PLEASANT RIDGE, MI – The next U.S. census is still nearly six months away. But there’s a new reason why this may be the most meaningful one in modern Michigan history.
For the first time ever, ordinary citizens – not the legislature– will use the numbers they find to draw the politicians’ new districts.
The official population count is always important, of course, for what one census official in Detroit last week noted were “675 billion reasons,” which is the number of dollars the federal government gives to the states, based on population alone.
Communities get their share of money based on body count too, which makes accurate figures all that much more important.
But beyond that, Michigan voted for a redistricting revolution last year that will completely change the way congressional and legislative districts are redrawn when the new census data is in.
Last fall, citizens outraged over gerrymandering by the legislature launched a purely grass-roots initiative called Voters Not Politicians, got a constitutional amendment on the ballot to give redistricting back to the citizens, which overwhelmingly passed.
That means that instead of the legislature drawing new district maps in 2021, after census results are in, a panel of randomly selected citizens – four Republicans, four Democrats and five independents – will create and adopt the maps without interference.
Republicans, who have controlled the redistricting process for decades, are now suing in federal court in an attempt to have the Voters Not Politicians amendment declared unconstitutional.
They are given little chance of succeeding, however; the U.S. Supreme Court recently approved a similar method in Arizona.
“People find it hard to give up power,” said Nancy Wang, an attorney who is now the executive director of Voters Not Politicians.
Having a correct count is crucial, she said because not only will the new districts have to be drawn to be as equal in population as possible, the goal is to try and keep communities together.
Some of the anger at the current system was because it is designed to produce perpetual Republican majorities in the legislature – even when, as in 2018, Democrats get more total votes.
But even some Republicans were outraged that boundaries were drawn that made no sense when it came to giving communities with common interests the same representation.
Districts were drawn that looked like tortured snakes in an effort, as one leaked e-mail from a Republican staffer said, to try and “cram all of the Dem garbage” into as few districts as possible.
“Keeping communities of common interest together is certainly one of our goals,” Wang said. Doing so will require some art. Every congressional district has to have exactly the same number of people, give or take one, based on what the census finds on April 1, 2020.
Legislative districts can vary slightly more, but the goal is still to have all relatively the same number of human beings.
But will the census count them all?
“They never do,” said Kurt Metzger, perhaps the best-known demographer in the state. “There’s always an undercount, in part because some people just don’t want to be counted,” he laughed.
“Others are afraid, especially if they have something to hide from the government. They fear – wrongly – the census information will be used to find them.”
Metzger should know. He spent a career counting noses, first with the U.S. Census Bureau, then running a university population center before starting a private firm, Data Driven Detroit.
Now, he is a two-term mayor of the tiny city of Pleasant Ridge, not far north of the Detroit border, but he still keeps an eye on the numbers. “The good news is that Michigan is growing again,” he said in an interview for my podcast last week.
Michigan was the only state to actually lose population between 2000 and 2010, primarily because of the auto industry crash. Now, it is growing again, if slowly: “We are over 10 million for the first time,” Metzger said, adding, “but the bad news is that other states are growing much faster.” That means that it is all-but-certain that Michigan will again lose a seat in Congress.
If those projections are right, in 2023 Michigan will have only 13 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, down from 19 in 1980.
That’s a lot of lost clout.
Those drawing the new districts will be creating a game of musical chairs in which two (or more) sitting members of congress will end up running against each other.
Why is Michigan, once a booming powerhouse, fading?
“We just aren’t attracting millennials and well-educated people from other states,” said Metzger, a Cincinnati native. “We are growing, ironically, because of immigrants, and because births are still exceeding deaths. But Michigan is an aging state.”
Clearly, change is needed if Michigan isn’t doomed to become the West Virginia of the Midwest. There are those who think that the political gridlock in Lansing and the inability of the parties to work together even to fix the roads isn’t helping.
The public also has only limited ability to pressure lawmakers to serve their needs, since gerrymandering has meant that most of the seats are not competitive, and term limits mean politicians aren’t around to face the consequences of bad policies.
This who helped Voters Not Politicians change the system hope that by 2022, a new system of fair and more competitive Michigan districts will give voters more say and lead to better policies.
Hopefully, the state can wait that long.
