By Zachary Gorchow
Executive Editor and Publisher
Posted: November 12, 2014 1:19 PM

In the week following the elections, some Democrats and analysts have vented about the Republican-controlled redistricting plan of 2011 when analyzing why the GOP gained four seats in the House and one seat in the Senate this year.

They are wrong.

Now, there actually are two different ways to look at the impact of redistricting on the 2014 elections for the Michigan Legislature.

The first one: Does the plan, written by Republicans with no meaningful input from the Democrats, design some districts that could have been more competitive to instead lean Republican and thus make it much harder for Democrats to win a House majority than Republicans?

The answer is, emphatically, yes.

The second one: In the actual races that Democrats and Republicans fiercely contested last week, did redistricting in 2011 stack the deck in favor of the Republican candidates?

The answer is, in most cases, absolutely not.

Let’s deal with the first question. By my count, there are 14 seats in the 110-seat House and seven seats in the 38-seat Senate where the 2011 reapportionment plan pushed competitive seats to become more Republican and will be in Republican hands in 2015.

So in the House, where Republicans will have a 63-47 majority in 2015, if nine of these 14 seats were more balanced politically and Democrats won those nine, yes, they would have 56 seats and the majority. And in the Senate, if Democrats won all seven of these seats, they would have 18 seats and … still be in the minority.

But here’s the problem with the argument that redistricting gerrymandered Democrats into an impossible task to win the majority. Most of the key House and Senate battles did not take place in these seats. In fact, many of them took place in seats whose boundaries have been largely stable or, in some cases, were made friendlier to Democrats than they were in the 2001 reapportionment plan.

The Senate is a great example. The key battles were in the 7th District (northwest Wayne County), 17th District (Lenawee and Monroe counties), the 20th District (Kalamazoo County) and the 32nd District (Saginaw and part of Genesee counties).

The way Republicans drew the 17th gave Democrats a chance. They lopped off Republican- leaning areas in Jackson and Washtenaw counties and instead paired Lenawee County with Monroe County (how the district looked in the 1990s when it elected a Democrat twice). Not only did that make the district a bit less Republican, but it put the best conceivable Democratic candidate for the seat, former Rep. Doug Spade of Adrian, into the district.

In the 20th, redistricting did Democrats a huge favor. It lopped off the two Republican-leaning townships in Van Buren County from the seat, making the district more Democratic and putting incumbent Sen. Tonya Schuitmaker (R-Lawton) into a new 26th District. So Democrats got an unexpected shot at an open seat and one with fewer Republican voters.

In the 32nd, Republicans got rid of the Republican-leaning Gratiot County portion of the seat and instead added Republican-leaning portions of Genesee County. Even still, it remained a Democratic-leaning district.

The 7th District was the one seat that Republicans made significantly more GOP, cleaving away the Downriver portions and instead adding Livonia. But even still, just on the eye test, the new lines of the 7th, neatly covering the northwest corner of Wayne County, are cleaner than the old “L” shape of the district. It was hardly an outrageous gerrymander.

Yet despite getting some help in three of the four seats from redistricting, the Democrats lost all four. And that doesn’t even address the massive candidate recruitment failures the party had in two seats that on their base votes are at least 50-50 or even tilt slightly Democratic, the 34th District in the Muskegon area and the 38th in the Upper Peninsula, resulting in the party making no serious effort in either.

And in looking at the House, of the four seats Democrats now hold that they lost on Election Day, none – I repeat, none – were designed in a way to tilt the playing field to the GOP. The 62nd District, with Battle Creek and environs, is a seat with a majority Democratic base. Republicans actually made the 71st, lost by Rep. Theresa Abed (D-Grand Ledge), a bit more Democratic when they redrew it, as was the case with the 91st, lost by Rep. Collene Lamonte (D-Montague). The 84th (Huron and Tuscola counties) has had the same boundaries since at least 1992.

Some of the House seats Democrats hoped to gain – the 23rd (Downriver), the 39th (west central Oakland County), the 43rd (north-central Oakland County), the 56th (most of Monroe County), the 99th (Isabella and part of Midland counties) and the 106th (northeast Lower Peninsula) – indeed were tilted by Republicans to favor their candidates.

Still, the 23rd remains a Democratic district. The 56th is about as close to 50-50 as it gets. The 43rd would still favor the GOP even if drawn differently. And Democrats had major failures in the primaries in the 23rd and 106th where their preferred candidates lost.

Other competitive seats like the 41st (Troy and Clawson), 57th (Lenawee County), 61st (southwest Kalamazoo County), 85th (Shiawassee and part of Saginaw counties), the 101st (Lake Michigan shoreline north of Muskegon) and 108th (Bay de Noc area of the Upper Peninsula) saw no major changes in their political composition in redistricting.

So why did Democrats take a beating in the House and Senate races even as their gubernatorial candidate, Mark Schauer, lost by a respectable margin, their U.S. Senate candidate, Gary Peters, won huge, their party won seven of the eight statewide education board seats and their House and Senate candidates essentially took half the total vote for the House and Senate?

The answer is three-fold.

One, Democrats are packed together more tightly with many seats where they have a 70 percent advantage or better, so that brings up their total House and Senate votes.

Two, the Democratic turnout problem in the mid-term election is real. Their candidates lost the 62nd, 71st and 91st by a combined 915 votes. These were all seats where redistricting, if anything, should have helped the Democrats.

The other is that when it comes to state legislative elections, it pays not to be of the same party as the president.

Since 2004, the president’s party has lost an average of two seats in the three subsequent Senate elections and an average of seven seats in the six subsequent House elections.

The bottom line is that, yes, of course Democrats would have had the opportunity to fare better had they controlled the redistricting pen in 2011. But it would not have been determinative.

After all, Democrats took the House majority in 2006 with 58 seats and then bumped that up to 67 in 2008, all under a Republican-drawn plan they blasted when it was drawn in 2001 as a gerrymander.