Gerrymandering in America by Anthony J. McGann, Charles Anthony Smith, Michael Latner, Alex Keena

Paperback, 272 pgs, Pub July 11th 2017 by Cambridge University Press, ISBN13: 9781316507674

This academic look at gerrymandering—how to measure it, how one does it most effectively, and what exactly are its effects—was published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press—yes, the British one. One author, Anthony McGann, is from Glasgow. The other three authors, Charles A Smith, Michael Latner, and Alex Keena, are all professors from CA institutions.

For someone new to the term gerrymandering, this definitely won’t be the easiest entry, but to someone more familiar, it has enlightening bits. They talk quite a lot about Pennsylvania, one of the worst gerrymandered states in the country. You may have heard the State Supreme Court in PA deemed the congressional maps so egregiously gerrymandered they ended up providing a new map to a recalcitrant state legislature in 2018.

After 2011 redistricting, though Democrats had won over 50% of the votes for congresspeople in the state, they managed to win only 5 of 18 congressional seats. After the State Supreme Court passed down the new maps in 2018, Democrats won 9 of 18 seats.

Actually, depending on where Democrats reside, there is no reason why 50% of votes should necessarily translate into half the seats. No one really cared if they didn’t. It was the relative skew that was offensive, and the ugly fact that the state legislators in office did nothing with their supermajority but pass innocuous resolutions, e.g., Dec 12 is Polar Bear Day, and Sept 13 is Healthy Heart Day, and avoid talking about the 18 cities in PA, including Pittsburgh, with lead levels higher than Flint, Michigan.

In Pennsylvania (and Wisconsin and Michigan and…) today, voters must face the horrible problem of having their state legislative districts so gerrymandered that no one will even run against incumbents. We can’t even vote the crooks out.

After the June 2019 SCOTUS decision not to deal with any more gerrymandering problems in federal courts, disenfranchised voters will be forced to bring maps redistricted after the 2020 Census through the state courts again. Meanwhile, nonpartisan volunteer organizations are blanketing the state with petitions to urge legislators to “do the right thing” and voluntarily give up their constitutional right to draw district lines, for the sake of fairness and democracy. So far, legislators haven’t shown interest in anybody's constitutional rights beyond their own.

Claims have been made by some that the self-sorting voters do along partisan lines into cities and rural areas is responsible for the bias in results, not the intentional gerrymander. However, these scholars have concluded self-sorting is not responsible for the extent of the bias in results, and gives examples of several states also with city/rural dichotomies that do not exhibit partisan bias. Many states exhibit extreme partisan bias, Pennsylvania among them.

There is a trade-off between seat maximization and incumbent protection. Regions with competitors packed into one district have extraordinary non-responsive voting blocks in the surrounding districts.

"Put bluntly, if you can pack your opponents into a single district where they win 80% of the vote, you can create [surrounding] districts where you have a 7.5% advantage. It is notable that the number of “incumbent protection” districting plans declined sharply between 2002 and 2012. It seems that more states are districting for national partisan advantage, even though it makes their incumbents slightly more vulnerable.”

The authors make a distinction between partisan bias and responsiveness. “If there is partisan bias, then one party is advantaged over the other…If a districting system has high responsiveness, then it gives an advantage to the larger party, whichever party that happens to be.”

Worst of all, in reviewing what I wanted to say about the pitiable position Pennsylvania’s manipulative legislators have left us in, near the top of the Top Ten Exhibiting Partisan Bias… worst yet is that the states above Pennsylvania in #4 place are states we never hear anything about. No, they are NOT Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin North Carolina, or Maryland. They are Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, states with large populations of African American voters so used to being beat up and beat down they don’t even protest anymore. Of course the government is going to steal their vote. Oh, it is enraging.

“...districting is mathematically a very, very difficult problem...”

The California independent redistricting commission may have been partly modeled on the British iteration, called Boundary Commissions. Boundary Commissions are explicitly forbidden from considering partisan data when deciding their maps. This has actually led, in CA as well, to skews that were unintentional but partisan in fact. As a result, CA commissions have made the unusual request that they must consider partisan data in order to avoid it.

A summary of the difference between Boundary Commissions and U.S. election districts and commissions: 1) Britain is not two party, which makes a huge difference in the attempt to gerrymander. People have been known to calculate their vote in order to stymie any gerrymander. That is, there is tactical voting. 2) A source of bias is not a gerrymander but is caused by differential turnout. “Labour tends to win when fewer people vote.” 3) Districts are not the same size nor same population as is required in U.S. congressional and legislative districts. This presents a small bias towards Labour. 4) The authors are not sure what the last advantage is: “If there is something about geographical distribution of support that has given Labour an advantage, it is not clear what it is.” One explanation…is that Labour appears disproportionately successful at winning close races.

Anyway, they conclude there was a partisan bias in Britain for whatever reason after 2010, but it seems to have disappeared by 2015. The Boundary Commissions have no real effect at preventing partisan bias because it explicitly cannot take partisan bias into account: “Fairness between the political parties is not a factor that can be considered.”




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The Lucky Ones by Rachel Cusk

Hardcover, 240 pgs, Pub April 7th 2003 by Fourth Estate (first published 2003), ISBN13: 9781857029123

I feel a bit slapped around by this novel, published in 2003, the year after Cusk's bombshell of a memoir about motherhood, A Life’s Work, had such a mixed reception. Not only do her chapters read as individual, difficult-to-reconcile stories, the sentiment is painful to read. She is not funny: if one laughs, she remarked in an interview, the power is lost. Women and men living together in anything but married bliss: it’s instructive, relatable, hardly comforting.

The angles from which Cusk approaches these stories are not immediately clarifying. I wondered why we were reading about couples or their friends. The view of an older mother whose daughter is living a life outside of the mother’s experience seemed false for much of the chapter, as though she did not capture the older woman’s essence and mechanism: that which makes her tick. Eventually we see something, but we do not feel warm to this armored woman, battling her demons.

Who says a novel has to unroll its delights promiscuously for anyone to partake? The novel is a serious attempt to take on issues of critical meaning to people involved in relationships, perhaps even same-sex relationships, because the dynamic is often the same. After all, most people are still buying a “pig in a poke” when they marry in the sense they often do not know well the person with whom they intend live, and in any case, the relationship changes with the addition of children to the equation.

Cusk of course captures the despair of married women everywhere trying to fit their personalities, skills, and unique abilities into what can feel like the straightjacket of marriage and childcare. But we must now, in this time of #MeToo, acknowledge the point of view of the husband who, no matter what kind of man he was taught to be, also finds himself aghast at the weight of responsibility suddenly thrust upon him when he achieves his majority and marries.

But Cusk wrote this in the olden days: in something like fifteen years we are finally talking broadly, openly, and seriously about the rights of women in the workplace but also about the definition of masculinity, male privilege, and patriarchy. All this openness could be shut down tomorrow, as many have predicted the backlash will come, but the very things that Cusk is talking about so clearly is exactly what we should be internalizing in order to emerge healthy.

Transitions between chapters can be clunky and uncomfortable in direction, but Cusk at her worst is still better than most at their best. The first chapter is set in a women’s prison, and had some startling overlap with Rachel Kushner’s Booker-shortlisted novel this year, The Mars Room, a story of inattentive public defenders and tragic consequences. The very next chapter dropped us in the middle of a winter ski vacation in Switzerland for young professionals just beginning to construct and/or deconstruct their lives.

She works her themes, the moment young women, old women, rich women, poor women, talented women, and educated women clearly see their social predicament. The male partners of these women are not as finely drawn. The character of Martin in “The Way You Do It” could almost be a precursor for her narrator occupying negative space in the Outline trilogy, though she’d not even conceived of the notion then. Victor, the husband of the red-haired Serena, dies of a wasting disease. Colin refuses to speak, having succumbed to an affair, and Mr. Daley complains impotently late in life that his wife had “stolen his soul.”

But Vanessa in “Matters of Life and Death” says her desire for self- expression was thwarted, not by her actual circumstances, but by her fear of what might be. This theme recurs in later novels—a painter cannot paint nor a writer write for the distraction of everyday. The “enemy was not her husband; it was the capacity in herself, of which she was aware, for finding her husband unsatisfactory.”

Also recurring in other novels is Cusk’s tendency to have someone look upon the physical characteristics of a house as proof of something in the character of its inhabitants. She may be pointing to a common tendency in many of us to judge people by the splendor—or not—of their homes. Unfortunately, one cannot simply buy a life, only a lifestyle.

There is a party in this novel, which by now should strike readers with dread at what is to come. Suffice it to say, a great deal of blood is spilled and the circumstances are unclear: there had been an argument shortly before. The outcome is as unsettling as the months preceding the event.

Even in the novels that received less attention and critical praise, Cusk is working hard at expression. One I particularly liked was

“Colin digested Vanessa’s remark with the expression of a dog realising that what he had thought was a stick was in fact a bone.”

Cusk moves on to revisit and refine these themes in her later work but we can see these in-between books are critical parts of her oeuvre, the building blocks for what is to come.

Below please find reviews of Cusk’s other work.

Saving Agnes, 1993
The Temporary, 1995 (not reviewed yet)
The Country Life, 1997
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, 2002
The Lucky Ones, 2003
In the Fold, 2005
Arlington Park, 2006
The Bradshaw Variations, 2009
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, 2009
Aftermath: On Marriage & Separation, 2012
Outline, 2014
Medea, 2015
Transit, 2016
Kudos, 2018
Coventry: Essays, 2019




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