It’s a Monday afternoon at the Massachusetts State House, and the third-floor office of Governor Deval Patrick is crammed with legislators, aides, community organizers, activists, and journalists. Patrick plants himself at his desk, in front of a three-page bill awaiting his signature and a constellation of blue-and-gold pens. (He’ll sign a portion of his name with each and hand them out as keepsakes.) It is, at first blush, a familiar Beacon Hill tableau: a governor about to execute his constitutional duty; lawmakers who worked on the bill looking on approvingly; interest-group leaders eagerly awaiting its addition to the books. Patrick makes light of the conspicuous lack of suspense. “You’re all holding your breath,” he says, “like you don’t know how this is going to turn out.”
In fact, many in the room could be forgiven for waiting until the ink dries before exhaling. So unlikely is this moment, and so remarkable the assemblage of people here sanctioning this new law, that few would have believed it possible a year earlier.
Patrick hands the first pen to the man standing over his left shoulder, state Representative Michael Moran, a Brighton Democrat wearing a blue shirt, yellow tie, and dark jacket. It is Moran, more than anyone else, who exemplifies the sea change that explains the bonhomie. For the first time in decades, the Legislature, led by Moran and his counterpart in the Senate, managed to create new state legislative and US congressional districts that by and large put the voters’ interests above the politicians’. You ask: Shouldn’t it always be that way? Of course it should. It just never is.
In a political culture long known for its reflexive acts of self-preservation, the joint legislative committee in charge of redistricting – and by extension the legislative leaders – accomplished something historic. In short, they got it right. Did it leave some people angry? Certainly. Was the process entirely apolitical? Please. Still, the redistricting exercise and the maps it produced were such a vast improvement over years past that a new standard has been set, and much higher than anyone realistically expected. “Night and day doesn’t even begin to describe it,” says Cheryl Clyburn Crawford, co-director of the civic organization MassVOTE, comparing this cycle with the last one, a decade ago.
Crawford and her ilk – voting-rights advocates, good-government types, minority leaders, community activists – aren’t accustomed to beaming behind governors when redistricting bills are signed. No, they’re typically challenging the maps in court, on the grounds that lawmakers trampled the rights of the electorate for their own sakes. Litigation has followed at least the past three cycles of redistricting, going back three decades. If you ask people about the last round, 10 years ago, “disaster” is a popular descriptor.
Perhaps the most jarring sight the November day that Patrick approved the congressional map was the presence of Pam Wilmot, the head of Common Cause Massachusetts. Wilmot’s almost utopian vision for democracy frequently clashes with reality. She’s often in the news for attacking questionable uses of public dollars or some egregious pension deal. Not this time, though. “It’s very gratifying to see the process work so well,” Wilmot tells me. It may not sound like it, but believe me: This is a truly shocking quote from Pam Wilmot.
Here’s the thing, though. The new maps signify something deeper, and potentially more lasting, than just better-looking districts. They reflect a broader cultural evolution at the State House, especially within the Democratic establishment, away from a machine-style approach to politics and toward a more modern, more progressive leadership. The progress has been uneven, to be sure, but it’s real. And taken together, a series of reforms – from a tightening of pension and ethics rules to putting state expenditures online in a new “open checkbook” – is nothing to sniff at. As one high-profile Democrat put it, “There’s been a long-term loosening of the grossest insider elements.”
A few good maps won’t change the world. They won’t eradicate self-interest or patronage or unsavory deal-making from the dark warrens of the State House. But they do say something about the state of our politics, something that’s worth celebrating. If our public leaders can conduct the people’s business with a little more humility and grace, they might go a long way toward restoring confidence in government itself.
Let’s start with perhaps the most notable change: The new plan doubles the number of Massachusetts House districts in which minorities make up a majority of the population (so-called majority-minority districts). There had been 10. Advocates wanted 18. Moran and his colleagues did them better, creating 20. And they are spread throughout the state, a reflection of the growing diversity beyond the capital city. One such district, for example, was added in Lawrence, which is nearly three-fourths Hispanic. The state legislative maps maintain the same number of districts – 160 in the House, 40 in the Senate – but with new boundaries.
Why does it matter that there are more majority-minority districts? Because nonwhite voters, a growing share of the electorate, will have greater clout in Massachusetts politics beginning in the November elections, the first for which the new maps take effect. It doesn’t necessarily mean that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians will vote for candidates who look like them. It does, however, give those voters more say in who represents them. And that, advocacy groups say, will make those communities more invested in civic life, which is good for everybody.
There’s a new majority-minority state Senate district in Springfield as well, and, for the first time, a true majority-minority congressional district. That seat, currently held by Michael Capuano of Somerville, includes much of Boston and a handful of communities to the north and south.
Overall, the new congressional map wins praise for its largely sensible redistribution of districts. (Not that it was easy to draw – the state lost a US House seat this cycle, going from 10 to nine, because its population growth failed to keep pace with other parts of the country.) The resulting districts are more geographically distinct, and more fair. Residents of the Cape, Islands, and Southeastern Massachusetts, for instance, now have their own seat, instead of sharing one with communities such as Quincy that are far away and may have different interests.
In addition, the plan provides more opportunities for Republican challengers. Even some Democrats acknowledge that’s healthy for democracy. The state GOP, which doubled its presence in the Massachusetts House in the party’s otherwise disappointing fall 2010 elections, hopes to take advantage of the new landscape this November. Stephen Crosby, a former top official in two Republican administrations and dean of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, says the result is nothing short of remarkable. “Any fair read of this performance is that the merits won out,” says Crosby, who is stepping down as dean to lead, at Patrick’s request, the state’s new gaming commission. “It rarely works so well.”
Just as noteworthy are the sacrifices powerful people swallowed for the larger good. Take Sonia Chang-Diaz, who, despite her brief tenure on Beacon Hill, had an influential voice as Senate vice chairwoman of the joint redistricting committee. The state senator was forced to shed Chinatown, a neighborhood with which she has worked closely and that she wanted to keep. “I certainly don’t enjoy that I’m losing communities that I’ve built strong relationships with,” Chang-Diaz says. “But I think it does bring a measure of credibility when you’re able to say, ‘Look, no one was spared.’ ”
Consider also that Deval Patrick, the most powerful political figure in the state, saw his hometown of Milton sliced in two in the congressional map. But he accepted it as part of the bargain. “Usually when they ask me about it, I say, ‘Well, what town would you have split?’ ” Patrick said at the bill signing, discussing newly divided communities. “I very rarely get an answer to that.”
Political leaders in Western Massachusetts, meanwhile, set out to preserve two congressional seats, to keep the delegation from being too Boston-centric. They had a natural champion in state Senator Stanley Rosenberg, the Amherst Democrat who led his chamber’s redistricting effort. But the numbers just didn’t work. Keeping two seats out west would have meant bizarrely shaped districts – in other words, a highly attractive solution to politicians of yore. The committee knew it wasn’t defensible, though, and instead created one massive district encompassing Springfield, the Berkshires, and southern Worcester County. “I have a lot of very disappointed constituents and friends,” Rosenberg says, although he notes the plan does honor people’s demand that Berkshire County communities remain together.
One could argue that nothing better affirms the integrity of the process than the political difficulties it inflicted on the all-Democratic US House delegation. Longtime Representatives Barney Frank and John Olver both opted not to run for reelection at least in part because the new congressional map didn’t suit them. And William Keating of Quincy, the delegation’s newest member, will relocate to the Cape to remain in his district. In the past, the delegation has had heavy influence over its own destiny. This time, US Representative Richard Neal of Springfield was sur-prised at how limited his interactions were with Beacon Hill leaders. Although the Democrat says he loves his new district, it was clear throughout, he says, that pleasing incumbents was not a primary goal of the Legislature.
So given all this, how does Massachusetts compare with the rest of the country? Pretty well, it turns out. As of early January, there were lawsuits filed against new state and federal maps in 31 states, according to Common Cause. The stories of political interference elsewhere read like a Saturday Night Live script: the use of secret hotel rooms, witch hunts against perceived enemies, absurd attempts to marginalize minority population growth. “In terms of acrimony and politics and fights over maps, Massachusetts was a whole lot calmer than in years past,” says Greg Rabidoux, national fair districts director for Common Cause, based in Washington, D.C., “and a lot more tranquil than in other states.”
There’s a particular irony in that. For it was Massachusetts that once helped popularize politically motivated mapmaking, as a young nation embarked on its wild experiment in representative government. We may not have invented the practice, but we got pretty good at it.
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Two hundred years ago, the ruling Democratic-Republican Party in Massachusetts devised a canny strategy to consolidate its power over the opposition: by redrawing congressional and legislative districts in its favor. The plan, approved by Elbridge Gerry, the governor and party leader, famously created a serpentine state Senate district north of Boston, whose nakedly political raison d’etre drew popular scorn. Thus the pejorative term “gerrymandering” was born.
Although Gerry’s party was punished at the polls, the gambit bearing his name stuck. Redistricting has remained one of the most politically driven acts on Beacon Hill. And that’s saying something. In recent decades, Democrats and Republicans routinely traded charges of political skullduggery, depending on which party held the cards. Often, resolution required a lawsuit.
The nadir – in the modern era, anyway – came a decade ago, when the powerful Democratic House speaker, Thomas Finneran, and a top lieutenant, Thomas Petrolati, presided over a largely back-room map-drawing process. By most accounts, they shut nearly everyone out of the negotiations, soliciting little input – even from fellow lawmakers – punishing political enemies, and providing little chance to review the maps prior to a vote. (Finneran defended the process at the time, saying it was driven by demographics, not politics.)
Voting-rights activists filed a legal challenge in federal court and won. A three-judge panel threw out the House plan in 2004, taking Finneran and his deputies to task for what the jurists called “the House’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the racial implications of its single-minded effort to protect incumbents at virtually any social cost.” The suit cost the state more than $2 million in legal fees and resulted in Finneran’s indictment for misrepresenting his role in the process; he later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice.
With that debacle still a fresh memory, advocates for voting rights and minorities were preparing for the worst when it came time to draw the maps anew. I remember sitting in Boston NAACP meetings early last year as the executive board plotted strategy on redistricting. It was as if they were preparing for war: drafting battle plans, working to identify allies, learning the lexicon. Indeed, early on, community organizations took preemptive action, arming themselves with technical expertise. They were determined to absorb the Census data. They needed to know the laws cold. They got the software to draw their own maps. They were ready, and their preparations gave them leverage. “When you come on with that type of ammunition, then you cannot be dismissed,” says Sean Daughtry, who chairs the political action committee for the Boston NAACP.
What many didn’t know was that Michael Moran and Stanley Rosenberg, with the support of their respective leaders, House Speaker Robert DeLeo and Senate President Therese Murray, had already committed to a redistricting process like Massachusetts had never seen. Back in 2009, they had begun laying the groundwork for the most open, transparent exercise in memory.
The forces pushing them in that direction were many. Legislative leaders knew that the prior experience had badly tarnished perceptions of state government – indeed, Rosenberg had been the Senate point man last time, too. They knew many legislative colleagues would not abide a repeat performance. They knew they’d be sued if they made a single wrong move. And they knew many voters, and some key activists, favored giving the task of redistricting to an independent commission, as California had done. DeLeo also knew his reputation was on the line. “I looked at this as one of the keys of people viewing me as a speaker and how they would view the members of the Legislature as well,” he says. Referring to the prior redistricting cycle, he adds, “I felt that one of the most important things I could do was to show that’s not the way things are going to be done up here.”
For Moran, it was initially difficult to build trust with the advocacy community. “Everybody had a skeptical eye,” he says. He kept telling everyone the same thing: Let’s not talk about 10 years ago. Let’s talk about now. Gradually, it became clear that Moran and Rosenberg were sincere in their desire for change. The redistricting committee put up a comprehensive website, which would receive tens of thousands of page views. They held 13 public hearings statewide, which drew more than 4,000 people and included testimony from about 400. They sat down with any group that asked, often multiple times. They exchanged maps and data with voting-rights advocates, an indication lawmakers were studying community proposals closely.
There were other positive signs. On a Saturday morning last spring, Moran – on his way to the Cape for a tasting for his wedding – showed up in his jeans at a meeting of community organizations at the Grove Hall library in Dorchester. He seemed to genuinely want to see their maps. “He asked, respectfully, ‘Do not give me one piece. Appreciate that this is an entire puzzle,’ ” recalls the NAACP’s Daughtry.
In the end, some aspects of the final maps looked an awful lot like what activists had been pushing. Voting-rights advocates were dumbfounded. I ask Moran what made the process work. “Communicating with everybody at all levels, and being honest and upfront,” he tells me. “I mean, those things seem pretty obvious, don’t they? . . . But sometimes they’re not as apparent as they should be.”
Veteran elections lawyer Dan Winslow, now a Republican state representative from Norfolk, disputes assertions that redistricting was done with full transparency. A truly open process, he says, would have included public hearings after the committee’s final maps were drawn, to give people a chance to reshape them. Much of the real work, he says, still went on in private. (Moran says further public hearings after the maps were done would not have been fruitful, because there would always have been someone unhappy, no matter how many ways they redrew districts.) Overall, however, Winslow was impressed. “That was the best redistricting process in Massachusetts in 30 years,” says Winslow, who was poised to sue if redistricting veered off course. “The fact is, they got it right. They did.”
Winslow and fellow GOP leaders are particularly enthused about the new landscape. Not only are congressional districts more competitive, the state party sees about 30 House seats – above and beyond the ones it holds now – for which it can mount strong challenges in November. “There are clearly and unequivocally opportunities for Republicans to win additional seats,” says Bradley Jones Jr., the House minority leader from North Reading.
To one longtime Democratic strategist, that’s a failure. Democratic legislative leaders, he believes, should have paid more heed to politics, not less, especially on the congressional maps, because Massachusetts will be hurt if Republicans gain control of the US House, Senate, and presidency. “What’s more important is that the Republicans not be able to control all three branches,” says the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This plan puts two, if not three [congressional seats] at great risk.”
That’s just one ingredient among many in the redistricting alchemy, of course. You throw it in the pot with the population shifts, the legal constraints, the value of incumbency, gender politics, the personal relationships, and you try to make soup. “It’s not just about numbers. It’s not just about geography. It’s not just about the candidates,” Moran says. “It’s not really a tangible thing you can touch. But you gotta figure out what the best mixture is of all those things.” He adds: “Can you draw other maps? Sure you could.”
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“It is definitely a cultural shift,” says Stanley Rosenberg, musing on the changes he has seen on Beacon Hill in recent years. And he’s not alone. Other inhabitants and observers of the Hill see it, too, and not just in redistricting, but in a number of reforms that would have been unimaginable not too long ago.
They see it in new pension rules that rein in benefits for public retirees. They see it in a new law, which labor unions had fought, forcing cities and towns to pare back excessive health care plans for current and former employees. They see it in tighter regulation of ethics and lobbying. These and other changes together represent a departure from the ways of the past, when lawmakers’ agendas were too often geared toward protecting themselves, their friends, and their allies. “I moved out 10 years ago and just recently moved back to the state,” says Malia Lazu, project director for the Drawing Democracy Project, a coalition that worked on redistricting. “There’s a different feeling, I think, to the power structure.”
No single force accounts for the political maturation. For one, Deval Patrick has made his influence felt after sweeping into power in 2006 on a vow to shake up an entrenched Beacon Hill culture. His example has empowered other grass-roots organizations to push for their agendas. The 2010 election of Republican Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat served as a wake-up call to Democratic leaders that they could not take voters for granted. The state’s budget constraints have also made necessary hard decisions on trimming public benefits.
And then, of course, there are the scandals. The last three speakers of the House have been convicted of crimes. Widely publicized pension abuses have stirred outrage. A massive patronage operation at the state Probation Department, in which DeLeo and Petrolati were both implicated, has sparked state and federal investigations. “Scandal is the engine of reform,” Wilmot says. When I put that to DeLeo, he tells me, “Maybe there were errors made. The good part is, maybe we’ve learned from our errors.” DeLeo, who is three years into his tenure as speaker, says lawmakers got the message clearly while out campaigning for the 2010 elections. “People were crying out for change. They were crying out for reform,” he says. “And that’s what we gave them.”
The push has been coming from inside the building, too. Fresh faces in the state House and Senate have infused new energy, new demands, new ideas, and new expectations into the political fabric. According to a tally by John Walsh, the state Democratic Party chairman, nearly half of the 200-member Legislature is new since the 2006 elections. One of them is Sonia Chang-Diaz, who hopes the gap is shrinking between what the public wants and what its leaders actually do. “Look, I don’t agree with everything that goes on in this building,” she says, “but I find myself often saying to folks out in the world that I think, in my experience so far, it’s not as bad as people think it is.”
Needless to say, the public has reason to remain chary. The probation scandal, which a federal grand jury has been investigating, may well produce scathing indictments. To some, the recent legalization of casinos is a step in the wrong direction. And legislative power is still centralized in the hands of DeLeo and Therese Murray. (DeLeo recently shook up his leadership team, ousting a lieutenant with whom he had clashed and rewarding Moran with a more prominent post.) Nonetheless, the state has made some important advancements, and, whatever the driving forces behind them, let’s hope it’s a long-term trend.
On redistricting, with Massachusetts having proved itself capable of a responsible result, many believe it will be difficult to regress. “Now that you’ve reached the new and improved standard, you’re not going to go back,” says Secretary of State William Galvin, who oversees elections. How strangely pleasant it will be if the state that let the gerrymander loose on the country has matured into a national model. Indeed, representatives of other states asked Moran at a recent legislative conference in Florida: How’d you guys do it? Local activists also say they hope the lessons from redistricting – the importance of coming to the table prepared, how to use technology to demand transparency, and the value of engaged participation in the political process – will transfer to other policy debates at the State House and beyond.
As I’m leaving Moran’s office, I ask him about getting that first pen from Patrick at the November bill signing. It looked to me as if he had been moved by the gesture. But I wasn’t sure. Had he?
He answers by saying he grew up a city kid, the son of Irish immigrants. He says he was the first person in his family to graduate from college. It took him seven years, but he earned a degree from UMass Boston. “It is pretty cool, to be honest with you,” says Moran, 40. “It is cool.” He reaches over to his desk, picks up the pen, and says he plans to get a case for it.
***
Hard Choices
In the past, politicians saw redistricting as a way to help themselves and their allies. This time, not so much. Here are five notable – and refreshing – signs that state leaders actually put the public good ahead of politics this cycle.
1) State Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz of Boston, who has built close relationships in Chinatown over three years in the Legislature, shed the neighborhood from her district to make the broader map work, despite her influential perch on the legislative redistricting committee.
2) Accused in years past of marginalizing nonwhite voters, lawmakers this cycle added no fewer than 11 districts in the state House and Senate in which minorities make up a majority of the population, including a House seat in Lawrence and a state Senate district in Springfield. They also added the first true majority-minority congressional district.
3) Governor Deval Patrick, the most powerful political figure in the state, accepted the splitting of his hometown, Milton, into two districts in the new congressional map.
4) Stanley Rosenberg, the powerful state senator from Amherst who chaired the Senate redistricting effort, relented on Western Massachusetts going from two congressional seats to one, disappointing constituents who fear it will mean less political clout for the region.
5) The new congressional map, drawn by state Democratic leaders, made life more difficult for several members of the state’s all-Democrat House delegation, resulting in the retirements of Barney Frank and John Olver, the involuntary relocation of William Keating to the Cape, and a more challenging political environment for John Tierney as he seeks another term.
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Not keeping up with the Joneses
The population growth of Massachusetts didn’t keep pace with other regions of the country, causing us to lose a congressional seat. By contrast, Texas is gaining the most number of congressional seats, four.
MASSACHUSETTS
Population in 2000: 6,349,097
Population in 2010: 6,547,629
Increase 3.1%
TEXAS
Population in 2000: 20,851,820
Population in 2010: 25,145,561
20.6% increase
Source: US Census
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Breaking it down
OLD CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS
Massachusetts lost a US House seat this cycle, going from 10 to nine. The resulting districts are more geographically distinct and fair – a sign that the process didn’t involve politics as usual.
NEW DISTRICTS
District 1
Western Massachusetts, long represented by two members of the US House, will now have just one. Incumbent Richard Neal hails from Springfield, but if he keeps his seat in November, he’ll represent the Berkshires, too.
District 3
Following pressure from state Senate President Therese Murray, who felt strongly about protecting the only woman in the congressional delegation, Niki Tsongas’s Merrimack Valley district retained the city of Lawrence, a critical piece of her political base.
District 6
Incumbent John Tierney, a Democrat already facing a strong challenger in Richard Tisei, a former Republican leader in the state Senate, will now have to contend with a more Republican-friendly north-of-Boston district, following the addition of Billerica and Tewksbury.
District 7
Nonwhites will now make up a majority of the voting-age population in the Boston-area US House district currently represented by Michael Capuano of Somerville, a significant shift that could send a minority candidate to Congress in the near future.
District 9
The mapmakers carved out a new congressional district composed of the Cape, the Islands, and Southeastern Massachusetts, believing the region deserved its own voice in Washington.
