Bye-Bye, Jersey Gerrymander

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/opinion/new-jersey-gerrymandering-democrats.html

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Good news: The gerrymandering plan in New Jersey — pushed by Democrats — appears to have died. It did so because of an outcry from progressive activists. Those activists put principle above partisan advantage, rallying to defeat the plan even though it probably would have benefited Democrats.

“A huge coalition of grass-roots activists, union leaders, voting rights advocates, and racial justice proponents objected,” as Mark Joseph Stern of Slate writes. “More than 100 activists and academics … testified against the amendment. They held press conferences and protests to shame Democratic leaders and demand real reform. It worked.”

Perry Bacon Jr. of FiveThirtyEight notes that New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, also opposed the plan — a stark contrast to Wisconsin, where Scott Walker, the outgoing Republican governor, has signed into law a partisan power grab.

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I take two larger messages from the New Jersey episode: One, the new progressive grass-roots movement isn’t just about President Trump. It can affect politics in ways that have nothing to do with him. And it cares about ideals larger than the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party.

Two, the country still needs a federal law to restrict gerrymandering. Today, politicians of both parties engage in the practice — and effectively disempower voters in the process. The Republicans have done more gerrymandering than Democrats lately. But Democrats have done it too, notably in Maryland and Illinois.

So I hope politicians of both parties will be open to a federal law that bars politicians from drawing their own districts. Independent, nonpartisan officials should do so instead.

Related: Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum points out one upside of Democratic gerrymandering: It increases the chances of a national solution. As he notes, the Supreme Court may soon hear a case about gerrymandering in Maryland (by Democrats) and in Wisconsin (by Republicans). “Conservatives on the Supreme Court will never strike down even the most egregious gerrymanders unless Democrats prove that they can play the game too,” Drum writes.

Two steps forward … I’ve been writing about the lack of economic diversity at top colleges for almost 15 years, and it’s sometimes tempting to become cynical. University leaders clearly want to be seen as caring about the issue. But year after year, many of them continue to enroll shockingly affluent student bodies — despite the large number of talented students from modest backgrounds.

Once in a while, though, there are signs of progress.

Yesterday, an arm of Michael Bloomberg’s foundation — which has made this issue one of its priorities — published some new data on economic diversity in higher education. The foundation has created a group of more than 100 public and private colleges that have vowed to enroll more lower-income students. The group is known as the American Talent Initiative, and each member school must have a graduation rate of at least 70 percent.

Over the past two years at the colleges in the initiative reporting data, the number of students receiving federal Pell Grants has risen to almost 218,000 from 210,000. (Pell Grants typically go to families from the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution.) The initiative has vowed to get this number to 260,000 by 2025 — which means it will need to pick up the pace in coming years.

Among the colleges that have made progress is the University of California, Irvine, which was already a leader and has become even more of one by increasing the number of transfers it takes from community colleges. Others increasing their economic diversity, according to the new report: the University of Illinois, the University of Iowa, Allegheny College, Davidson College, Princeton and Yale. For more, see Melissa Korn’s write-up in The Wall Street Journal. (The link requires a Journal subscription.)

I think it’s important to remember that this isn’t simply a matter of diversity. It’s a matter of fairness.

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