Redistricting and Regions: The Lines That Divide Us

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Transcript

Colin Woodard [00:00:00] The country came together, the United States, through an accident of history. There was a shared threat in the 1770s to the way that all of these separate nations, if you will, or regional cultures had governed themselves. They all had their own ways of doing things, and London wanted to centralize and standardize the empire, so they rose up to defend their own ways. Lo and behold, they won, and that meant that they were inside something called the United States, and nobody was quite sure what that was. 

Sarah [00:00:40] This is Sarah Stewart Holland. 

Beth [00:00:41] And this Beth Silvers. 

Sarah [00:00:43] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics. 

Beth [00:00:58] Hello, and thank you so much for joining us for our new episode of Pantsuit Politics. Today, we're going to talk about the redistricting process happening around the country in advance of this year's congressional midterms. As part of that conversation, we are really excited to have author and journalist Colin Woodard here. He's done some fascinating work about the different geographic regions in America and what that means for our politics. We know you're going to love that conversation, and then we'll talk more about where the process is today and how we're approaching the midterm races here outside of politics. We'll update you on my COVID situation. I think I have a very unexpected and helpful television recommendation to offer anyone who's suffering through this. 

Sarah [00:01:38] Before we get started, we wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who shared Friday's episode on five things you need to know about the Martin Luther King Jr Day celebration. It is a very big deal to us when you share our conversations with people in your lives, and it is by far the best way to grow the show. There's been a lot of writing lately about how hard this industry is and how hard it is right now, especially for news and politics shows. And we say this all the time, but we really, really, mean it. We are able to do this work because of your support. So thank you so much for sharing and tagging us and talking about the episodes. 

Beth [00:02:19] This year, every member of the House of Representatives is up for re-election. That is required by the Constitution right up front. Article 1, Section 2, tells us that members of the House must be chosen every second year by the people of the several states. We'll talk more about that in a minute. We're going to work our way into the details of how congressional districts are drawn and how members are elected. But we wanted to start with the big picture thinking about what we know about the country right now and the factors that influence elections in different areas of the country. 

Sarah [00:02:50] It might be weird to start a conversation about districts with this conversation with Colin Woodard about regions, but I think it is incredibly helpful because I think it's easy in these conversations about gerrymandering to get in a very us them. We're right, they're wrong. They're the enemy. They're trying to get in the system. We're on the side of right. And I think what Colin Woodard does is give this incredibly helpful perspective and add all these layers to each region of the country so that we don't get consumed by the political lines, but can really see the influence of these regional lines. So he is a New York Times best selling author of six nonfiction works, including American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. He is a Polk award winning journalist, Pulitzer Prize finalist and respected authority on the sociology of the United States nationhood. And his new book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of the United States Nationhood, is about the urgent creation of a myth to convince us all that we are all one people of one background, but we are not. And that is what Colin and I talk about in this conversation. Colin, welcome to the show. We are so thrilled to have you. 

Colin Woodard [00:03:59] It's my great pleasure. 

Sarah [00:04:01] Well, let me tell you, I first read American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good, which shockingly enough, you wrote before the pandemic. 

Colin Woodard [00:04:11] Yes. Just before the pandemic. And in fact, it's a book that came out just a few weeks before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination. So it was a weird timing to have a book that was pre-Trump emerge right when Trumpism began. So it was a funny timing for that book all the way around. 

Sarah [00:04:28] But it is hyper relevant now as we consistently talk about individual liberty and the common good. 

Colin Woodard [00:04:33] Absolutely. Yeah. It was a book talking, you know, warning about the instability in America's democracy and the things that would have to be done to stabilize this. You know, sort of warned iceberg ahead. And, of course, the book came out and we struck the iceberg as it was coming out and everyone's been sort of chasing after lifeboats since. But if we are to right ourselves and make sure we don't strike icebergs in the future, there are some important lessons in it. 

Sarah [00:05:00] I loved it. And as a part of this book, you do like a summary of your previous book, American Nations, where you really laid out these regions of the country and it really just broke my brain wide open. I thought, oh, this is it. This is why we're always so frustrated with each other because we have these -- I think you have 11 different regions of the country and how that plays out culturally, historically, why sometimes when you feel like you go to another part of the country, you're in a in a different country. And I think it's so helpful, especially as we enter election season. You know, we're going to start looking at House races to try to understand places at a more granular level. But I actually think the way you've organized it at a very macro level is incredibly helpful. So tell us about these regions. 

Colin Woodard [00:05:49] Yeah. Well, the book argues that we've never been one America, but rather several Americas. And the difference between those Americas, which have a lot of attributes of nationhood, are called track back to the differences between the rival colonial projects that formed on the eastern and southern rims of what's now the United States. You know that the New England colonies centered around Boston and the Dutch settled the area around what's now New York City. And the Chesapeake Tidewater Country settled by the lesser sons of English country gentry and trying to reproduce that sort of, you know, like Downton Abbey in the 17th century kind of approach of society. Or the Scots Irish settled back country or the Spanish settled Southwest and so on that these were all completely different societies. They had distinct ethnographic characteristics, religious characteristics, ideas about what kind of society is a good society, different economic models they were pursuing. 

[00:06:49] Some of them belong to different empires in the case of the Dutch or the French and so on. And even the the English and later British colonies didn't agree on much of anything and certainly didn't think that they were all engaged in a project that would result in a continent spanning superpower that they would all belong to. The country came together, the United States, through an accident of history. There was a shared threat in the 1770s to the way that all of these separate nations, if you will, or regional cultures had governed themselves. They all had their own ways of doing things. And London wanted to decentralize and standardize the empire, so they rose up to defend their own ways. Lo and behold, they won, and that meant that they were inside something called the United States, and nobody was quite sure what that was in the 1780s or even after the Constitution was written then. 

Sarah [00:07:48] Well, sometimes even today. 

Colin Woodard [00:07:50] And certainly even today for precisely those reasons that divides between these regions were profound, and even the idea that the United States was a nation state was not clear to anybody, you know, even through the aftermath of the Civil War. So the fact that we're fractured into red and blue -- well, they say red and blue states, but you really have to look below the state level because the regional cultures, the settlement patterns of each of them didn't track to the state boundaries in many cases. But the fact that we're divided in that way should come as no surprise if you realize that the deep fractures that go back to this balkanized settlement and political heritage we have going back to European colonization of the continent. 

Sarah [00:08:39] Well, and I think  what you do in American Character is use that to help people understand how different regions of the country are really driven by the common good or are really driven by individual liberty. And so it stops being -- you know, I know it's called American Character, but it stops feeling like everybody is just terrible or has a character flaw when you start to scratch at the surface and think like, oh, this is really driven by a lot of history and by a lot of culture. I mean, when you talk about the deep south and sort of the role of oligarchy in that culture, I thought, oh, yeah, that's it. That's what I've been pushing up against my whole life. 

Colin Woodard [00:09:15] That's right. Yeah. And very different from, say, what I call Greater Appalachia, which would include, you know, Kentucky, West Virginia, the southern tiers of the lower Great Lakes states like Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, a lot of Missouri, the Ozarks, the Texas Hill Country. Broadly speaking, that's one enormous culture, parts of which we call "southern" but when it comes down to questions of oligarchy, that's a region that's the ideology is very much against it, right? Nobody is going to lord over us. Where as you get into the lowlands in the Deep South, it was a society organized for the benefit of the great planters on the top of the society and explicitly so. And the legacies of that heritage going back centuries can be felt certainly in politics and in culture and ideas about what kind of policies you should have on a wide range of issues. And yeah, it makes for a fractious federal life. 

Sarah [00:10:17] And especially these areas of the country like where I live, where you're close enough to feel the input of both. I would definitely say, you know, it doesn't feel in western Kentucky as Appalachian as it does in eastern Kentucky. It always feels like sort of two different states. But now, you know, when I started to look at all these regions, it's like where I live you can see the interplay of so many of that sort of Midwest mentality of the Appalachia and the Scott Irish. Definitely, that's in my ancestry and the Deep South. And it's just when you just have words to put around this and history and culture and to sort of sort all that out, it feels less overpowering. It feels less frustrating. I mean, we were talking about before we started recording, Texas makes a lot more sense if you realize there are like four regions of culture and geography within the same state. 

Colin Woodard [00:11:11] Yeah, absolutely right. Austin's the state capital, but Dallas and Houston and San Antonio are the hubs of three very different places. Houston and that lowland area stretching along the Gulf of Mexico was settled via the Deep South as a slave plantation society. Whereas, Dallas and the Hill Country was settled in a stream that was Greater Appalachian, which had come through from the Ozarks and further up even drawing on the area of Kentucky and elsewhere. And then the southern part was settled first as the northernmost fringe and frontier of new Spain's conquest of the continent. And so, yeah, it's a deeply divided place in many respects, and you can see that through its history and and its political background as well. 

Sarah [00:12:01] And where do you feel like you see this play out the most in politics? Because that's what we're really trying to scratch at with some of these House races. I mean, you'll see ads for other part of the country and you feel like who would that appeal to? What are they even talking about? But I think when you can put this framework around it, you realize like, oh, well, they're speaking to a long language of individual liberty. Or they're speaking to a long history of centering the common good. And I mean, again, even with the pandemic, I think you see that breakdown. But where else do you see that as you look around our political landscape? 

Colin Woodard [00:12:34] Absolutely. I mean, you know, I argue in American Character that, yes, that the thing ultimately that these regions and Americans have been fighting about and debating since the beginning is what's the best way to create a free society. We have this big American experiment in self-government. How do you do that? What does freedom really mean? And there's those two big interpretations that the different regional cultures have different allegiances to. One is that the best way to achieve freedom is to maximize the individual's freedom, personal autonomy, freedom from constraint from the government or anybody else. And that axiomatically the individual is more free and the government's weaker. That's got to be a good thing, right? And then there's an opposing tradition that says, no, it's about the common good about building and maintaining a free society. And that argument goes -- it's like de Tocqueville when he talks about you need to cultivate a Republican citizenry that, you know, humans lived in tyranny for 5000 years. 

[00:13:34] And we construct this incredible, fragile thing that's a liberal democracy where individuals could imagine being free but can only exist if you're maintaining all of this infrastructure, social and otherwise so that people can govern themselves, have the education to do it, have the ability to achieve their potential to have investments in schools and roads. And, you know, these days we have pre-k programs, and libraries, and Pell Grants and that's all how you maintain a free society because you're guaranteeing the chance that actual freedom isn't an accident of birth. But those two interpretations, individual liberty and the common good, in policy terms come in direct conflict. And you named some of them. I mean, many of our most divisive issues on the national stage are an argument about that. You know, gun rights. Is the most important thing to protect the Second Amendment rights of the gun holder when push comes to shove or the safety and right to life of everyone else? 

[00:14:36] Whether or not in the face of a dangerous global pandemic is the most important thing to protect everyone by imposing if you have two mandates on wearing masks or vaccines, or is it individual liberty and personal freedom? The freedom from the tyranny of the government telling you you have to get vaccinated or you have to wear a mask to protect others, right? That's a classic individual liberty common good equation. And you look on all of these indices, if you make a map, and I have, at a county level, what are the vaccination rates now on? And if you sort that by the regional cultures in American Nations, the difference between the common good regional cultures like the Midlands and Yankee Dam and what I call the Left Coast, the Strip on the Pacific on the ocean side of the mountains, and Washington state, and Oregon and the northern two-thirds of California. I mean, that difference is almost double, right? 

[00:15:40] But the most common good oriented regional cultures, which include vast rural areas as well as urban areas it's not urban-rural, but the difference in vaccination rates is almost two to one compared to, say, the Deep South or Greater Appalachia, where there's that strong individual liberty tradition. And those are the regions where you find governors and other officials fighting against public health advice, usually on the grounds that you're trampling on people's personal autonomy and individual liberty. And that that's more important than protecting the immunocompromised or children or what have you in the pandemic. Which doesn't -- you know, in Yankee dam and New England, say, that doesn't compute, right? The legacy in New England goes back to the early Puritans, right? A group of Calvinist who thought like the Old Testament Hebrews that they had been charged by God with a specific mission in the world, ambition they had to do collectively that their communities and trying to create a more some kind of Calvinist religious utopia in the New England wilderness, they would be rewarded or punished collectively for whether or not they followed the program. 

[00:16:51] And when an individual is messing with the community's health, that's considered a faux pas. I mean, it was a real faux pas back in the early Puritan times you get thrown in stock and such. But, you know, today there's still more so than any other region of the country. The areas that were founded by the Puritans and their descendants did the initial colonization of ,all the way out to Minnesota we're talking. I mean, this is a long colonization drive over subsequent generations. Those regions are also the ones that are most powerfully committed to the public health advice in the pandemic. Go to gun violenc, you can map per capita death rates both suicides and homicides from firearms. It's shocking. I mean, if you sort them by the American nations, the per capita death rates, you can loop them together  for over a decade and average them all out. 

[00:17:42] I mean, you're talking almost an eight or 10 to one per capita difference again on a regional basis, right? You know, northern New England where I live, and Greater Appalachia, I would have to think that we probably have at least as many gun owners, right? This is a place with frontiers like Aspect. You know, two thirds of my state, Maine, has never been settled. I mean, it's industrial forest land that people hunt in. My school would have, you know, almost everyone would be absent when I was in high school during deer hunting season. But the idea that gun owners rights supersede gun safety doesn't compute in Maine, even as it's strongly about gun ownership and is part of the culture in a way that would not at all track in greater Appalachia, I imagine, in Kentucky and West Virginia and elsewhere. So, yeah, profound difference is going back to those ideas about how you build a free society and what's most important in that. 

Sarah [00:18:39] Now, how is this all still true in, you know, global media environment where we're all bombarded by sort of information, often the same information, often conflicting information. But like we have this very globalized media environment. People can move. People move a lot. There's a lot of immigration sort of around the United States within states, and we see that a lot due to the pandemic and we talk all the time about our nationalized politics, right? I mean, that's sort of what we're trying to chip away at with thinking through this whole series is using them to understand small regions of the country much deeper. But how come this nationalized environment we live in, especially as media has gotten better and better and better, not erased these regional differences? 

Colin Woodard [00:19:24] Yeah. How could that be? We've got mass marketing, and mass migration, and mass media, and mass retailing, and people move around all the time. How could they possibly not -- you know, how could these regional cultures and their effects still be with us? How are the blue and red areas not just turning more purple? I mean, the fact is that by any way you measure it, they aren't right? We're getting on a county level more and more blue and red, right? The number of places that are competitive, be it House districts or individual precincts has gone down dramatically since the 1970s. So how can that be? Well, part of the answer is that as people move around, the people who are moving, a lot of social scientists have looked at this, tend to resemble politically and ideologically the place they're going to, not the place they're from. In other words, people are voting with their feet. 

[00:20:17] To some extent, when somebody is like, "Gosh, the place I grew up in, I love it. I feel like people really understand me. I'd never live anywhere else." And other people would be like,"The place I grew up, everyone has all these unexamined assumptions, I think they're completely wrong. It drives me absolutely crazy. Why can't they see that X, Y and Z are totally bogus? If I ever had a chance, if my company said you could move somewhere else, I would move somewhere where people believe like I do."  And overall, statistically, that's what people are doing. So that's part of it. Another is that immigration, especially the great definitional immigration waves of the late 19th century, cut off in 1924 by the racially minded Immigration Act that year. But that massive influx did not arrive and spread across the country evenly. If you map using the census takers, fortunately in that time period, would ask people are you foreign-born or not? And people have crunched the numbers at a county level. 

[00:21:14] What percentage of people? What's the per capita rate of immigrants during that period? We can see them at a county level. And the answer is essentially nobody went to Greater Appalachia, the Tidewater or the Deep South. Because all the things they were looking for -- this was generally a European wave of people fleeing feudal like conditions and looking for an opportunity to have freehold land of their own somewhere on this frontier. All of that stuff was really only available in the Midlands Yankee tracts or in a city like Wayne in New Netherland. So even that created, from that definitional period, regions of the country with very few new comers in the 19th and early 20th century and other places where there was a flood of them. And so that also only increased the gulf and ideas about who's an American, who belongs, who's an outsider, how does identity work? 

[00:22:09] And, again, it's not on a state boundary level. This is knowing where the actual settlement zones are tracks along those almost perfectly. So those are two parts of it. And culture just has this lasting and powerful hold. I mean, the argument in the book is essentially that people -- you know, somebody from Mars, a Martian brothers could arrive, one of them could go to the Deep South. One could go to Yankee dam and you go forward a couple of generations and their grandchildren, you know, yeah, they might know that they're Martian, and they might remember that their parents could speak Martian and their granddad really was from Mars; but they themselves would've probably intermarried by that point, may not speak any Martian at all. And the dialect of English they speak will probably be regionally tracked. And that, essentially, just assimilation like it works anywhere in the world happens here, but you're not assimilating into a  "American culture" you're assimilating into one of these regional cultures. So that's why over time culture tends to win out. 

[00:23:08] Now, this is a long winded answer. But in the new media environment of the past five to 10 years, I do think has the ability to maybe start collapsing these regional differences because social media and the algorithms that propel it, now that the public square is now occurring online and can be manipulated by Macedonian troll farms or whatever you want,  our information and our public square and the way we build our political attitudes is no longer linked to geography in any way. So that, you know, we'll have to see because it's so early. But up until five or 10 years ago, culture won out because you got your attitudes and your public square was located where you live. Now that it's not, and maybe the person informing you is really, you know, work for the FSB in Moscow, or maybe it's somebody trying to sell you a certain kind of widgets who knows that because you subscribe to this magazine and a bunch of other stuff that Google's algorithm knows that you are the person to target to buy this widget, but it's no longer linked to place. So we'll have to see how that plays out. And that may play a role in the sort of radicalization of our politics rarely recently may have to do with some of that. 

Sarah [00:24:24] Yeah, I wonder if it'll just be an accelerant. But, I mean, I think you're right. You know, culture always wins. And I think that this is such a helpful framework for understanding these different cultures as we move into an election season. And we thank you so much for giving us this tool to think through the different regions of the country as we move forward. 

Colin Woodard [00:24:41] Absolutely. Well, thanks for your interest. 

Beth [00:24:44] Thank you so much to Colin for joining Sarah. I'm so bummed that I had to miss that conversation because I was in the throes of COVID, but I loved learning from it and keeping in mind everything we just learned from Colin. Next, we're going to talk about how districts are actually drawn and how representatives are elected. By federal law, we have 435 members of Congress. Sarah, would you like a minute to talk about how you hate that? 

Sarah [00:25:22] It's dumb. It's too few members? We have 300 million people. In what universe is 435 divided by 300 million representative? I'm bad at math, I am, but not that bad at math. It's dumb. 

Beth [00:25:37] So we've kind of fixed that number despite the fact that our population grows with every census. 

Sarah [00:25:42] I just want to say we fixed it legislatively not in the Constitution. Always worth pointing out.

Beth [00:25:46] With every census, those 435 seats get allocated among the states based on how the population has shifted. And then all of the states that get more than one seat in the House decide how they're going to draw their congressional districts. There are a number of legal requirements that apply here, and there's like a lot of latitude as well. So we're going to quickly talk through what states have to keep in mind as they draw these districts. 

Sarah [00:26:13] So you might have heard the expression one person one vote. And that is from the Constitution which tells us that representatives should be chosen by the people of the several states. And we have a Supreme Court stater telling us that that means that congressional districts within each state should contain approximately equal numbers of people. So that as nearly as is practical, one person's vote is worth the same as another person's vote within the state. Now, we don't worry about that across states. That's another beef of mine. But within states, we do. That's why you see in our home state of Kentucky giant districts on my side of the state and this tiny little district which contains Louisville our most populous city. So there are cases where states have had to explain any population deviation from mathematical equality among their districts, and the courts asks whether those deviations are justified based on legitimate state objectives. And if that sounds squishy that's because constitutional law is often squishy and Supreme Court interpretations even squishier. 

Beth [00:27:09] Another constitutional consideration for district drawing is the 14th Amendment. Courts have interpreted the 14th Amendment to require essentially that states be very, very, very, careful when drawing district lines based on race. Very, very, very, careful is not the legal language that is used in those cases, but that's the gist of it. 

Sarah [00:27:28] And then we have the Voting Rights Act. This is a legislative requirement, not a constitutional requirement. But the districts have to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This law prohibits any voting qualification or practice that results in the denial or abridgment of the right to vote based on race, color or membership in a language minority. And there are lots of aspects of Section 2 in the Voting Rights Act and many, many, judicial test decisions trying to apply it, scale it, and otherwise shape its impact. Including recent Supreme Court precedent that rolls back a lot of the requirements of the Voting Rights Act. I actually was thinking about the Voting Rights Act, Beth, after my conversation with Colin where we talk about, you know, we're different. And so applying one standard across all these regions is problematic. But I think the Voting Rights Act, Section 2 in particular, sets forth a really good model for how to do that. To say this is what we're applying. But we know that certain parts of the country might have a little bit -- let me be as graceful as possible, bigger cultural and historical barriers to applying this. And so we're going to look at these all individually. We're going to set out some standards. We're going to have people in charge of sort of keeping an eye on on different regions that might struggle with these requirements. 

Beth [00:28:40] Which is exactly what the Supreme Court has found problematic because they've said maybe at some point we were all different, but it doesn't feel like we're all different anymore. 

Sarah [00:28:49] They need to read Colin Woodard's book. That's what I think. 

Beth [00:28:51] I think so too. Now, we have laws around gerrymandering that practice of drawing weird districts for specific purposes that apply to race, language, ethnicity. We do not have federal laws around partisan gerrymandering. In fact, the Supreme Court has said federal courts are not going to get involved in claims of partisan gerrymandering. There's no basis on which we can do that. A variety of bills have been introduced in Congress dealing with partisan gerrymandering, none have passed. States are taking swings at this. This is where you see some nonpartisan commissions trying to draw district lines. And as we're about to talk about, that's like going okay mixed results from that. 

Sarah [00:29:39] So based on our recent census, results were at this point where we're taking a stab at it again. Every 10 years we take a stab at this process. And so redistricting is going on right now. It's not finished. As of January 14th, 26 states have finished their maps. New York is still working on its second map proposal. Mississippi and Kentucky's Legislature have sent maps to the governor for signature. The Ohio Supreme Court has rejected the first attempt at their new maps, and there are lawsuits pending in North Carolina. Connecticut's bipartisan redistricting commission didn't meet the deadline to approve the map, which kicks the process to the state Supreme Court. Wisconsin's governor vetoed the map passed by the Legislature so that it will also go to the court. It's a hot mess. 

[00:30:20] And we have this fun new entrant coming from, oh, wait for it, the state of Florida. As is often the case, often the case Florida. Florida coming in with something hot, hot, and new. Ron DeSantis became the first governor in recent political history to just say, "Hey, you know what? I have an idea. This is my map. This is what I want the redistricting to look like." He filed it on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and eliminated two majority black districts. Bold move. I mean, I think he's sort of known for that. The idea is that he's basically saying, "If the Republican state legislature doesn't submit a map that looks like this, I'm going to veto it." But stepping into the process in this particular way is interesting. Yeah, I'm going to use the word interesting. 

Beth [00:31:06] So, Sarah, I was trying to put together what are my big takeaways after looking at the shifts that are happening and being contemplated in light of this census? And my headline is the more things change, the more they stay the same. We are continuing a trajectory of reducing the number of toss up districts. Every time we embark on this process, we get fewer truly competitive congressional districts according to the Cook Political Report, which I think is kind of a gold standard of people analyzing congressional districts. Fourteen of 435 districts are truly tossups. FiveThirtyEight classifies 21 districts as highly competitive. The second thing I want to say is that neither party grabbed a ton of power from this process. Depends on how you look at it. There are a few more solidly blue districts now. 

[00:32:02] Republicans converted some lean's right districts to solidly Republican districts. The map slightly favors Democrats, but we still have unbalanced more aggressively Republican gerrymandered districts. Democrats are playing the game a little better now. You've probably read a lot about how Democrats tend to unilaterally disarm in this process. The Republicans gerrymander hard. When Democrats have power they try to go more bipartisan or nonpartisan. Some Democrats said this time we're going to do this too, and some have for many years. There have always been districts that are gerrymandered to favor both parties. On balance, Republicans have been more aggressive about this. And then, you know, it still feels and is kind of gross like  nothing about this feels right as you dive into it. 

Sarah [00:32:53] Yeah. You know, I had a macro level anxiety about this because when this process happens, there is always a lot of incendiary headlines. A lot of incendiary emails coming from party activists. This is what they're doing. And some of the things are crappy. Like it's not just congressional districts that are getting drawn. State House districts are getting drawn. In Kentucky they condense -- two of my most favorite female legislators they condense their districts. And I just thought, of course you did. Of course, you're threatened by them. 

Beth [00:33:22] And those state districts are not one person one vote under federal law. They can do what they want. It state law that applies. 

Sarah [00:33:30] So in the congressional districts like, you know, you read all of this and I was trying to keep my wits about me. I was just trying to think like, okay, we read this stuff every year. Yes, there are fewer competitive districts. But it was very helpful for me to read Matt Iglesias, his newsletter, where he talked about like when you look overall at the map, democrats shored up some places, like you said, kind of abandoned that unilateral disarmament strategy. And so it's not this Republican blowout, which I think this more incendiary headlines and definitely the political emails you get make you feel like, no. Does that make me feel any better about the really crappy way my district is drawn and the fact that my representative, Jamie Comer, lives in Frankfurt, which is hours away and like totally disconnected from our region of the state? No, it doesn't. It doesn't make me feel any better. But back to my first point, to me, the issue is less about partisan gerrymandering. Although would I love everybody to move to nonpartisan districts? Of course. Although, must be noted in Michigan, the nonpartisan redistricting commission eliminated a historically black district. 

[00:34:43] And there is a lot of angry people who said like, well, yeah, this sounds great, but they're not taking into account majority-minority districts in a way that is important for representation. And so it's not like these nonpartisan districts are without issue. But what I mean, would I love those? Yes. But what I think is so stupid is that our country gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and we're sorting these same 435 districts out. Oh, we'll take from Michigan and we'll give to California. We'll take from here and we'll give to Texas. It's just so stupid. It's a number we made up to fit the room in the 1920s. And the fact that we continue to do this is to me fundamental to our partisanship, to our polarization, to the fact that the people feel like the system doesn't represent them, that it's rigged. Whatever language you want to use, they're not wrong. This representation sucks. You don't feel represented when your congressperson has, you know, anywhere from several hundred thousand to they think it'll be up to a million constituents soon. Like, it's just, it's so dumb that we keep, you know, diving out these same 435 districts and expect it to be a fair process where people feel like democracy is flourishing. 

Beth [00:36:04] The point from that Matt Iglesias piece that hit me the hardest was that the problem with gerrymandering is not unfairness to political parties, it is unfairness to voters. And here's what he said that I just loved. He said, in socio cultural terms, I think these practices undermine the national fabric by creating an exaggerated sense of national polarization. The fact that there are about 500,000 Trump voters in Chicago and about 500,000 Biden voters in Utah is a relevant fact about American society that deserves to be made more salient, so that people understand more clearly and vividly that opposite party voters are members of their community and not people living somewhere else to be eliminated. I think that is it, because if you look at these maps, yeah, we're extremely polarized. And these maps are meant to do that, not to actually reflect what's going on in a certain census block. 

Sarah [00:37:05] And I can't help but remember our conversation surrounding January 6th, where we talked about how many of the insurrectionists didn't come from Trump majority districts. They came from Biden districts. And I think that's probably a little bit of why. It's not that I'm sympathetic, but there's a part of that that connects with me because I live in a place where I don't get represented regularly. It's terrible. It is not a great feeling. It makes you feel angry. It makes you feel disconnected. It makes you feel invisible because there are people. It's not this, you know, easy pie. It's why Barack Obama's speech so many years ago where we go to church in blue states and we love our gay friends in red states connected with people because they're like, Yeah, that's not my lived experience. You can't divide up the lines like this in a way that human beings always fit neatly within. You just make them feel ignored. And I think it's that's why I really connect with Colin's work, because I think talking about the cultural connection is so important. And he made a really good point after we wrapped our previous conversation that I want to play here about gerrymandering and how often gerrymandering is slicing up these cultural context. 

Colin Woodard [00:38:22] And you'll notice very quickly when dealing with House districts, that a lot of them straddle these regional cultural lines. And that's that's no accident, right? If you're gerrymandering stuff, let's say you're Republican or you are Democrat, you gerrymander in different ways, but you want to gerrymander up the western reserves of Ohio which is the Yankees zone which votes democratically. You're not going to give it districts that are horizontal along the lake. You're going to cut them in spaghetti lots, either advantageously or disadvantageously to Cleveland and surroundings, depending on which party you're in. But you'll see that a lot. You'll see the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where I've lived for a year and a half. You know, Brownsville lawn, you know, all that whole strip at the very southern end of Texas is a cohesive cultural zone. But you'll see that many of the house districts are cut as crazy spaghetti lots north the south so that you can strand Democratic voters in the Rio Grande Valley in areas that are slightly a majority district. Because you're pulling in Deep Southern, you know, Corpus Christi and surroundings or whatnot. So I mean, you'll see all around the country, you'll see a lot of gerrymandering often results in building house districts that cross these regional cultural areas. 

Sarah [00:39:39] Well, that was going to be my question. I'm like, wait, so some of these gerrymandered districts actually follow the sort of cultural context that you're saying, "No, they're splitting them up on purpose." 

Colin Woodard [00:39:50] Yeah. Well, gerrymandering by definition, they're trying to gain political advantage in the way they draw the districts. But if you're doing that, you probably haven't read American Nations. But just using all of the other metrics you're looking for to find partisan advantage almost always is going to find you drawing across these regional cultural lines because the culture has so much effect on political behavior. So you'll find a lot of districts are hacked up in that way in various regions of the country. Less so maybe in states that have a commission system and in fact don't allow gerrymandering or make it harder. You'll find less of that because they tend to be more culturally cohesive. But in in the majority of states where it's done to partisan advantage by one party or the other, you'll see the district will not be in El Norte district. It'll be an El Norte slash Deep South district. 

Sarah [00:40:45] Right. Right. 

Beth [00:40:47] So there are better ways to do this. We could spend many, many, episodes on ways that we could do a better job drawing districts, how we could prioritize different factors and drawing those districts, how we could vote differently. But right now, these are the maps that we have. And so the question is, you know, what are we going to do about it? How are we going to approach these elections? And what Sarah and I have been talking about is trying to think extremely locally because that is the goal of the system. The House of Representatives, much more than any other federal office is meant to allow people to feel represented based on what is happening where they live. So we want to talk to candidates from those regions that Colin and Sarah discussed about their districts, not about their campaigns, about the districts. How has COVID impacted the district? What major industries in the district? 

[00:41:44] And how are things going with that industry? What resources does the district have in abundance or desperately need? So between now and the election, those are the kinds of conversations you're going to hear a couple of times a month here. And just to be really explicit, because this time of year we start to hear from candidates or people saying please interview so-and-so who's running in my state. We love that. Please send people our way. And please understand that what we want to talk about is what's happening on the ground there. We so admire people who run for office and appreciate what they do and what they're going for in interviews. What we really want to connect with people about is the understanding of that local community, not how they feel about build back better or those nationalized kind of culture war issues. 

Sarah [00:42:30] Because I think what appeals to me about these regions is not to further divide us to just say, like, well, we're just these different countries and that's it, but just to remind us what a big lift multicultural democracy is. To just remind us that there's a lot of history and culture and geography and a million other factors tied up in how somebody reacts to a vaccine mandate or how a region of the country reacts to a vaccine mandate. It's not about the district lines, it's about so much more than that. And often it is candidates who are on the ground experiencing those perspectives day after day, listening to people's stories, meeting business owners who have a really good window into how all those factors come into play. I definitely learned more than I had in my entire life during my campaign when I knocked on all those doors and saw those sort of historical factors play out as I listened to people and asked for their vote and shared my sort of policy ideas. And so I'm really excited to talk to the candidates to help us understand our country in more depth. 

Beth [00:43:35] I loved hearing Colin talk about how social media is shrinking the public square and weakening those regional differences because that feels like an infant stage of that tool to me, much in the way of that conversations about race in America and the infant stage sounded like we don't see color. And as that conversation has evolved, people are saying, "No, that's not what we're going for at all. We absolutely want to see community differences, cultural differences. We want to celebrate different heritages and different perspectives and the value of multicolor culturalism. And so I hope that politically in that public square and otherwise, we can do the same thing around our maps and our representatives to say, "No, I like really value that you are coming from a completely different district than mine and you bring this different perspective and we shouldn't be flattening everything out to which caucus you vote with." So we are going to continue those conversations. We are going to start with the candidate in the Greater Appalachian region and keep working our way around the country. Please do send us any suggestions that you have. And next up, I will just talk a little bit about how COVID is the weirdest. 

Sarah [00:45:09] So, Beth, the people want to know how you're doing. 

Beth [00:45:11] Doing pretty well. I feel I'm lucky that my experience has been as smooth as it has been compared to the alternatives. At the same time, I'll tell you, it's very perspective inducing to think to myself, I have three vaccines and this is rough. And just to understand it puts mild in greater context. 

Sarah [00:45:34] I was fixing to say you're not feeling the mild nature of Omicron. 

Beth [00:45:37] It puts mild in greater context, for me, for sure. I'm really tired. I feel like I have a migraine all the time. I got a lot of kind of pain around my torso, but I'm doing better. My brain still feels like scrambled eggs. I'm working on it. That scrambled eggs brain is what I wanted to to talk to you about because a couple of factors influenced my television watching this last week. I needed something I didn't care about a whole lot so that I could come in and out of consciousness because basically all I did for five days was sleep and lay in bed and text people in my house to say, Would you please bring me some more ice? So I needed something I wasn't super invested in. I needed something that wasn't complex. I needed something that Chad and I don't watch together, and I settled on two types of entertainment. One was shows about cheating in sports, which I really enjoyed. It's kind of the energy that I was really looking for. And then the other is called Ink Masters. It is a competition reality show about tattoo artist. 

Sarah [00:46:41] Oh, that is not what I expected you to say. 

Beth [00:46:44] I know. I just want to tell you a little bit about it. First of all, it is hosted by Dave Navarro. 

Sarah [00:46:49] First important note neither you nor I have tattoos. 

Beth [00:46:52] No tattoos here. If there were ever a human to fully embody the darkness and the randomness and the tenacity of COVID, I think it's Dave Navarro. I think he's the perfect human -- 

Sarah [00:47:05] I can't tell if you're complimenting him or not. 

Beth [00:47:06]  I can't really, either. But I like him. I enjoyed seeing him on my television for hours and hours. Here's what I really wanted from morning to ask you. So these tattoo artists are competing and they're tattooing real people. And they call the people they bring in, wait for it, the human canvases. 

Sarah [00:47:24] No. 

Beth [00:47:25] I want to know if there is any version of being a human canvas that you could get on board for. 

Sarah [00:47:32] Yeah, like paint. Like body paint. Sure, I would even -- listen, truthfully, I would even be like a nude model for an art class because I have very little modesty, almost no modesty. Like, I don't like dress immodestly, not for any like moral reasons, just because, no. But I don't have any modesty, really. So I could do that. But like a human canvas for something permanent, that's a no for me. That's a no. 

Beth [00:48:00] The permanent state is what gets me to I would not go for that. The one thing I settled on is I think that I could like lie on a table and let people put appetizers on me. You know, like, cover me in fruit or something. I think I'd be a human canvas in that way and that's about it. So if you already have a tattoo, I don't know how this show would go for you. I think it's possible that you would start to look at your tattoo and be like, "Oh my God, this line work is terrible." Like, You know what I mean? Because the critiques are so fine. 

Sarah [00:48:26] So, wait, are these people showing up to get tattooed, do they have tattoos or this is their first tattoo? 

Beth [00:48:30] They're all. They're very tattooed. 

Sarah [00:48:32] Because that's what I think. I think like being a human canvas when it's your first tattoo is a whole different ballgame game than if you got a sleeve, then what's another tattoo? Who cares? 

Beth [00:48:44] And there was a very fascinating episode where people came for facial tattoos. And one of the tattoo artist is very strongly against facial tattoos and doesn't do them at home. And like had this whole conversation. He only did it because this person already had tattoos on their face. 

Sarah [00:48:59] What is his opposition to face tattoos? I'm here for this conversation. 

Beth [00:49:02] Just that you can never cover them up. And he just feels like that is too much of a life changing decision for someone and that they're hard to remove. And he's just like, I just think it's unethical. I don't do it. People got tattoos on their heads. People got tattoos on their eyelids. 

Sarah [00:49:20] That has to hurt so badly. 

Beth [00:49:21] Well, this is the other thing, if you have ever been tattooed curious, which like I know a lot of white ladies my age who grew up in Baptist churches, are very tattoo curious. I think this will cure you of it. Because when you see how intricate the work is and these are like the people at the top of their field and they still get these critiques about the screw ups and how things are going to age over time. 

Sarah [00:49:45] Oh, that's interesting. 

Beth [00:49:46] And like they talk about different forms of skin being really hard to work on if you have scar tissue, if you have wrinkles. So I think that will just cure you of the desire to do anything permanent to yourself. The other thing, though, is they show these people getting this work done, and it looks excruciating even for folks who have many, many, many, tattoos.  

Sarah [00:50:08] I'm as tattoo curious. I'm going to make him watch this show. 

Beth [00:50:10] It made me like interested in temporary tattoos because some of them are beautiful. It's amazing what they can do. 

Sarah [00:50:18] I used to love henna. I was all about henna in college

Beth [00:50:20] It's gorgeous. There are weird moments about cultural appropriation that are definitely not addressed on the show that's hosted by Dave Navarro and sponsored by Taco Bell. Poetic. But they don't really discuss like, should you be getting an Asian tattoo? Like does this make sense? There are questions to explore. But I'm just telling you it's like the perfect level. I could go to sleep. It didn't matter. I didn't like any of the people. This is the opposite of like Ted Lasso viewing. Everybody's pissed off constantly. They have the shortest fuzes. They are like going for the jugular the whole time, but it was the right energy for a sick person. 

Sarah [00:50:55] That is hilarious. When I tell my boys about tattoos, like, why I don't have one and as I say, like, "I'm a curious person who really prioritizes self-growth, self-awareness and change. And so there's not really a point in my life that I want to mark permanently because I always want to be developing." Nicholas and I got very close to getting tattoos one time, and I think I would. I thought a lot about this, and I think if I was to mark anything permanent that I feel like will never change, it might be the state of Kentucky because I will forever and always be a Kentuckian. And I'm also like an eighth generation Kentuckian. But that's it to me. Like, I don't want to commit to something because what if 18 year old Super Baptist Sarah had gotten a tattoo? Like I wanted to until my grandmother shamed me and said, "No, ma'am." What if I had? Then I'd be like marked permanently with this person I'm no longer anywhere close to be. That's kind of my thing on tattoos. Personally, I don't really care about anybody. I have strong opinions and care not at all if you have a tattoo. Go for it. I've seen beautiful tattoos. My friend Dave has the freaking coolest tattoo from this artist. Like, you don't even get to approve, you just get to show up and he does it. It's so freaking cool. That's just personally where I'm at on tattoos. 

Beth [00:52:02] Yeah, I actually love seeing other people's tattoos like especially people who have sleeves. I think they're beautiful and interesting, and I cannot commit to a wall color. And so I'm just not going to be able to choose for myself something that I really want to ride with for the rest of my days. And I look at my skin and see how much it's changed between 30 and 40, and I'm just not going to make assumptions about what it does next. But the artistry of this is incredible. I mean, what these people can draw and the fact that they can draw it on skin is amazing. 

Sarah [00:52:36] With  like it's not a pencil that they can erase? 

Beth [00:52:38] Yeah. 

Sarah [00:52:38] Bananas. 

Beth [00:52:38] And also, this show is so wacky and that's perfect for COVID. Like this one guy came in and he said, "I want you to make it look like a zombie, like, bit the back of my head." And I thought, yeah, why not? Do that. It's 2022, do it. Why would you not want a zombie to bite the back of your head off? 

Sarah [00:52:56] That's great. You go for it, friend. That sounds about right. 

Beth [00:53:02] Live your best life. 

Sarah [00:53:02] That's right. Have the best tattoo available to you. That I feel very strongly about. Just have the best tattoo available to you. 

Beth [00:53:08] That's right. And if you get sick, just spend some time with Dave. He is there for you. There are three seasons of Ink Master, they're on Netflix. Again, every episode he tells you that Taco Bell is sponsoring, it feels so good. It's just perfect. 

Sarah [00:53:23] I could not have been in a more different space than you this weekend. As far as entertainment, I read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice while listening to Regency Music. I watched Denzel Washington and Macbeth and finished Station Eleven. So is a very different vibe, very different vibe.

Beth [00:53:36] One degree of connection with you, I watched Denzel Washington in The Pelican Brief. 

Sarah [00:53:41] I haven't  watched that in forever. 

Beth [00:53:42] I hadn't neither, and just suddenly it popped into my mind. That's what I want right now because I know what happens. I can fall asleep and it doesn't matter.  And I do love Julia Roberts and her hair. I really strongly connect with her hair in that movie. 

Sarah [00:53:55] She had some good hair. You don't get full Julia Roberts hair as much as you used to. 

Beth [00:53:59] And that's a shame. We've lost something in that. Well, I'm so glad you all were here today. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Colin Woodard, again, who I bet did not expect to be mentioned in an episode with Ink Master. We should maybe like work on our language when we invite people on to this show, just to let them know the range of things. We'll be back here with you again on Friday. You don't have to wait very long this week to talk about one year of the Biden administration. Until then, have the best week available to you. 

[00:54:35] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director. 

Sarah [00:54:40] Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music. 

Beth [00:54:46] Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers. 

Executive Producers [00:54:50] Martha Bronitsky, Ali Edwards, Janice Elliot, Sarah Greenup, Julie Heller, Helen Handley, Tiffany Hassler, Emily Holladay, Katie Johnson, Katina Zuganelis Kasling,  Barry Kaufman, Molly Kohrs. 

[00:55:08] The Kriebs, Laurie LaDow, Lily McClure, Jared Minson, Emily Neesley, The Pentons, Tawni Peterson, Tracy Puthoff, Sara Ralph, Jeremy Sequoia, Katie Stigers, Karin True, Onica Ulveling, Nick and Alysa Vilelli, Amy Whited, 

Beth [00:55:25] Jeff Davis, Melinda Johnston, Ashley Thompson, Michelle Wood, Joshua Allen, Morgan McHugh, Nichole Berkelas, Paula Bremer, and Tim Miller. 

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