EDITORIAL: No evidence that redistricting process has been unfair
In this overheated era we’re enduring, conspiracy theories seem to flourish like grass after a springtime downpour. But sometimes the best explanation for events is the least complicated and most straightforward one.
President Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman. Men did indeed land on the moon. Paul McCartney was not replaced in the Beatles by a double. Princess Diana was not murdered. And the 2020 presidential election was not rife with fraud.
It’s much more mundane and much closer to home, but some Pennsylvania Republicans have been peddling the notion that Mark Nordenberg, the chairman of the Legislative Reapportionment Commission and the former chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, has it in for them. For that reason, they say he whittled down the advantage the GOP has enjoyed in the state’s House of Representatives on the proposed redistricting map.
Why? According to their theory, Nordenberg is angry over votes they cast to reduce Pitt’s funding. State Rep. Bud Cook, R-West Pike Run, who will see his Mon Valley-centered 49th District split up and partially absorbed into what is now the 50th District under the new map, fulminated that it was “an attempted theft of the commonwealth’s freedom” and warned darkly that he and his supporters will hold Nordenberg accountable.
What the accountability would entail isn’t precisely clear. But that point aside, Cook and his fellow Republicans are sidestepping the most obvious and reasonable explanation for why the preliminary map turned out the way it did – Democratic-leaning cities and suburbs have grown, while Republican strongholds in rural areas have seen population declines. This is not unique to Pennsylvania. Rural communities across the country have been losing young people to metropolitan areas over the last two decades because that’s where jobs and opportunities are.
In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Nordenberg denied that he was deliberately trying to put Republicans at a disadvantage, and that the maps reflect “the population trends that have changed the state over the last 10 years.”
It should also be noted that the proposed map would still most likely yield a GOP majority, albeit a much narrower one. As Nordenberg explained, “The map itself is a map that favors the Republicans. It doesn’t favor them as much as the current map does, but that is a product of the changing demographics of the commonwealth.”
Many of the complaints about the map made locally are echoed in communities around Pennsylvania. Elected officials don’t want to see counties split or communities split, or, on the other hand, they believe that some communities have shared interests across county lines. But coming up with a map that pleases everybody when you have a little more than 200 legislative districts to carve up on a finite number of acres is almost certainly beyond the realm of possibility.
It seems that Cook and his fellow Republicans are pounding the table in hopes they will get what they want as the haggling over the map continues. Rather than trying to “work the refs,” though, they would be better off trying to convince voters in their newly drawn districts that they should be sent back to Harrisburg.