There’s no way to know for sure, but some of the Indiana General Assembly’s most questionable legislation — like removing protections for the state’s wetlands — might have been prevented if the legislators’ districts were fairly mapped.
Unfortunately, those district maps are drawn by lawmakers who, historically, tend to do so in ways that keep their ruling party in power.
Thus, Hoosiers often end up with laws like Senate Enrolled Act 389, which the supermajority party — the Republicans — muscled through this spring. More than 100 organizations publicly opposed the bill, including the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, whose president predicted the legislation would “have negative impacts on Indiana’s water quality, flood control and quality-of-place factors that the state needs to attract and retain a skilled workforce.”
It takes effect six days from now, anyway.
Several House and Senate Republicans joined Democrats in voting against the bill. The GOP’s supermajority offset the defections, though.
Republicans hold 71% of the House seats (71 out of 100) and 78% of the Senate seats (39 of 50). Republicans also hold 78% of Indiana’s U.S. House seats (7 out of 9).
Yet, in statewide voting last November, Republican candidates for president, governor and attorney general all drew around 57% of the votes.
So, why is Indiana’s state and federal legislative representation so much more politically lopsided than the actual population?
It could be because of the way Indiana legislators — dominated by one party — laid out the maps for those districts. In an old political tactic called “gerrymandering,” a state’s dominant party draws state and federal legislative districts so that the minority party gets packed into a few districts, while spreading out the majority party through most of the other districts.
Both parties have long gerrymandered their states’ districts around the country, depending on which party is in power in those states. They outline those districts every 10 years after the decennial U.S. census. Indiana’s current districts, drawn in 2011, stand out for their bias, according to a study commissioned by activist group Women4Change Indiana.
Indiana’s present electoral maps are more tilted in favor of one party than 95% of all the maps in the United States during the past 50 years, according to research by Christopher Warshaw, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University in the nation’s capital. The tilt exceeds that of neighbors Kentucky, Ohio and Illinois, says the study, which was released Monday.
“It’s a pretty extreme level of partisan bias in the Indiana map,” Warshaw said by phone Thursday morning.
Of course, Indiana is clearly a Republican-leaning state, regardless of how the district borders are drawn. The 2020 election illuminated that reality. Hoosiers favored incumbent Republican Donald Trump over the eventual overall winner Joe Biden, a Democrat, by a 57% to 41% margin. Incumbent Gov. Eric Holcomb and fellow Republican attorney general candidate Todd Rokita also won in statewide balloting with 56% and 58% of the votes.
Yet, the November outcome also left Republicans with about three-quarters of the state legislative and congressional seats.
“All of those are far more seats than you would expect them to get, based on the percentage of votes that they’ve received at the statewide level,” Warshaw said.
“This really matters because [state] laws are made by the Legislature,” Warshaw added, “and I think having these sort of supermajority levels in the Legislature really gives the current majority the ability to pass pretty extreme laws that aren’t necessarily supported by the voters.” More moderate lawmakers would compromise more often.
The lopsided districts also can diminish voters’ options by creating less competitive races. Forty of the 125 seats in the General Assembly on the November ballot went uncontested.
More sophisticated technology, more polarized and nationalized elections, and a determination by the parties nationally has made it easier for political parties to predict voters’ inclinations and draw maps to capitalize on that information, Warshaw explained.
Ideally, Indiana would adopt an independent redistricting commission. Twenty-one states use those nonpartisan or bipartisan commissions to draw their legislative maps, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Neighboring Michigan recently joined the list, as well as Utah and Colorado.
“We’ve seen with other states, the best way to prevent gerrymandering is to have a nonpartisan commission that draws maps without partisan considerations. Or even better, to draw a map that is designed to be fair to both parties,” Warshaw said. “And Indiana obviously doesn’t have that.”
If it did, Indiana would most likely have a Legislature that is 60% to 65% Republican, and a congressional delegation split 5 to 4, or 6 to 3, in favor of the GOP, Warshaw said.
“Those are the kind of outcomes that would look more like the statewide voter preferences in Indiana,” he said.
With the release of the 2020 census results delayed until September by the pandemic, the Indiana General Assembly members themselves will, once again, redraw the state’s legislative maps. Groups including Common Cause Indiana, which organized the nonbinding Indiana Citizens Redistricting Commission, are pushing legislative leaders to conduct the district line-drawing more openly.
Indiana House Speaker Todd Hutson, a Republican from Fishers, told the Indianapolis Star it will be “a transparent redistricting process.” He added, “The public will once again have opportunities to provide input in meetings around the state.”
And once again, Hoosiers must rely on one party to handle the process without partisan influence.
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