Economist: Terminator vs. gerrymander

Shortly after winning election as governor of California in 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger watched leaders from the state Legislature stage a spittle-flecked, chair-toppling fight in his office.

“I don't know if the drama was meant for me because I was new,” he recalled in an interview, miming open-mouthed astonishment.

A bigger shock came hours later. Two of the combatants, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, telephoned him from a bar. Sure, we fight about things in the daytime, the pair told the governor, a Republican who had won as an action-man outsider in a Democratic state. With night falling, though, the party bosses wanted Schwarzenegger to know their shared view of his proposal to have electoral districts drawn by an independent panel, rather than by politicians.

A “horrible” idea that would cost incumbent members their seats, they growled. “Just kill this,” he remembers hearing.

It took Schwarzenegger and his allies several attempts to outwit California's political establishment, but in 2008 and 2010 voters passed ballot propositions that handed the power to draw districts for the state Legislature and for Congress to an independent body with no partisan majority, and including such folk as farmers and business owners.

In 2010, Californians also approved a top-two primary system, under which all voters - rather than party stalwarts - may pick candidates for state and federal districts, with the highest-scoring pair proceeding to the general election, even if they are from the same party. The explicit aim is to give candidates an incentive to woo broad coalitions that cross party lines, rather than merely fire up hard-core partisans.

Six years after leaving the governorship, Schwarzenegger could be forgiven for shunning politics. His offices in Santa Monica, a few blocks from the gym where he maintains his hewn-oak physique, would make a cozy retreat: There are film posters and body-building awards, framed photographs of him with Pope Francis and sundry presidents, works of art by Andy Warhol and others, and many movie props, including a life-sized crocodile beneath his pool table.

He cut a lonely figure in the 2016 election, as an environmentally conscious, socially liberal, pro-immigration Republican. He backed Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, the lone moderate in the Republican presidential primary. He has publicly chided President Donald Trump over climate change.

Instead of hiding, Schwarzenegger is in the thick of a nationwide campaign against gerrymandering, a practice whereby parties draw electoral districts to give their side an unfair advantage. The cause has momentum behind it. There are campaigns to put redistricting reform on the ballot in Michigan, Missouri and Ohio, and lawsuits are in progress from North Carolina to Maryland, where Democrats are accused of outrageous gerrymandering.

Schwarzenegger has committed to match donations to a fund that will help Common Cause, an open-government group, participate in a case at the U.S. Supreme Court challenging maps drawn by Wisconsin Republicans. The Wisconsin case will see reformers citing a new tool, the “efficiency gap,” intended to give courts an objective way to spot gerrymandering. To simplify, the measure counts wasted votes cast for each party, in hopelessly hostile or inefficiently super-safe districts, and identifies states where one party receives many more such votes, as in Wisconsin.

Schwarzenegger has recorded a short video explaining what he concedes is the “very dry” subject of gerrymandering. In it the actor compares the respective popularity of Congress, cockroaches and herpes, while noting that “the former Soviet Politburo had more turnover” than pre-reform California, which between 2002 and 2010 held 265 congressional races, of which only one saw a seat change its party control. His arguments are reinforced by film clips in which he variously looks startled, looks resolute or blows things up. The video has been viewed 25 million times.

Political professionals can be a bit sniffy about gerrymandering's importance as an explanation for government dysfunction. They note the way that Americans of like mind increasingly flock together, with the result that, even when districts are drawn to respect county or community boundaries, Democrats will be packed into cities, while Republicans dominate rural areas. In states which have adopted non-partisan districting, such as Arizona and California, seats still change hands only rarely.

The former Terminator can hold his own with wonkish skeptics. The Schwarzenegger Institute at the University of Southern California, founded to promote “post-partisanship,” commissioned studies that found that, after the 2012 election, California's state legislators had more moderate voting records, while its candidates are unusually responsive to supporters of a rival party.

Schwarzenegger does not deny self-sorting effects: Of course Californian districts become more liberal near the ocean, he said. They still are home to some conservatives, however, as some liberals live inland, and previously such voters were not counted.

Strikingly, his main concern is not Democrats or Republicans “getting the shaft” in this or that state. His interest is in boosting political performance everywhere. Uncompetitive districts make legislators less effective, he said: To be precise, he compares politicians in gerrymandered seats to “overweight” people who should “go to the (expletive) gym.”

As a governor, he recalled, he saw ultra-safe legislators in thrall to activists who controlled their re-selection as candidates, long before they faced general elections. He became convinced that, if districts held only 10 percent to 15 percent more voters from the opposing party, incumbents' calculations would change.

Gerrymandering is a 200-year-old “screw-up,” Schwarzenegger said, and must be fixed patiently, state by state. He remembers when bodybuilders were thought stupid or narcissistic, or to be “suffering from some complex.” Now hotels on every continent have gyms with weights.

Make the right case for competition, fitness and performance, in short, and minds can be changed.

From the Economist magazine.