The coming redistricting showdown in Missouri will be huge

Who counts? When it comes to state legislative districts, the long-time standard has been everyone.

But that could be about to change in Missouri. A subtle and technical change to the state constitution, approved narrowly by voters last Tuesday, could dramatically change the nature of representation in the Show-Me State — and foreshadow big changes nationwide when lawmakers draw new state legislative maps next year.

Instead of drawing districts based on total population, a phrase tucked inside the initiative states that legislative districts shall “be drawn on the basis of one person, one vote.” Missouri officials have made clear what that phrase means to them: The ability to draw districts based on citizen voting-age population (CVAP) rather than the total population.

The U.S. Constitution mandates that congressional districts be drawn based on total population — everyone, voters and nonvoters, citizens and noncitizens, adults and children under 18 — and state governments have followed that lead when drawing their maps. Whether or not it is possible to draw state lines using CVAP is a question that the U.S. Supreme Court soon may need to settle. 

This is likely to be the major redistricting showdown of the decade. National GOP strategists, caught on tape behind closed doors at an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) conference last year, encouraged state lawmakers to switch to CVAP instead of using total population. Missouri may go first, but Texas, Georgia and even Florida — other states where redistricting will be controlled entirely by the GOP — could possibly jump next.

It is another reminder of the power held by district lines. In 2010, Republicans launched a strategy called REDMAP, designed to win control of state legislatures and lock in friendly lines throughout the decade. It worked: Both chambers of the state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan and Florida, for example, have been controlled by Republicans ever since, even in years when Democrats won hundreds of thousands more statewide votes.

While CVAP sounds wonky, this subtle shift has the potential to remake political power. It is the next step in locking in the gains won through redistricting. Here’s why: State legislative districts must be as equal in population size as possible, so the first step in drawing lines is taking population data from the new census and dividing it by the number of districts. 

Simple enough, right? Change that population number, however, and you can change the nature of representation itself. Remove minors and noncitizens from the count and suddenly there’s the need for fewer districts in urban areas that swing predominantly Democratic. By wiping that population away, states are left with an electorate that’s older, whiter and more rural — and more likely to favor Republicans.

Conservative activists commissioned the late Republican redistricting mastermind Thomas Hofeller to study the partisan and demographic impact of CVAP on Texas state legislative districts, and an August 2015 memo, discovered in Hofeller’s files after his deaths, showed it would give Republicans a significant advantage.

Using citizens of voting age as the population basis, he wrote, would cause a loss of relative population — and, therefore, fewer districts — in the fast-growing and rapidly changing areas of Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth. The greatest population loss, Hofeller found, would be in the heavily Latino and Democratic strongholds of South Texas, El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley. Political power would flow elsewhere: “All other regions,” he wrote, “would enjoy relative gains in population, with the greatest with the greatest gains being in Central as well as West Texas’ rural and semi-rural counties.”

In Missouri, such a change would drain population and power from St. Louis and Kansas City and give advantage to rural, GOP-leaning central parts of the state. 

Hofeller’s conclusions were clear: First, “Democratic districts could geographically expand to absorb additional high Democrat precincts from adjacent Republican districts, strengthening the adjoining GOP districts.” And second, “a switch to the use of citizen voting age population as the redistricting population base for redistricting would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”

There are other clues about the GOP’s 2021 redistricting strategy scattered inside this winning Missouri plan. It adds language to the state constitution that would make it harder for citizens to gain standing to challenge a gerrymandered map in court. And if a challenge did clear that bar and make it into the courts, it ties the hands of lawmakers when it comes to potential remedies and makes it more difficult to invalidate an entire plan.

Missouri now also will prioritize compactness when it comes to drawing districts, rather than reflect the state’s overall political balance. Once again, with Democratic power concentrated in two large cities at opposite ends of the state, using compactness as the criteria gives an advantage to Republicans, who are scattered more efficiently throughout Missouri.

And Democrats who believe that demographics are destiny, or that growing Black and Latino populations will help win blue maps, could face bitter reality. Republican mapmakers drew districts that defied demographic change throughout the 2010s. They’re well positioned with even more sophisticated weapons this time.  

David Daley is a senior fellow at FairVote and the author of “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count” and “Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy.” Follow him on Twitter @davedaley3.