“Lessons” learned from 2006:  The Washington Post delivers one, on electoral competition in 2006, declared to be good but not good enough, and the New York Times is pleased to restore Kansas, once a model of red state voter ignorance, to the ranks of the enlightened states.  Each of these editorials is a lesson in itself.  "Redistricting Reconsidered," Washington Post (Nov. 15, 2006) at A20; "What's Right with Kansas," New York Times (Nov. 15, 2006).  

    Redistricting reform has scraped a knee, maybe two, but it is back on its feet.   The Post is pleased that more races were competitive, but it warns against complacency, which is another expression for re-launching the reform project.  Many voters still re-elected incumbents.  The press on this election is happy to have it both ways:  this was a political earthquake for some purposes, and the “same old, same old” for others.  Change is dramatic, but the more things change, for redistricting purposes, the more they stay the same.  The elections were competitive, but not competitive enough.

     The Post believes that gerrymandering is “cheating,” and this may explain its ardor on the issue:  it is perhaps not so much that politicians are truly robbing voters of choice, since when so inclined, as this year, the voters do indeed choose.  But politicians just shouldn’t be able to try to influence their own re-election prospects through unseemly, sneaky means, like gerrymandering, precisely as they have done throughout the history of the Republic.  The Post mentions other offenses, such as capitalizing on incumbency by delivering “pork.”  Voters may respond well to this care and feeding—the Post implies that they might—but like redistricting, which may  place voters in districts with Representatives and fellow citizens who share their politics, voters don’t seem to appreciate that they are achieving satisfaction at the expense of “competition.”  They are wrong to do so; ignorantly conspiring to subvert democratic choice, their own democratic choice.

     The New York Times has prepared a different lesson, this one more flattering to voters, and specifically those voting in Kansas.  They were once all fools, their primitive thinking made famous by author Thomas Frank who could not figure out—but actually did—what was the matter with their self-destructive, “red state” voting habits.  The Times, quite in agreement with Frank, enrolled him for a time as a columnist.

     But this year Kansas voters passed from darkness into light, establishing “a bastion of moderation” in an election in which the “Democratic Party posted major gains” and moderates prevailed over conservative Republicans.  Even progressives, otherwise pleased with the turn in Kansas politics, would have to take note of the Times’ assumption here that the ignorance or enlightenment of voters is expressed in a particular outcome. 

     These lesson connect—the celebration of Kansas’s awakening and the declared imperative of redistricting reform share common ground—at the point where voters are believed not to know what is good for them.  And in the conviction that others do.

Bob Bauer