It took the combined efforts of Gov. Chris Sununu and the New Hampshire Supreme Court to keep the state’s two congressional districts competitive in the face of all-out gerrymandering by the Republican-controlled Legislature this year. All’s well that ends well, but let’s hope the mess disabused the governor of the notion that his party’s lawmakers have the state’s best interests at heart.
The Legislature is charged with redrawing the boundaries of political districts every 10 years to reflect changes in population identified by the most recent Census, to ensure that each voter’s ballot carries the same electoral weight. The 2020 Census found that the First Congressional District had nearly 18,000 more people than the Second. That’s not a big disparity, but big enough to require redistricting.
Republican lawmakers, however, eschewed small changes and spent several months torturing the political map of New Hampshire in an attempt to create a First Congressional District that strongly favored their party, while essentially ceding the Second District, which includes the Upper Valley, to the Democrats. One iteration of the map they came up with moved nearly half the state’s residents into another district and placed the state’s two current representatives to Congress in the same district.
But who cares, as long as each party has an all-but-guaranteed seat? Everyone who believes in a vibrant democracy should care, because competition in districts where each party has a legitimate chance to win means that neither can successfully indulge in the extreme partisanship that is now gridlocking the national government. It also means that each party’s voters have a chance to influence the outcome of the race in their district, not be relegated to permanent minority or majority status. And in New Hampshire’s case, the two seats, although now both held by Democrats, have historically flipped between the parties, sometimes from election to election, so it’s hard to understand what Republican lawmakers objected to, unless they fear that their policies no longer can attract broad support.
To his credit, Sununu vetoed the legislative attempts to render the state half red and half blue for the next 10 years, correctly recognizing that New Hampshire’s true political color is purple. “Granite Staters expect districts that hold our incumbents accountable so that no one elected official is immune from challengers or (from having to provide) constituent services,” the governor said in vetoing one of the Legislature’s proposed maps.
Enter the state Supreme Court to resolve the impasse. It appointed a Stanford Law School professor, Nathaniel Persily, as special master to draw boundaries based on the principle of “least change,” used in other states.
Persily solved the problem posed to him by transferring just five towns from the First to the Second District. The resulting population disparity was exactly one person — that is, under his map, which the Supreme Court adopted last week, the First District contains 688,764 people and the Second District, 688,765. With all due respect, our guess is that one did not need to be a professor of law at Stanford to figure this out, but only a rational person who did not have an interest in loading the electoral dice.
End of story? Not quite. While the battle over the congressional districts raged, Sununu quietly signed off on new state Senate and Executive Council districts drawn by the Legislature that render them less competitive than currently. In the case of the Senate, 16 of the 24 new districts now favor Republicans, while four of the five Executive Council districts are of the same reddish hue. This arrangement is being challenged in Hillsborough Superior Court by a dozen Democratic plaintiffs. It’s reasonable to wonder why the governor found the congressional districts so objectionable but deemed the state Senate and Executive Council boundaries acceptable. Amid persistent speculation that Sununu has aspirations for higher office, perhaps of the Oval variety, he may have calculated that the national spotlight would focus on the congressional districts and his vetoes would appeal to whatever moderates are left in the GOP.
We also wonder if Sununu is having second thoughts about vetoing in 2019 and 2020 legislation proposed by Democrats that would have created an independent commission to redraw political districts, subject to legislative approval. In his 2020 veto message, the governor declared that, “New Hampshire has a redistricting process that is fair, representative, and accountable to voters. New Hampshire takes the process seriously, and we should take pride that issues of gerrymandering in the state are rare.” As it turns out, not so fair or so rare as he imagined a couple of short years ago.