经济学人下载:重新划分选区之争

Take Texas. Republicans control the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature, so can draw new maps without interference from Democrats. That power is all the more coveted since Texas will receive four new seats in the House of Representatives at the next election, thanks to the rapid growth of its population over the past decade. Partisan Republicans would like all four districts drawn with Republican majorities. But as Sherri Greenberg of the University of Texas at Austin points out, even in Texas, there are not enough Republicans to create four secure new Republican districts.

以德克萨斯州为例。共和党掌管政府，又控制了两大州立法内庭，所以共和党能够不受民主党干扰自行确定新的选区图。由于德州人口在这十年内增长迅速，下次选举将在众议院新增四个席位，所以共和党的这项权利可以说是无人不垂涎。但德州大学的雪莉·格林伯格（Sherri Greenberg）指出，就算在德克萨斯州，也没有足够的共和党成员以新建四个稳定的共和党选区。

That is partly because Republicans won almost every marginal seat in the state at the last election, leaving themselves already thinly spread. Democrats now hold just nine of Texas’s 32 House seats. “The elections accomplished what we were afraid they were going to try to accomplish by gerrymandering,” says Mike Villarreal, the most senior Democrat on the redistricting committee in the state House of Representatives. That outcome, in turn, was underpinned by a previous Republican gerrymander. In 2003, shortly after taking control of the state legislature for the first time in over a century, Republicans redrew the congressional map in a way that cost the Democrats six seats at the subsequent election, and more since. That leaves Republicans with few plausible targets in the Democratic congressional delegation.

这样的情形，在一定程度上是由于共和党在上次选举中几乎赢得了所有的边际席位，所以他们的分布已经很稀疏。在德克萨斯州总共32个席位中，民主党只有9个席位。州议院选区重划委员会最资深的民主党人员麦克·维拉里尔（Mike Villarreal）说，“选举印证了我们所担心的事，他们真的通过不公正地划分选区赢了我们。”那次选举的结果，正是之前共和党进行不公正选区划分的结果。2003年，共和党一百多年来第一次坐镇州立法机关，还没过多久，便通过选区重划分让民主党损失了六个席位，并且让它以后继续损失席位。最后，共和党针对民主党国会代表的可行目标就非常少了。

To make matters trickier for the Republicans, some 90% of the growth in the state’s population over the past decade has come from minorities, who tend to vote Democratic. Indeed, minorities are now in the majority in Texas, with Hispanics alone accounting for about 38% of the population—although their share of legal residents of voting age is smaller. The racial divide in Texas politics is quite stark: there are only two state House seats with a white majority represented by Democrats, a legislator points out, and only three minority seats represented by Republicans.

更让共和党不顺的，是德州人口的增长中大概有90%是少数民族，他们更偏向民主党。事实上，如今在德州，少数民族才是大多数，光拉美裔人口就占总人口的38%（尽管拉美裔人口中达到合法选举年龄的人数比例较低）。德州政治的种族区别非常明显——有一位立法委员指出，州议院民主党拥有的白人席位只有两个，而共和党拥有的少数民族席位只有三个。

.A latter-day Governor Gerry might respond by distributing Hispanic voters across all seats to minimise their influence. But that is a risky tactic in two respects. First, the state’s demographics are changing fast enough that an overly ambitious partisan gerrymander is likely to come unstuck during its ten-year lifespan. The last map the Republicans drew secured them a comfortable majority of 88 of the 150 seats in the state House in 2002, but only 76 in 2008. Republicans involved in redistricting this time around say they cannot be too aggressive if their handiwork is to have any hope of surviving.

如果是格雷州长，在这种情形下，可能会将尽量拉美裔人口分散开来，减少他们的影响。但这一策略有两大危险。首先，本州的人口分布情况变化很快，如果偏向某个党派的选区划分进行得太过，在未来的十年里可能不能收效。共和党上次划分的选区让他们在2002年轻松赢得州议院的多数席位——总共150个席位当中赢得88个，可是在2008年，就只获得76个席位。这次，参与重新划分选区的共和党成员说，他们不能做得太过，因为划分的结果只怕很快又受新变化影响。