Redistricting Quotes

Legislators redistrict all the time to achieve desired results. They group people together based on how they think they will vote. There is something fundamentally wrong with this tactic; it is unconstitutional, it is manipulative, it is patronizing, and it infringes upon all citizens' right to vote.

It is worthy of note, however, that the exclusion of black voters from polling booths is not the only way in which black political power has been suppressed. Another dimension of disenfranchisement echoes not so much Jim Crow as slavery. Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come.35 This has enormous consequences for the redistricting process. White rural communities that house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote.

Elections in America were also becoming less free and fair. In 2010, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, a plan to take control of statehouses across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census. Through the process of what is called gerrymandering, after Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme (even though he didn’t like it), political parties could gain control of extra seats in a state by drawing districts to either “pack” or “crack” their opponents.

REDMAP locked in control of half of Congress until at least 2020—or until Democrats can theoretically beat Republicans on the newly drawn maps. What would that take? David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report is one of the smartest analysts of state races and redistricting. According to his study, the maps have become so tilted that to retake the House of Representatives, “Democrats would need to win the national popular vote by between six and seven points in order to win the barest possible House majority.” As Rolling Stone observed, that would require “100 Democratic voters to turn out for every 94 Republicans.” O

Unless you’re an amusement park owned by terribly influential corporations who get to bend and twist laws to suit their whims. The world renowned Movieland theme park is known for bending and twisting laws to suit their whims. They basically write copyright laws. They’ve redistricted their property to make sure not a single police precinct has jurisdiction inside the park.

Norm breaking was also evident at the state level. Among the most notorious cases was the 2003 Texas redistricting plan.

The advent of computers had turned redistricting into an expensive, cynical, and highly precise science. Hofeller, the foremost practitioner on the Republican side, had professionalized the vast ideological sorting of the country into warring partisan camps. On his laptop was a program called Maptitude that contained the population details of every neighborhood, including the residents’ racial makeup.

is one area in which appearances do matter.

All but two of the eleven districts with the lowest Polsby-Popper scores, none of which filled as much as 3 percent of the circle, faced legal challenges. Of the legal challenges only those to Illinois’s “Earmuff District” and North Carolina-1 did not succeed, although the state redrew the latter to make it more compact. The other two districts among those with the worst perimeter scores, Texas-6 and -25, both abutted districts invalidated in Bush v.

All but two of the eleven districts with the lowest Polsby-Popper scores, none of which filled as much as 3 percent of the circle, faced legal challenges. Of the legal challenges only those to Illinois’s “Earmuff District” and North Carolina-1 did not succeed, although the state redrew the latter to make it more compact. The other two districts among those with the worst perimeter scores, Texas-6 and -25, both abutted districts invalidated in Bush v. Vera and derived their strange shapes in large part because of the shapes given their majority-minority neighbors.

Maryland’s districts, portions of which appear in figure 4.3, were less compact, especially on the convex hull measure, in 2013 than a decade earlier.10 figure 4.3 features District 3, the only one of Maryland’s eight districts to make the “Worst 10” lists. Districts 2, 4, and 7 also have narrow necks and tight twists and turns. A slim, contorted finger of District 2 traces the two northern blobs of District 3. Except for the 6th District, which will be discussed in the next chapter, partisan machinations did not dictate the shape of these districts. Race did play a role as the plan designed by Democratic governor Martin O’Malley carefully allocated Democratic voters so as to maintain the 4th and 7th as majority-black districts. Chapter 5 also addresses the Pennsylvania plan invalidated by the state Supreme Court, while part of the Virginia map was found to pack African Americans, a topic considered in chapter 3. Contributing to the low compactness scores for several states, such as Rhode Island and Hawaii, are their ragged shorelines. Indiana and Nevada had the most compact statewide plans for the 2010s. Table 4.3  States Having the Lowest Average Compactness Scores as of 2013 State Reock Polsby-Popper Convex Hull Maryland 2 1 1 North Carolina 5 4 4 Louisiana 7 3 3 West Virginia 8 5 2 Virginia 4 7 13 Hawaii 18 2 25

Much of the criticism concerning partisan gerrymandering during the 2010s focused on GOP-drawn districts in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, as discussed in the next chapter. However, when all states with more than one district are considered, comparison of the average district compactness concludes that Democrats ignored this traditional districting principle more than did Republicans.11 On each of the three measures considered here, Democratic districts scored less well than those fashioned by the GOP. Legislatively

with the demands for tiny population deviations, states with numerous counties can often draw congressional districts using counties as their primary building blocks. Iowa’s constitution prohibits splitting counties between congressional districts. In 2003 the difference between the most and least populous districts was 134 individuals.

While redistricting committees are often encouraged to avoid splitting communities of interest, rarely are workable definitions provided to define what constitutes a community of interest. As we saw in chapter 3, if the community of interest is defined in racial or ethnic terms, then the Voting Rights Act provided the basis for a challenge. One major case dealt with alternative communities of interest. Hasidic Jews in New York City went to court when the legislature split the one district from which they had been able to elect their preference in order to create a majority-black district.17 The Supreme Court upheld the decision by the New York legislature to draw a heavily African American district even though that eliminated the prospects for the Hasidic Jewish community. The Court reasoned that the legislature appropriately gave precedence to black concerns since the Voting Rights Act specifically addressed the

One scholar estimates that the congressional plans drawn following the 2000 census sought to protect 231 of the House incumbents

Brunell points out that maintenance of communities of interest and respect for county lines will conflict to the extent that communities of interest spread across county boundaries.19 This

Counties provided the primary building blocks for legislative districts for most of the nation’s history and in less populated areas people still identify with counties, so to the extent possible counties should be kept whole in districting plans. Even when the need to minimize population deviations makes it impossible to avoid splitting counties, mapmakers should strive to avoid districts that connect far-flung pieces of geography by means of touch points, waterways, or narrow necks since those designs make it difficult for voters to know what district they live in. In more compact districts, voters are more likely to know the name of their legislator. Moreover, campaigning is easier in compact

responsive to that community’s needs. Districts should retain the core populations of incumbents since they have established relationships with their constituents. Moreover, the incumbents’ experience benefits both their constituents and the legislature. The replacement of incumbents should come about as a result of voter dissatisfaction and not because of mapmakers’ decisions.

Communities of interest, especially in urban areas, do not coincide with county or city boundaries, so that giving precedence to traditional political boundaries may split communities of interest. Moreover, to unite communities that share interests may require drawing strange-looking districts in order to bring together people with shared values while avoiding those who lack the relevant characteristic and remain within the narrow population parameters permitted by courts.

The greatest difficulty usually involves efforts to create majority-minority districts. Attaining that objective may prevent creation of more compact districts, result in disregarding political boundaries, and separate some incumbents from the core of their former districts.

Figure 5.1 The Original Gerrymander. Source: Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

judged it the least compact in the nation.8 The report assessing congressional districts for the 1990s prepared by the Congressional Research Service applied the convex hull to the population and not to area. The least compact district as calculated using convex hull for the population was Colorado-4. Neither this district nor the next five in terms of low population scores had to defend its plan in court. Only three districts with low scores on the population compactness measure drew a legal challenge. Of these three, Florida-23 escaped unscathed when the judge dismissed the suit. On

Table 4.2 reports a ranking of what Azavea considers to be the ten least compact districts in place in 2013. The ranking rests on the three measures. Interestingly, the two least compact districts are the descendants of the two districts that ranked among the least compact twenty years earlier, as reported in table 4.1. North Carolina-12 in 2013 continued to twist its way along I-85 northwest to Greensboro while Florida-5 took much the shape of Florida-3 in the 1990s as it linked black communities in Jacksonville and Orlando. These two districts plus Louisiana-2 are majority-minority. A generation earlier, all but two of the least compact on Polsby-Popper were minority districts. The number of 2013 least compact districts that were majority-minority was also less than the eight on the Reock measure in 1993.

Least Compact Congressional Districts as of 2013 District Reock Polsby-Popper Convex Hull NC – 12 2 2 1 FL – 5 3 4 2 MD – 3 27 1 3 OH – 9 1 14 4 TX – 35 5 12 5 NC – 4 13 10 6 LA – 2 28 11 7 FL – 22 6 23 18 MD – 6 9 31 8 NY – 10 42 42 16 Entries show the ranking of the district on the measure. Source: Redrawing the Map on Redistricting, 2012 (Philadelphia, PA: Azavea, 2012).

Much of the criticism concerning partisan gerrymandering during the 2010s focused on GOP-drawn districts in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, as discussed in the next chapter. However, when all states with more than one district are considered, comparison of the average district compactness concludes that Democrats ignored this traditional districting principle more than did Republicans.11 On each of the three measures considered here, Democratic districts scored less well than those fashioned by the GOP. Legislatively drawn plans in states not controlled by one party were more compact than those drawn by Republicans or Democrats on the convex hull measure, but on the other two measures they scored between the two parties’ plans. In keeping with the suspicions of reformers, partisan plans tended to have less compact districts than plans drawn by other entities. Districts in plans prepared by independent commissions scored slightly better on Reock but were a little less compact than districts prepared by courts on Polsby-Popper and convex hull. In two of the nation’s most populous states, restricting the influence of the legislature coincided with more compact districts in 2013 than in 2003. In California, authority to redistrict was shifted from the legislature to an independent commission, while in Florida the legislature retained the authority to draw new districts but a constitutional amendment banned efforts to advance the interests of a party or incumbent.

They thought I would just give up and move on to something else, to other priorities. This was their second mistake. When something like redistricting reform snaps into focus in my mind, when it becomes a goal for me, I don't let it go. I don't move on. I don't quit. And I don't compromise. There is no plan B. Plan B is to succeed at plan A.

Gillespie called the plan “REDMAP,” an acronym for the Redistricting Majority Project. To implement it, he took over the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), a nonprofit group that had previously functioned as a catchall bank account for corporations interested in influencing state laws. All he needed was enough money to put REDMAP into action.

2010 is not just any election year: it is crucial given that this class of governors will be in charge as their states draw Congressional and state legislative districts as part of the reapportionment process after the next census. And given historical trends in midterm elections and the lopsided majority Democrats enjoy in Congress, the possibility that Republicans could make gains in House races next year could give the party a psychological boost at the halfway point of Mr. Obama’s term. Jankowski immediately recognized the opportunity. As provided in the Constitution, every state redraws all of its district lines every ten years, that is, after the census. That means elections in “zero years” matter more than others. Jankowski realized it would be possible to target states where the legislature is in charge of redistricting, flip as many chambers as possible, take control of the process, and redraw the lines.

New York Times: Republicans should mount an aggressive campaign to flip state legislatures ahead of post-census redistricting, then press the advantage to both redraw congressional and state legislative lines in their favor and aggressively advance the conservative agenda. Presidents almost always lose seats in a midterm election. Democratic turnout always falls in non-presidential years. Smart money spent on the right races had the potential to make more of a difference than ever. Republican

REDMAP—for Redistricting Majority Project—a

At the city level, redistricting battles affected both the City Council and School Committee. In both cases, the use of an at-large election format marginalized black voters.

following the 2018 election, more than one in six Americans lived in a state in which the party that controlled the legislature failed to win a majority of the statewide vote. The states involved, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin, have been ranked as having the six most unfair maps. Grofman considers the first four states the worst with the last two plus Florida, Georgia, and Indiana as additional bad examples.91 Given

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the plurality, rejected the Fourteenth Amendment as a basis for finding for plaintiffs, noting that the Equal Protection Clause “guarantees equal protection of the law to persons, not equal representation in government to equivalently sized groups.” The plurality opinion cited one of the leading casebooks on voting rights for the proposition that, throughout its subsequent history, “Bandemer has served almost exclusively as an invitation to litigation without much prospect of redress.”88 Justice Scalia pointed out that those who had sought relief under Bandemer had achieved nothing except to rack up substantial legal fees. The

While Illinois regularly made the list of 2011 gerrymanders, those who have studied the impact of the plan conclude that because of the disproportionate share of the Democratic support concentrated in Chicago, Democrats had to pull out all the stops to secure a share of seats in line with their share of the votes.

figure 5.2 shows the North Carolina congressional districts drawn based on the 2010 census and from which three Democrats were elected in 2014. The design supports the conclusion of Azavea, as reported in table 4.3, that the Tar Heel State map was the second least compact. The 1st and 12th Districts that have elected African Americans since 1992 continue to retain shapes much like those of twenty years earlier in order to maximize black percentages with the former at 52.1 percent black and the latter 49 percent black.45 The 4th District,

The National Journal ranks members of Congress from the most liberal to the most conservative. Recently, it has been rare for any Democrat to be more conservative than the most liberal Republican. It was not always

An extensive analysis of redistricting of state legislatures between 1968 and 1988 shows that in the first elections held under both partisan and bipartisan redistricting plans the swing ratios exceed those for elections not preceded by a new set of districts.15 Disrupting relationships between

Democrats gained four seats in 2018 to equal Republicans’ nine seats in the delegation. The new plan also complied with at least two traditional redistricting principles in that it had a higher compactness score and it split fewer than half as many counties as the GOP gerrymander.125

1In part this draws on Michael Wines, “Thomas Hofeller, 75, Gerrymander Genius,” New York Times (August 22, 2018). 2Ibid

In 2012, the party that won a majority of the vote did not get a majority of the seats in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.109

Caught up in the firestorm of partisan politics, parties exploited their positions when they had a trifecta. McGann and his co-authors demonstrate that parties having a trifecta carried out partisan gerrymanders in electorally competitive states but not where they had a commanding position.42 Following

up three congressional seats. Going into the 2020 election, Republicans had only a 14–13 advantage, down from their seventeen seats under the 2012 plan.

The Iowa approach is frequently pointed to as desirable because it limits partisan influence; however, the plan does not come from a commission. Instead, the Legislative Services Agency draws the congressional map. In going about its task, the Agency faces constraints not imposed in most states. It cannot divide counties nor can it consider where the incumbents live, or the voting history of the counties. The Agency simply tries to minimize the population variations among districts and since Iowa has many counties with relatively small populations it has been possible to design congressional districts with relatively little population variation while meeting the other constraints. The legislature cannot change a plan submitted by the Legislative Services

Wang and his colleagues use the analogy of a toolbox to justify a multi-pronged approach since one size may not fit all fact situations. “In jurisprudence, as with home repair, it can be handy to have a kit containing more than one tool.”117 Different tools may be required depending on the number of districts in a jurisdiction, the level of partisan competition, geography, and so forth. Michael D. McDonald and colleagues offer a five-part test for assessing a statewide plan, along with a four-part test for a district-level

In Shaw v. Reno, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor emphasized her concern about the shape of North Carolina’s 12th District. This long, skinny I-85 District, as shown in figure 3.2, stretched across 160 miles of the Carolina Piedmont and seemed on its face to violate the notions of compactness. Justice O’Connor observed, “We believe that reapportionment

commissioners. Generally, however, Chen and Cottrell found less bias in plans prepared by commissions than when a party with a trifecta had control.131

Sandra Day O’Connor, the only recent judge to have served as a legislator, understood the inherently political nature of redistricting and refused to join her colleagues who wanted to undo plans that advantaged one party. Acknowledging that partisanship is endemic in the key partisan decisions surrounding new districts, how can a judge determine when there is too much partisanship? Attempts

to reduce competitiveness. After analyzing two decades of data, Seabrook concludes that plans drawn by a party with a trifecta actually result in greater competitiveness than those designed by bipartisan agreement.

David Cottrell compared the competitiveness of simulated plans with the actual plans for the 113rd Congress. He found that the plans adopted resulted in districts about 3 percentage points safer than did the simulations that relied on algorithms that consider equalizing populations, contiguity, and compactness but not partisanship or incumbency.

simpler approach is to simply examine the designs of the districts. As Justice O’Connor observed in Shaw v. Reno, when it comes to redistricting, looks matter. This approach is especially appropriate in states in which one party has a substantial advantage, for example, the challenge to Maryland’s decision to eliminate one of its two Republican districts as challenged in Lamone v. Benisek.110 The approach may also be more reliable than some that rely on statistical analyses when there are few districts. Wang and his colleagues suggest this approach for states with two to six districts.111 However, some partisan gerrymanders do not have extraordinary-looking districts and some strange shapes result from concerns about something other than party, such as in Maryland where figure 4.3 shows how lines were drawn to maintain two majority-black districts.

The Florida legislature continues to do redistricting but amendments to the state constitution ratified in 2010 reduce the weight that legislators can give to partisanship and incumbency. The courts enforced these requirements when Democrats challenged the plans for the state Senate and Congress. A new congressional plan implemented in 2016 led to Democrats picking

Undergirding the various approaches outlined here is evidence of an intent to disadvantage of the opposition. North Carolina’s Representative Lewis had no hesitation in

During the late 1950s and first half of the next decade, approximately 60 percent of the House incumbents won reelection with more than 60 percent of the vote.66 Since

The Tar Heel State’s congressional plans designed by Republicans in 2011 became the poster child for a partisan gerrymander as becomes obvious when inspecting table 5.3. The first election in the new districts saw Republicans narrowly lose the congressional vote statewide yet win nine of the thirteen districts.

North Carolina For decades North Carolina’s congressional maps have been ground zero for gerrymandering lawsuits. Challenges to the I-85 District, created by Democrats in 1992, that extended from Charlotte to Durham at some points no wider than two lanes on the Interstate, made it to the Supreme Court four times. In the next decade, Obama carried North Carolina in 2008 when Democrats won the governorship and unseated a GOP senator. Even after the 2010 GOP wave,

Specifically, the court found that by artificially reducing Democratic presence in the delegation the plan ran afoul of the guarantee for free and equal elections. The advantage conferred on the GOP and the strange shapes of some districts indicated that traditional redistricting principles had been ignored.124 After the state court ordered new districts—a decision that the U.S.

In contrast with those who urge using redistricting to promote competitiveness, Thomas Brunell disagrees with those concerns and, instead, argues the virtues of uncompetitive districts. As mentioned in chapter 1, Brunell justifies packing on the basis that more people would be satisfied with Congress, its policies, and their legislators if most voters lived in districts in which their party constituted an overwhelming majority.84 High concentrations of supporters of one

Pennsylvania, which joined North Carolina as one of the maps most often condemned as a partisan gerrymander during the 2010s, voted for President Obama twice giving him a ten-point edge in 2008 and half that margin four years later, as shown in table 5.4. At the time of the redistricting the state had a Republican and a Democratic senator and a Republican governor. The 2010 GOP wave reversed the congressional delegation from twelve Democrats and seven Republicans to a 12–7 Republican majority. The GOP-controlled legislature that redrew the state had to eliminate a district and in doing so it set out to consolidate the gains made in 2010. The new plan assessed the lost seat against the Democrats but also managed to create a thirteenth GOP district leaving Democrats with only five seats. The Brennan Center for Justice estimated that the plan netted the GOP four more seats

Table 5.2 shows the linkage between the share of the votes won and the share of congressional seats won under differing conditions of partisan influence in 2012. In the states in which one party drew the new districts, it won more than 70 percent of

District competitiveness may influence the distribution of federal funding for projects. With electoral security comes seniority and with seniority comes greater influence often in the guise of committee or subcommittee leadership so that a legislator from an uncompetitive district, all other things being equal, may be especially effective in securing pork barrel projects.60 The politically powerful who often come from secure districts and, in the past when earmarks were allowed, they could insert for projects and contracts. An alternative perspective, however, suggests that it is only the most electorally insecure incumbents who will go to the additional trouble of winning new projects for their districts.61 Many

On many measures a circular district would receive a score of one. As the value approaches

A third measure, the convex hull, suggests putting a hypothetical rubber band around a district.5 The score is the percentage of the area surrounded by the hypothetical rubber band that is in the district. The measure would yield a high score for regular geometric shapes such as a square, rectangle, pentagon, and so on. However, a district in which portions have been cut away in order to avoid including certain populations would have lower scores. Each

Courts have not established thresholds for what constitutes extremely low compactness. Pildes and Niemi have suggested that scores below .15 on Reock or .05 on Polsby-Popper indicate extremely non-compact districts.6 Ansolabehere and Palmer use the

Recently, evidence of non-compact districts has been stressed in claims of partisan gerrymandering. A notable example was Pennyslvania-7, the ignominious Goofy kicking Donald Duck district as shown in figure 4.2, which at one point narrowed to the width of a restaurant.

Christopher Ingraham also developed a list of the ten least compact districts.9 His choices for ignominy include six of the Azavea districts and has the same worst three, although Ingraham reverses the order of Maryland-3 and Florida-5. He also has two of the most widely criticized (and spoofed) districts which did not make the Azavea list, Pennsylvania-7 (Goofy kicking Donald Duck) and Illinois-4 (Earmuff District). Ingraham’s selections are more heavily weighted toward majority-minority districts with four being longstanding black districts while three others are majority Hispanic

Before minimizing population differences became common, most states could largely avoid splitting counties. The narrowing of the population deviations demanded by courts has necessitated more county splits. Splitting counties reached new heights in the 1990s when jurisdictions believed that they had an obligation to maximize the number of minority districts. Today, legislatures often violate county lines in order to pack members of a single party into a district. Some majority-minority districts continued to split counties as the versions of Florida-5 and North Carolina-1 and -12 put into effect in 2013, with the Florida district and North Carolina-12 being elongated, narrow strips that did not contain any entire county.

Daniel Bowen has developed a measure for respect for political boundaries. He calls his measure coterminosity calculated as the share of a district’s boundary that also serves as a state, county, or municipal boundary. He reports that congressional districts that score high on coterminosity have constituents more likely to contact their representative, have more positive contacts, and to be aware of projects the legislator secured for the district (allocation responsiveness).16 Maintenance of Communities

Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, these communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which people in prison frequently come.35 This has enormous consequences for the redistricting process. White rural communities that house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote. Exclusion from juries. Another clear parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is the systematic exclusion of blacks from juries. One hallmark of the Jim Crow era was all-white juries trying black defendants in the South. Although the exclusion of jurors on the

A mostly anonymous figure until his death in 2018, Hofeller liked to describe gerrymandering as “the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States.” He once told an audience of state legislators, “Redistricting is like an election in reverse. It’s a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters.

(8) Florida voter registration disk removed and new disk inserted for redistricting via "The HAMMER" computer system in Fort Washington Maryland--via Navy Intel cover... (they stole the election via re-districting in Florida? How many other states did Brennan and Clapper do this?) (9) Crypto-keys via "The Hammer" to all banking and secure information “The Whistleblower

Whites may be surprised by the strength of black voter solidarity. Chris Bell, a white Democratic congressman from Texas, was redistricted into a largely black area and promptly crushed in the 2004 Democratic primary by the former head of the Houston chapter of the NAACP. He felt betrayed: He said he had spent his entire career “fighting for diversity, championing diversity,” and was dismayed that “many people do not want to look past the color of your skin.” This only demonstrated how little Mr. Bell understood blacks. As Bishop Paul Morton of the St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church in New Orleans said of black voters, “I’ve talked to some people who say, ‘I don’t care how bad the black is, he’s better than any white.’” Many blacks also expect all blacks to vote the same way. Jesse Jackson criticized Alabama congressman Artur Davis for voting against Mr. Obama’s signature medical insurance legislation, saying, “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.” Racial consciousness explains why President Barack Obama drew support even from blacks who ordinarily vote Republican. No fewer than 87 percent of blacks who identified themselves as conservatives said they would vote for him. In the three states that track party registration by race—Florida, Louisiana, and North Carolina—blacks were dropping off the Republican rolls in record numbers and rallying to the Democrats. As one GOP black explained during the primaries, “Most black Republicans who support John McCain won’t tell you this, but if Barack Obama is the nominee for the Democratic ticket, they will go into the voting booth in November and vote for Obama.” “Among black conservatives, they tell me privately, it would be very hard to vote against him [Obama] in November,” said black conservative radio host Armstrong Williams. During the campaign, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown said, “I think most white politicians do not understand that the race pride we [blacks] all have trumps everything else.