Iowa Republicans don’t need to gerrymander legislative maps - Iowans did it for them

Iowa lawmakers will reconvene this week to consider a second set of proposed legislative maps.

The Iowa Senate this month voted down the Legislative Services Agency’s first proposal. If they reject the second round, lawmakers will have a chance to amend the third set, opening the process to potential gerrymandering.

Critics are confident that Iowa Republicans are heading toward a full-blown Illinois-style gerrymander. The most confident prognosticators unsurprisingly have no knowledge of legislators’ thinking.

There are two key strategies to gerrymandering — cracking and packing. To crack, voters of the same party are divided into multiple districts to dilute their votes. To pack — also known as sink — similarly aligned voters are grouped into the same territory, giving them one safe district but making them uncompetitive in nearby districts.

Iowa Republicans don’t need to do any of that in order to get favorable state legislative districts. Iowa Democrats already packed themselves.

In the most recent census figures, most of Iowa’s population growth came from places where Democrats are still competitive. More than three-fourths of statewide growth came from the four largest counties — Linn, Johnson, Scott and Polk — which all went for Joe Biden in 2020. The fastest-growing, Dallas, is a swing county that Donald Trump carried by 2 points.

This is not unique to Iowa nor is it surprising. People with a more progressive worldview will find themselves congregating in cities, while people who live a few miles from the farm they grew up on will tend to be more conservative. And as any TV journalist broadcasting from a Podunk diner over the past five years can tell you, the urban-rural divide is getting deeper, or something.

The result is that Democrats can be neatly packed together in Iowa’s state legislative maps, even without redrawing lines with partisan intent. The nonpartisan plans offer Republicans a clear path to maintaining their comfortable legislative majorities.

Amorphous districts often are a sign of gerrymandering but not always.

In Iowa, legislative lines are supposed to respect other political boundaries such as cities. So we get districts like the proposed Senate Districts 42 and 46 in the second plan. They are multicounty districts with jagged, oddly shaped cutouts for urban areas in Linn and Johnson. The densely populated cutouts will be favorable districts for Democrats but the outlying districts will be better for Republicans.

It looks and works like a gerrymander, but it is the natural and nonpartisan outcome of population shifts.

Republicans in control of the Legislature still might reject the second map and make partisan amendments to the third but, as liberal blogger Laura Belin has pointed out, the Iowa Supreme Court likely will have to sign off on maps approved by the Legislature, thanks to the census data delay this year. The maps will be subject to a state law that prohibits drawing maps to favor a political party.

Even if Republicans want to go through a legal battle, there might not be much upside.

“You could not gerrymander better vote sink districts than the ones clean redistricting does naturally,” John Deeth, an Iowa elections analyst, wrote on Twitter last month as the first redistricting proposal was under consideration.

(319) 339-3156; adam.sullivan@thegazette.com