"Now for a clean sweep!" Smiley v. Holm, partisan gerrymandering, and at-large congressional elections.

AuthorSchweigert, Benedict J.

The 1930 Census reduced Minnesota's apportionment in the U.S. House of Representatives from ten to nine, requiring the state to draw new congressional districts. The Republican-led state legislature passed a gerrymandered redistricting bill in an attempt to insulate its nine incumbents in the state's delegation from the party's expected loss of the statewide popular vote to the insurgent Farmer-Labor Party. When the Farmer-Labor Governor, Floyd B. Olson, vetoed the redistricting bill, the legislature claimed the bill could take effect without the governor's signature. In Smiley v. Holm, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the veto was effective and that because Minnesota therefore had no validly enacted congressional districts, it must elect all nine of its congressmen at-large. In the ensuing election, voters swept from power all but two of the sitting congressmen and reduced the Republicans from nine seats to three. This Note presents a historical case study of the events surrounding Smiley and the 1932 congressional elections in Minnesota and uses it to discuss the benefits and costs" of at-large elections. It determines that in this case, the at-large elections effectively blocked countermajoritarian tactics in the 1932 and subsequent elections without some of the negative consequences usually ascribed to at-large elections.

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK A. Evaluating Redistricting Outcomes B. Evaluating the Redistricting Process II. THE POLITICS AND HISTORY OF SMILEY V. HOLM A. Setting the Stage for a Realignment: The Politics of Minnesota Before 1931 B. The Republican Gerrymander: Fighting to Hold Back the Realignment C. The Litigation and Its Outcome III. EVALUATING THE REMEDY: THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE AT-LARGE ELECTIONS A. Consequences for Substantive Representation 1. Redistricting Outcomes: The 1932 Congressional Elections 2. Redistricting Processes: Bargaining over Future Redistricting B. Other Concerns with At-Large Elections 1. Voter Confusion 2. Underrepresentation of Minority Interests CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION

Partisan gerrymandering is a serious contemporary concern, but it is not a new problem. Since at least 1811, when a newspaper editor invented the term to refer to a redistricting scheme by Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, (1) political parties have used clever line-drawing to protect their incumbents and ensure that they are overrepresented in legislative bodies relative to their support in the electorate. In this way, parties attempt to maximize their power and retain it, even when a majority (2) of the electorate turns against them.

Minnesota experienced this kind of gerrymandering in the early 1930s. After the onset of the Great Depression, the Republican Party--which had dominated state politics for decades--lost statewide public support to the Farmer-Labor Party. (3) The Republicans responded by attempting to retain their lock on the state's congressional delegation through the redistricting process. (4) The new Farmer-Labor governor vetoed the state legislature's redistricting plan. (5) The legislature, however, argued that the federal Constitution excluded the governor from the redistricting process and that its plan was law. (6)

In Smiley v. Holm (7) the Supreme Court of the United States rejected the Minnesota Legislature's incumbent-insulating strategy and instead allowed the new party preferences of the state's voters to find immediate and dramatic expression. The Court upheld the governor's veto and ordered at-large elections for all nine of Minnesota's congressional seats should the state fail to validly adopt a plan. (8) In the at-large elections that followed, voters swept from power all but two sitting congressmen and reduced the Republican delegation from nine seats out of ten to three out of nine. (9) Rather than face at-large elections again in 1934, the Minnesota Republicans, still a majority in the state senate, agreed to a compromise redistricting bill that became law in 1933. (10)

This Note presents a historical case study of the circumstances surrounding Smiley and the 1932 congressional elections in Minnesota and uses it to discuss the benefits and costs of at-large representation. In recent decades, courts have come to frequently criticize all forms of multimember representation, including representation at-large. In Connor v. Finch, the U.S. Supreme Court warned that "the practice of multimember districting can contribute to voter confusion, make legislative representatives more remote from their constituents, and tend to submerge electoral minorities and overrepresent electoral majorities." (11) Other state and federal courts have expressed similar concerns. (12) This Note evaluates the benefits of the Court's decision in Smiley--blocking a countermajoritarian gerrymander--and contrasts them with these concerns.

This Note demonstrates that the decision in Smiley foiled the countermajoritarian strategy of the gerrymandering party and altered the redistricting process so as to hinder such strategies in the future, without some of the negative consequences frequently ascribed to at-large elections. Part I provides a theoretical framework for discussing the countermajoritarian threat of partisan gerrymandering. It identifies desirable traits of a responsive electoral system that partisan gerrymandering impedes and discusses factors in the redistricting process that influence the nature of the redistricting plan produced. Part II explains the political situation in Minnesota that created the controversy addressed in Smiley, describing its development from the ruling party's attempt to insulate its incumbents from predicted electoral defeat. Part III examines the consequences of the Supreme Court's decision, both for the 1932 elections and for the subsequent final negotiations over redistricting. It concludes that the at-large elections blocked the tactics of the gerrymandering party, protecting the state from capture by a ruling minority party. The elections did so without creating severe bias against the minority party and without provoking voter confusion, although they did fail to distribute the congressional delegation evenly throughout the state.

  1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

    Redistricting outcomes are distinguishable from redistricting processes. Each seat in the House of Representatives represents a particular geographically defined group of citizens. That group of citizens determines who sits in that seat. Each seat might represent a distinct group of citizens ("single-member districts"), more than one seat might represent a larger group of citizens ("multi-member districts"), or each of the seats apportioned to a state might represent the entire state ("at-large representation"). (13) The political mechanism by which a state determines which group of citizens each seat represents is its "redistricting process." The redistricting process then results in a districting plan that assigns particular seats to particular groups of citizens. This plan is the "redistricting outcome."

    Smiley v. Holm dealt with both redistricting outcomes and redistricting processes. This Part discusses the two issues separately, providing a theoretical framework for analyzing each. The later Parts of this Note will use this framework to compare the gerrymandered plan defeated in Smiley, the at-large elections ordered by the Court, and the plan finally adopted in 1933. Section I.A elaborates a framework for evaluating redistricting outcomes based on their ability to represent the changing preferences of voters effectively and accurately. Section I.B discusses the process of redistricting and how procedural changes affect redistricting outcomes.

    1. Evaluating Redistricting Outcomes

      Scholars can plausibly judge a redistricting outcome by how well it produces representation that reflects the preferences of the people of that state. The framers established the U.S. House of Representatives to be the organ of the federal government most responsive to changes in public opinion. At the Constitutional Convention, James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued that the House of Representatives must be directly elected because "[t]he legislature ought to be the most exact transcript of the whole society. Representation is made necessary only because it is impossible for the people to act collectively." (14) In The Federalist No. 52, James Madison agreed, explaining that the House of Representatives "should have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people." (15)

      The House of Representatives "represents" the electorate of the United States in varied ways. An officeholder provides "descriptive" representation to the extent that she shares the demographic characteristics of her electorate. (16) A preference for single-member districts enshrines one form of descriptive representation: a member of Congress "represents" her constituents when she is a member of the same narrowly-defined geographic community. Descriptive representation also often involves membership in the constituents' racial or ethnic group. (17) Scholars distinguish such "descriptive" representation from "substantive" representation, in which elected policymakers represent their constituents by pursuing the voters' policy preferences. (18) This Note primarily addresses substantive representation, examining districting systems based on their ability to represent the policy preferences of voters, with partisan affiliation serving as a proxy for policy preferences. This Note focuses on substantive representation because it is the interest that the problem of partisan gerrymandering most directly implicates: when parties use gerrymandering to gain disproportionate seat share, they are attempting to damage the substantive representational interest of their opponents' supporters. (19)

      Assuming that party preferences can serve as a proxy for policy preferences, a state congressional...

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