ELDER: Gerrymandering: Obama then vs. Obama now

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Former president Barack Obama railed against Texas for attempting a mid-decade redistricting to create more Republican U.S. House seats.

On social media, Obama said: “We can’t lose focus on what matters — right now, Republicans in Texas are trying to gerrymander district lines to unfairly win five seats in next year’s midterm elections. This is a power grab that undermines our democracy.”

Obama, in 2022, wrote: “Three years ago, I helped @EricHolder launch @AllOnTheLine, a people-powered campaign to fight gerrymandering and advocate for fair redistricting. All On The Line is driven by the core belief that voters should choose their representatives — not the other way around.”

That “voters should choose their representatives — not the other way around” reflects quite a change in thinking from a politician who skillfully used gerrymandering to protect his Illinois State Senate seat.

In 2012, the left-leaning ProPublica wrote: “Obama’s Gerrymander — President Obama may have propelled his political career forward by gerrymandering a Chicago district to include rich supporters.”

Illinois state senator Obama decided to primary Democratic Illinois U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther. Rush painted Obama as a born-and-raised-in-Hawaii, carpetbagging lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, by way of Harvard Law, who attended prep school and did not have a clue about the life of a typical black person. It worked. Obama not only lost the primary but also performed poorly with black voters.

So, what did Obama do? He examined the election results and proceeded to gerrymander his state Senate seat to guard against losing it. He reduced the number of those who voted against him and increased the number of those who did. In short, Obama rejected the notion that “voters should choose their representatives — not the other way around.”

The change in his state Senate seat before and after the gerrymander was remarkable. New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza interviewed John Corrigan, an Illinois Democrat who worked with Obama to redraw the seat. Corrigan called it “a radical change.” Lizza wrote: “Corrigan remembers two things about the district that he and Obama drew. First, it retained Obama’s Hyde Park base — he had managed to beat Rush in Hyde Park — then swooped upward along the lakefront and toward downtown. By the end of the final redistricting process, his new district bore little resemblance to his old one. … Obama’s new district was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar and better educated. It also included one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago.”

Again, Obama in 2001 gerrymandered his State Senate district to make it less black, more white, more Jewish and more affluent? Presumably, this did not come up during the 2024 presidential campaign, when Obama lectured “the brothers” about their reluctance to vote for Kamala Harris. When asked about his newly designed state Senate seat, Obama was dismissive: “The system of redistricting in the U.S. tends to allow representatives to choose people instead of people choosing representatives. It’s just politics.”

Obama is not the only one to flip-flop on gerrymandering. Common Cause, a left-leaning “good government” non-profit, worked in California to take redistricting away from politicians. Its website brags: “In 2008, California Common Cause led a coalition that drafted and passed the historic Voters First Act, which took a significant step toward ending gerrymandering in California. This ballot initiative stripped California legislators of the power to draw state legislative districts and created the Citizens Redistricting Commission (CRC). … The CRC is now a national model for redistricting reform.”

But Common Cause appears to be waffling. Texas is attempting a mid-decade redistricting, something unusual but legal under Texas law. In response, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to defy the state law that took redistricting away from the politicians. Newsom said: “If we don’t put a stake into the heart of (the Trump) administration, there may not be an election in 2028. They’re not screwing around. We can’t afford to screw around either. We have got to fight fire with fire.”
What does Common Cause now say? A representative says the organization is “swamped” and could “circle back at a later time.” Call it the Obama Gerrymander Rule: When Democrats do it, “it’s just politics.” When Republicans do it, it becomes “a power grab that undermines our democracy.”