by Edward Blum and Roger Clegg 

Weekly Standard article

Conventional wisdom holds that House and Senate Republicans will suffer steep losses and ultimately control of Congress in 2002 if George W. Bush becomes president. This assertion is easy to support as an historical matter: Most “out-year” elections produce losses for the party of the President. 

More significantly for 2002, however, is the belief that Democrats will turn out in massive numbers to defeat candidates of the party that “stole” the presidential election from Al Gore. Dozens of articles have concluded the Republican party will inevitably lose seats: “Whichever candidate finally wins the presidential contest will be so weakened politically that the opposing party will have a clear advantage heading into the 2002 and 2004 campaigns,” wrote two senior reporters for the Washington Post.  Others speculate that Democrats will overwhelm Republicans at the polls because the former’s African American base will be mobilized as vigorously as it was last November. 

In sum, the only question is the size of the Republican loss in 2002, not the eventuality of it. 

There is much to quarrel with in the received wisdom set out above, but even if it contains some truth there is much that it ignores.  In particular, counterbalancing the theoretical Democrat backlash is the nuts-and-bolts advantage the GOP has going into congressional redistricting in 2002 in many states. In this regard, the Republicans are much better off than they were after the last census in 1990.  At that time, Republicans had complete legislative control of states that had only five House seats.  Democrats, on the other hand, controlled states with 172 seats. (The remaining seats were in states where control was split between the two parties, or where redistricting boards managed the process.) The GOP in 2002, however, will control state legislatures in which 98 House seats are affected, while the Democrats will hold sway over states where 144 seats are in play. 

But, just as was the case in 1990, in one important respect the GOP finds itself on the horns of a legal and philosophical dilemma with regard to how to use its advantage:  Should race be one of the primary building blocks in the redistricting process? How the GOP addresses this issue may well determine whether black voters, in particular, will ever consider voting for Republican congressional candidates during the next decade.  It will also determine whether conservatives can expect ideological consistency on the issue of race within the Republican Party.  Needless to say, if adherence to principle can’t be found there, it won’t be found in either major party.

In 1990, the Congressional Black Caucus and the racial advocacy groups formed a political alliance with the GOP to promote the creation of ultra-safe, “minority-majority” districts. The GOP reasoned that these twisted and contorted districts would be so heavily packed with minorities that the surrounding white districts would be bleached of their core Democrat constituency and would likely vote Republican. Dozens of heavily minority districts—with shapes likened to “Rorschach tests” or “bugs splattered on a windshield”—were drawn in the Deep South as well as in some non-Southern cities, such as New York.  Some believe this dynamic had as much to do with the Republican gains in 1994 as did the unpopularity of President Clinton’s failed health-care initiative.

By 1992, however, these racially gerrymandered districts were under legal challenge, first in North Carolina (Shaw v. Reno) and, a little later, in Louisiana (Hays v. Louisiana).  The lawsuits were initially brought by white Democrats, who may have anticipated the coming GOP electoral domination. But these Democrats, it turned out, had some unlikely allies.   Conservative legal groups joined the fray in 1994 and thereafter, filing challenges in Texas, Virginia, Georgia, New York, and other states.

From the beginning, the Republican Party was gravely concerned about these challenges. Former Republican National Committee chief counsel Ben Ginsberg, who worked diligently to maximize the number of minority-majority districts in 1991, believed the conservative efforts to unpack these majority-minority districts were misguided in light of the benefits they would have on Republicans.

Whether these districts played a significant role in the GOP takeover in 1994 is open to debate. Yes, many seats in states in which these districts were created saw a swell of Republican gains—but many states with very small minority populations saw significant GOP gains as well. Washington State’s congressional Democrats, for example, went from eight out of the nine-person delegation to just two, with House Speaker Tom Foley being one of those put out of a job.

Now comes 2001, and the Republican Party faces many of the same dilemmas as in 1991, with a critical new one as well: Racial gerrymandering is now clearly illegal.  Many of those lawsuits filed in the 1990s found their way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and, in a dozen decisions handed down from 1992 through 2000, the Court forbid state legislatures from using race as the primary criterion for drawing voting districts. 

In each one of these cases, the civil rights establishment—including the Congressional Black Caucus, League of United Latin American Citizens, and the NAACP—decried the Court’s decision as a return to the days when minorities were forced to undergo literacy tests and pay poll taxes. But strange as it may seem to these groups, those decisions may ultimately ensure more minorities in Congress, not fewer. 

In 1991, the U.S. Justice Department’s civil rights division, aided by the civil rights groups themselves, argued for the creation of minority-majority districts with a minimum 65 percent minority population, claiming that a minority candidate needed that percentage in order to compete effectively in the primaries and the general election. That high percentage of minority population, however, has proved to be unnecessary for black and Hispanic candidates to win. In dozens of districts throughout the country in which federal courts forced the redrawing of gerrymandered districts, minority candidates have been elected with black or Hispanic populations as low as 35 percent. In fact, not one minority incumbent has lost his or her seat in Congress since 1992, although dozens of districts have been redrawn with lower minority percentages. One can only wonder if the Justice Department will continue to press for 65 percent districts based on the recent voting results.

Whatever the Justice Department does, however, the Republican National Committee will be tempted once again to work for the maximization of minority-majority districts during the upcoming round of redistricting. This would be a mistake for two reasons. 

First, the Republican Party must stand for the principle of equal rights under law—conservatives can’t be opposed to racial preferences in university admissions and contracting, yet favor them in the arena of voting.  Second, the GOP’s best chance for attracting black and Hispanic voters to their ranks is to have Republican politicians represent them in legislative bodies and learn to work with them to solve the issues that confront some minority communities. 

It is this second proposition that Republicans must embrace if they hope to attract minorities to their party. Local issues often trump national ideologies in congressional elections. It may be another generation before the GOP can attract a substantial percentage of minority voters to consider their presidential candidate, but that doesn’t have to be the story in down-ballot, out-year elections.  Witness, for example, the minority support Gov. Bush received in his re-election bid for governor in 1998 (nearly 27 percent) as compared with his presidential candidacy (only 8 percent). 

Republicans should neither abandon efforts to attract minority voters nor adopt a me-too version of the NAACP’s racialist agenda.  Instead, they should welcome opportunities to refute the claims of Democrats and their allies in the civil rights establishment that Republicans are all closet racists.  And the best way to do this is not by window-dressing at a national convention every four years—which doesn’t hurt but which will be viewed by many as a cynical ploy—but by careful attention to bridge-building at the grassroots level.

Republican members of Congress grudgingly admit they know very little about the needs of minority communities, and this is hardly surprising when there are so few minorities in their districts. Racial redistricting will merely enforce the status quo and prevent Republicans from building the bridges that will ultimately lead to minority support.

Isolating blacks, in particular, pushes their leadership to the left, and marginalizes more moderate and conservative African Americans.  Conversely, the interracial coalition building necessitated by racially mixed districts is likely to give a prominent role to black leaders who can appeal to a broader spectrum of voters, black and white.

If Republican officeholders put their time-honored ideals before what some think is their short-term political interest, they can represent more racial minorities and, in so doing, gain their confidence and trust. In a very literal sense, they will trace an inclusive circle in the sand instead of drawing an exclusionary line in it.