some states losing districts according to how the population has changed over the last decade. Then the fun begins.

The districts aren’t drawn along county lines or geographic features or natural population dividers, the districts are drawn by the states’ legislatures for the purpose of helping whichever party is in power. This is called gerrymandering and it’s why Donald Trump looks poised to win the Republican nomination in 2016.

If you need a primer on gerrymandering you can read it here. I’ll touch only on some of the highlights.

In 2010 the Republican party gained control of the House of Representatives and some 700 seats in state legislatures. This sweep into power, coinciding with the census and requisite redistricting, has lead directly to the remarkable popularity and power of Donald Trump in 2016. Follow with me on this one.

The Republicans have control of many state legislatures during a redistricting year, so they draw district lines that protect Republican seats and minimize Democratic seats in Congress.

Since these new districts are safely Republican the races in those districts become between the moderate and conservative factions of the Republican party. Many of those seats are won by the conservative faction. The increase in the right-leaning state and federal legislatures allows for more laws to be passed that exclude historically Democratic voting populations through voter ID laws. Which further secures the safe Republican seats and pushes the candidates further to the right.

Having candidates on the public stage that are further and further to the right of center creates a market for media and news outlets to profit by targeting. So the national dialog through media is skewed in the direction of that target audience (and the same happens on the Democratic side which have their own markets and their own media panderers that profit from those markets, but this isn’t an essay about what led to the appeal of Bernie Sanders).

Then along comes a master of media. Donald Trump, for all his flaws, is indisputably talented, perhaps even at genius levels, at working through the media. He understands not how a message will play in the media, but how people will respond to the message. He’s not concerned that the media hates him, because the media isn’t his audience. And the media did a great job of defining his target audience, creating a platform for him to use, and distributing his message to that audience.

Republicans used gerrymandering to create ultra-conservative districts (and if they were in power at the time, the Democrats would have done exactly the same thing).

Fewer and fewer people were actually needed to support a viable candidate, so fewer and fewer people cared to vote, so only the most passionate voters remained, which tended to be the most extreme.

Ultra-conservative candidates won.

Ultra-conservative media rose.

A media master rallied the ultra-conservative people through ultra-conservative media.

Donald Trump is exactly what the Republicans get as a result of their gerrymandering. It is a drive toward the extremes. It silences the voices of the majority. And it pushes our national dialogue into a shouting match instead of a debate.

We have four years until the next census in 2020. We have four years to demand from our lawmakers that district lines cannot be drawn by the very people who benefit from those lines. We have four years to demand back our voice as voters of the middle. We have four years to transform the target audience of our media from the radical extreme left and right to the majority of us who are in the middle. We have four years to fight for a democracy that has been fought for in the past, but not with bullets and blood this time. This time we need to fight with letters to our state legislature. This time we need to fight with petitions and referendums. This time we need to fight to change the laws of our states so that the district lines reflect not the political parties, but the people those parties are meant to represent. This time we need to fight for our equality so that every vote matters, every vote is a statement, and every vote is a demand for action.

There’s an engineering saying that I picked up somewhere along the line. We have a system that is perfectly designed for the output we’re receiving. That is to say, we have what we have because we did what we did. We can’t blame the output without blaming the input.

The input was gerrymandering; the output is the mess of our entire political landscape. Change the input if you want to change the output.

Change the system.

Take back your voice.

End gerrymandering.