The Politics of Redistricting

This week, the Manatee County Commission took its first meaningful steps in the once-a-decade process of redrawing the district boundaries for the board’s five in-district commissioners (districts 6 and 7– currently occupied by commissioners Whitmore and Kruse–are "at-large“ seats, which are contested countywide). Commissioners discussed not wanting to politicize the process, which is sort of like attempting to manage a five-mile run in August without breaking a sweat.

In other words, it’s inherent to the process itself. And why wouldn’t it be? If the developers who buy seats for the majority of commissioners on the board are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get them into office, it goes without saying that they will want those commissioners to make sure that any redrawing of the lines, at a minimum, doesn’t make it any harder to buy the board majority through dark money PACs.

From there, it’s not much of a leap to presume that they wouldn’t be averse to maps that might make it less expensive or at least more reliable to do so, or that they have probably weighed in already, most likely through the same political consultants they regularly use to turn that campaign cash into votes on the board. I’m sure some of those forces have already crunched the numbers and thrown together a few ideas as to how the lines might be best drawn in terms of making it easier to shape the outcome of board races. That’s just the way these things go and anyone who pretends it isn’t–elected official or otherwise–is either being ignorant or dishonest and perhaps both.

In fact, in choosing to hire John Guthrie as the consultant who will navigate Manatee through the process, the county has selected someone whose most marketable experience is the fact that he was the staff director on redistricting for the Florida Senate when the legislative chamber got caught trying to gerrymander Congressional redistricting maps in favor of Republicans, following the 2010 census. In the lawsuits that followed, Guthrie (like many others) acknowledgedin depositions having deleted copies of suggested maps submitted by Republican political consultants–maps that were disguised to appear as though they had been submitted by members of the public.

Much of the focus on Tuesday’s meeting was District 2, which was created in 1990, in response to a series of lawsuits filed by the NAACP that alleged that many counties in Florida had deliberately drawn maps in a way that would make it impossible for a person of color to win a seat. Indeed, there had never been a Black county commissioner prior to the district being drawn, and three of the four people who have held the seat since have been Black.

It’s also been no coincidence, given racial party affiliation demographics, that District 2 has been the only seat of the seven during the post-Dixiecrat era, in which a Democrat has held a Manatee County Commission seat. That means there are two minorities in Manatee County who have a vested interest in the district’s geographical boundaries.

District boundaries are not supposed to be drawn in a manner that would deliberately help or hurt either party. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act also extends more specific protections based on race, specifically preventing them from being redrawn in a way that would increase the difficulty of minority representation. Keeping District 2 in the hands of either Democrats or people of color won’t be easy, however.

The district, which snakes through the urban corridor and exists on both sides of the Manatee River, had already been out of compliance in terms of the way districts are to be drawn (using natural geography and distinct city and neighborhoods as boundary lines). Additionally, unless it takes on a considerable number of new constituents, it will be grossly disproportionate in terms of size (districts are required to be within 10 percent variance on population).

There are a couple of major hurdles. For starters, less than 8 percent of the population of Manatee County is Black, so drawing any district comprised of roughly 20 percent of the county’s population in a way that will make it as likely to have Black representation as District 2 currently is will be a challenge, to say the least, especially since that was largely achieved by not only having a smaller district but by drawing it in a way that also included a lot of white and Hispanic Democrats.

Because nearly 90 percent of Blacks tend to vote Democrat and both Blacks and Democratic-leaning voters as a whole tend to live in the more densely populated areas of a county, all of those factors were able to keep District 2 in Democrats' control since its creation and Black-represented in all but the four years that white Democrat Michael Gallen held the seat from 2010-14. Given the county’s current demographics in which less than 8 percent of Manatee residents are Black and less than 30 percent of voters are registered Democrat, it’s unlikely that any way that you would draw five districts, roughly equal in population, would result in someone from either group, let alone both, winning. In other words, we might expect a lawsuit no matter what.

And District 2 is not the only district that’s getting a close look. As Commissioner James Satcher made clear on Tuesday, the current board majority of self-proclaimed Trump Republicans (commissioners Satcher, Vanessa Baugh, Kevin Van Ostenbridge, and George Kruse) and their benefactors in the development community do not see the board as having six Republicans, regardless of what it says next to each commissioner's name. Satcher’s obvious implication when he said that the board had four Republicans and three Democrats was that commissioners Misty Servia and Carrol Whitmore, both Republicans, aren’t really members of that party.

Satcher’s supporters on the far right routinely tar Whitmore and Servia, who I hesitate to call moderate so much as less Trumpian (think Jeb Bush Republicans), as being "RINOs," a pejorative acronym that stands for Republicans in Name Only. The same forces who’ve been working to get commissioners like those four in the new majority into office have already been very clear about their intentions of replacing Servia with someone more their speed, and if there are in fact consultant-drawn maps floating around, I would be very surprised if ideas for Servia’s District 4 did not revolve around the ex-President’s popularity.

In short, baseless attack ads that center on polarizing national culture war issues while distracting from both local matters and the concrete qualifications of each candidate tend to be much more effective when aimed at voters who have a strong affinity for Trump. That’s the playbook that developers used to gain unprecedented influence over the board in 2020, and given their growing appetite to influence matters far beyond those that line their pockets, it would seem a safe bet that they’ll be looking for every advantage in getting rid of both she and Whitmore in 2022.

If you’re reading this column, I’d say the chances are pretty good that you already know how difficult it is for grassroots candidates to have even an outside chance in modern county commission races. And I imagine that I’m also not alone in thinking that, despite it being a time in which we as a community really need that to change if we are going to be able to preserve even a moderate quality of life before the developers are through shaking every last dollar from the proverbial tree, it’s about to get worse instead of better.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of ourweekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County governmentsince 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Clickherefor his bio. His 4th novel, Burn Black Wall Street Burn, was recently released and is availablehere.