I write today to express my profound misgivings about the nationwide counter-gerrymandering campaign the Democrats are contemplating under the de facto leadership of Gavin Newsom. 

In part, this is a government major’s perspective. Gerrymandering is a bad thing for democracy, therefore wall-to-wall gerrymandering will not be a good thing. The goal of any gerrymander is the creation of “safe seats,” which are seats that one or the other of the political parties can rest assured about instead of competing for.

But it is only when candidates compete hard for seats they might or might not win that we get useful elections, where new ideas might get tried out or old ideas might get fact-checked, where tuned-in voters are aware that the seat is up for grabs and that the contest is therefore worth paying attention to. 

Seats in our House of Representatives are something like 90% safe as it is. This is mostly due to decades of gerrymandering, and to seniority and momentum. Once you’re been in the House a while, unless the endless fund-raising gets to you, you have name-recognition at home and perhaps some bacon-bringing ability.

Routinely, Americans rate the Congress very low and their own representative pretty high. For those who can handle the working conditions (which may include death threats), it’s a job that can last most of a lifetime. In the big picture, this would not appear to be a good thing for the country and world. Currently, our safely-seated Congress is pretty useless.

The new Dem push will exacerbate the problem, not as a side-effect, but as a goal. The idea is to carve out districts wherever possible nationwide that will, according to the latest polling and what might be described as voter science, be safe Democrat districts. Less clash of ideas, a higher barrier to entry for anyone who isn’t already in. The only election that matters will be the Democratic primary, usually a low-turnout affair controlled by the party itself.

There’s an even more fundamental problem with the line-drawing approach to winning elections. It implies punting on the thing that elections are supposed to be about, which is changing hearts and minds. The gerrymanderer assumes that the votes are what they are and where they are, and therefore it’s time to create districts that look like a robot’s attempt at modern art.

The point of politics is supposed to be to convince voters to vote for you — because of your pretty face or your bold ideas or your decades in office or your newcomer status or whatever you feel you have going for you. The gerrymandering strategy involves a certain throwing in the towel on communicating with the voters and the non-voters who might get off the couch someday if somebody really spoke to them.

And why would a major political party– the Democrats, in this case– give up on regular old message-based politicking at this point? It’s a little as if they had acknowledged and internalized their lack of a real message to sell other than Stop Trump, and instead were forging ahead with a strategy cooked up by the latest software, the hippest algorithms. As a matter of political philosophy, I hate when that happens.

Late in the Harris campaign I was dismayed to find her seeming to continually focus on Trump and his latest utterances, as if America didn’t already know about Trump, instead of playing to what should have been her strength. She’s a sane and well-informed grown-up who could have been speaking directly to the public about sane grown-up stuff, which would have left Trump at the children’s table because he isn’t capable of an informed debate about much of anything. She could have been talking about her program.

The Democrats as a herd have not particularly moved beyond that. Thirty-some years ago, Bill Clinton shoved the party to the right; he won the White House, and the party lost any credibility it had as a change agent or a voice for the oppressed. In 2016 when it looked like Bernie Sanders might take the country by storm, the party– not the people– stopped him. These days, the Democrats’ selling point is that they’re not Trump– which is true, and important, but not enough to change hearts and minds. So, let’s gerrymander!

I understand the impulse to fight fire with fire, but redrawing districts is not going to get us out of the fix we’re in. In Texas, the current epicenter of Republican gerrymandering, part of the reason the GOP sees opportunities is the rather hard swing toward Trump among Hispanic voters there in 2024. That’s not a technical detail; that’s the real story. It’s a sad story but true, and the Democrats need to somehow come to grips with it. Hispanic Texans aren’t the only demographic they’re losing.

Eric Kuhn lives in Middletown.