Redistricting Fail

Hakeem Jeffries is presenting himself as a hard-charging leader of his party, pushing a crash blue-state redistricting program to counter President Donald Trump’s moves to add Republican seats in Texas, Missouri and elsewhere.

But behind the scenes, the House minority leader is encountering the limits of his power — and the credibility of Democrats’ counterattack. Just this week, some Illinois lawmakers sent Jeffries a clear message they were not interested in pursuing a redraw that could dilute their districts with additional GOP votes. And in his home state of New York, state and party officials have all but rejected his suggestion they draw a new map, saying it’s not legally possible ahead of the midterms.

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He has also been limited by legal guardrails Democrats put up in some blue states to restrict gerrymandering — laws that have now left the party at a disadvantage in what’s becoming a tit-for-tat war. Republican-controlled states will likely be able to draw more Democrats out of their seats than Democrats will be able to target GOP lawmakers in blue states.

That poses a threat to Jeffries’ aspirations of becoming speaker in 2027. Yet the New Yorker has stuck to his low-key, conciliatory leadership style, with Democrats pointing to the deference he’s given to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, state congressional delegations and state-level officials in handling the process.

“What shocked me when I first came into the DCCC was when I learned that the expansive battlefield that I thought I would have at my discretion was actually a pretty small map,” Israel told me. “There are a couple dozen competitive districts, maybe … You can have the best recruit, the best candidate, the best fundraising. But if you have an uncompetitive district, there’s no path.

“I mean, the math proves it,” he says, and you hear the anguish of every night at a chain hotel bar with a burger and a bad Syrah. “Look, we won 1.4 million more votes than they did in 2012 and we only picked up eight seats. That tells you that this whole thing was jury-rigged in order to stop Democrats from playing in competitive districts. It worked brilliantly for them. I’m just sorry we didn’t figure that out in 2008.”

As Israel sees it, that’s the year when Democrats really screwed up. He thinks the party should have been thinking ahead then to redistricting and down-ballot races. Instead, they planned for nothing. Redistricting, he says, never seemed to cross the mind of Democratic leadership. It was, he says, “a catastrophic strategic mistake”. In 2006 and 2008, Democrats “won districts that we had no business winning. But then we started losing state legislatures and governors across America – and that’s what destroyed us in 2010 and 2012. Had we devoted resources to protecting Democrats in state houses across America, the Republicans still would have won the majority in 2010. But we would have had a seat at the table in redistricting and we might have been able to take it away from them in 2012.

“The DNC,” he says, shaking his head, “they just whistled past the graveyard. I don’t understand why.”

Republicans, he says, “have always been better than Democrats at playing the long game. And they played the long game in two fundamental ways. Number one, on the judicial side. They realized they had to stock courts across the country with partisan Republican judges and they did it. The second long game was on redistricting. The center of gravity wasn’t an immediate majority in the House. It was rebuilding the infrastructure in courts and state houses across the country so when they got the majority back they could stay in it for a long, long time.”