Memorial Day weekend in Wisconsin usually involves grilling, yard projects that immediately become more complicated than expected, and at least one person insisting they can totally finish rebuilding the deck before Monday night.
Underneath all of that though, Memorial Day is serious. It is a day set aside to remember people who died serving this country and the idea behind it: self-government. Messy, imperfect, occasionally exhausting self-government, but self-government nonetheless.
That system only works if people believe their participation matters.
Now, many of my clients, friends, and unfortunate random passersby already know that if a discussion with me goes on long enough, there is a decent chance I will somehow bring up gerrymandering. Some completely innocent people have probably walked into a conversation about liquor licensing, real estate, or small business issues and accidentally received an unsolicited lecture on legislative maps.
I can’t help myself. It is one of my favorite topics.
Part of the reason is that redistricting sits at the intersection of law, politics, incentives, demographics, and basic human nature. It is also one of the few areas where otherwise serious people will defend district maps that look like someone traced them during a minor earthquake.
For years, there was a real push for nonpartisan redistricting reform and independent commissions. The basic idea was simple enough: voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around. That goal was legitimate then, and it is legitimate now.
But lately, instead of moving toward a more stable system, we seem to be drifting into a redistricting arms race. Whichever party controls the process pushes for maximum advantage, while the other side condemns the practice and promises to respond in kind somewhere else when it gets the chance. We are even seeing more discussion about revisiting maps outside the normal census cycle altogether.
That should concern people regardless of party. Because once redistricting becomes a continuous political weapon instead of a periodic administrative process, people start losing trust in the system itself.
Most people are not spending Memorial Day weekend reading court opinions about district boundaries. Most people (understandably) barely want to read their HOA bylaws. They just want elections to be fair and stable.
Instead, modern redistricting increasingly feels like one of those late-stage board games where nobody fully remembers the rules anymore, everybody is convinced the other person is cheating, and someone has quietly been hiding money under the board since 1998.
And to be clear, this is not uniquely a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. Both parties seem perfectly comfortable condemning aggressive maps in states they lose while defending aggressive maps in states they control. Human nature remains undefeated.
Oddly enough, one of the most recognizable voices on this issue has been Arnold Schwarzenegger. Which is still objectively funny. Somewhere along the line, the Terminator became one of America’s leading advocates for independent redistricting commissions. But he makes a fair point. People lose faith in institutions when they believe outcomes are predetermined or the rules are constantly changing depending on who currently has leverage.
And once cynicism takes hold, people disengage. They stop voting. They stop paying attention. They stop believing public institutions belong to them at all.
That is not healthy for any republic.
None of this means there is some magical, perfectly neutral map hidden away somewhere. Redistricting is complicated. Geography is complicated. Communities of interest are complicated. Every map involves tradeoffs. But there is still a meaningful difference between an imperfect process and a forever escalation cycle.
Thanks for reading and Happy Memorial Day.