MA Redistricting: The Good, the Bad and Forging a Bold Road Forward
One thing is clear from the redistricting maps released locally last week: moderates have a vice grip on the Massachusetts legislature. If you have read the Rivera Consulting blog before, this is not news to you. In 2020, the political relationship between Governor Baker and House Leadership was hiding in plain sight. The new Massachusetts legislative district maps are peak Massachusetts - gerrymandered to protect those in power. Across the state, these redrawn districts provide limited new opportunities to elect more people of color to the legislature. Conversely, the legislature is strengthening protection for sitting incumbents that have faced—or likely will soon—strong primary progressive challenges. In short, from Lowell down to Brockton these new maps have provided several moderate Democrat incumbents an easier path to reelection, with communities of color splintered and diluted in an intentional attempt to minimize their political power.
These mixed results is an unsurprising result for one of the only legislatures in the country that draws its own lines, versus independent commissions found in states such as Ohio, Michigan, Nevada, and Oregon. Coalitions like the Democracy Hubs did incredible work in the face of the many structural barriers in the redistricting process. Building a Deep Democracy* framework in Massachusetts requires challenging these barriers and the status quo to recalibrate policy making and usher in truly representative leadership that delivers on a shared agenda tax and racial equity. Yet the long history of incumbent protection in Massachusetts remains affirmed with these new maps.
The good news is that based on the maps released by the legislature’s redistricting committee, there are now 33 House Districts where the majority of voters are Black, Latino, Indigenous, or Asian. Largely in part to the advocacy of Democracy Hub organizers, there are now four “incumbent free” districts in Lawrence, Framingham, Chelsea and Brockton in this category. In the Senate, we saw the creation of an additional Senate district in Boston that holds a majority of people of color. This is a real victory, one that was a major public objective of movement led organizations like MassVote, MassVoter Table, and MCAN during the redistricting process.
Unfortunately, the good news ends there. In our Deep Democracy Methodology and Analysis, we identified incumbents who were most susceptible to primary challenges.** In these new maps, Deep Democracy-aligned districts with 2020 elections that featured viable progressive primary challengers House leadership-aligned incumbents, lost significant numbers of voters of color. The results of this process can only be seen as an intentional strategic decision on the part of Beacon Hill to dilute the changing demographics of seats once seen as clear opportunities to shift ideological and racial power in the legislature.
We see a clear example of this in the 19th Suffolk House District. After conservative Democratic Rep. Jeff Turco edged out progressive Revere organizer Juan Jaramillo in the 19th Suffolk in a special election last spring, many people in Massachusetts politics argued that he would face a challenging reelection campaign against a unified progressive field. The new maps make his re-election campaign substantially easier for him, removing the diverse Revere precincts in which he performed worst and adding new precincts in which the majority of residents are white. These changes involve precise line-drawing in precinct 2-3, removing blocks where more than 80% of residents are people of color and splitting the precinct into two districts. These maps will increase the electoral difficulty for Latino candidates based in Revere seeking to win the district.
Changes to the 19th Suffolk and their Impact on District Demographics (based on 2020 census block-level data)
Additionally, three current State House incumbents are benefiting from the addition of the 11th Suffolk— a long fought for House seat located entirely within the city of Chelsea. White incumbents who benefit from this seat include:
Dan Ryan, who beat Vidot in 2020 and keeps Charlestown while gaining historically low-turnout precincts at MIT and BU;
Joe McGonagle, who narrowly defeated Gerly Adrien in 2018, loses Everett 2-1, a precinct where the majority of residents are people of color and where he had his worst performance in 2018.
Jessica Giannino, a first-term Revere representative, loses the Chelsea precincts where she only narrowly beat Joe Gravellese in 2020 amid her 22-point district-wide victory.
We saw all three of these districts as potential Deep Democracy pickups in our initial analysis of the 2010-2020 maps. The path to victory for a movement candidate is now tougher in each of them. These changes in the 11th Suffolk illustrate the paradox of the maps for Deep Democracy: they present a clear path to allow specific communities of color around Massachusetts to elect representatives who better represent them on Beacon Hill, but they complicate the path to statewide legislative wins by shoring up Representatives who back leadership. As we celebrate the progress advocates and communities made in fighting for these districts, it's clear that to build community power with these maps in the next decade, we cannot settle for progress only in the 33 “minority opportunity” districts handed down by leadership.
In Massachusetts, community demands for fair and equitable representation are met when the legislature can do so without putting their moderate incumbents at risk. When these two goals conflict, incumbents always win. Just look at how the proposed maps draw Brockton’s district; instead of uniting Brockton, Randolph, and Stoughton in a district where the majority of residents are people of color, the legislature keeps New England’s only majority-Black city in a Senate district paired with conservative and overwhelmingly white suburbs.*** In the name of “continuity,” the legislature maintains the a political base of entrenched moderate Senator Michael Brady, who has been in the legislature for over a decade.
As Drawing Democracy coalition convener and Mass Voter Table Executive Director Beth Huang told the Globe, “continuity speaks toward an incumbent having similar voters[…] I have nothing personal against Mike Brady, who has been a good senator, but continuity is about legislators choosing voters instead of voters choosing legislators. I think the racial equity considerations should outweigh the principle of continuity.” In both the House and the Senate maps, the redistricting committee sought to deliver both, but almost never delivered on racial equity when it meant a tougher reelection for an incumbent.
These maps show us why we need a Deep Democracy playbook that leads to a shared equity agenda to deliver on equity, that enables movement and progressive organizations to build their political power, and to win on a wider playing field. When you look at the leading elections and policy outcomes in the last 10 years, it is states like Virginia, Colorado, Arizona, Texas and Georgia that are leading on democracy and civic engagement. Even when facing a conservative backlash or tough elections that threatens all this progress, movement and progressive organizations, as well as donors are collaborating to win by forging new strategies that account for the multi-racial and multilingual reality of our national ecosystem.
The new maps show what we have long known about Deep Democracy in Massachusetts: if Boston-based progressives simply wait for changes in the state’s electorate to carry them to victory without funding Deep Democracy and powerbuilding across the state, movements cannot build the power needed for tax and racial justice in Massachusetts. In 47 years we have only elected two Democrats — Michael Dukakis and Deval Patrick — to the corner office and have only elected less than 100 BIPOC leaders to Beacon Hill. This incremental approach will continue to get in the way of progress and transformation that millions of people of color and their families deserve.
What is clear is that delivering on equity in Massachusetts puts the status quo at risk and threatens the power establishment. That kind of justice we need at this moment won’t be given away by a redistricting commission. It has to be done by building trust, recognizing past harm and letting go of what no longer works, and thinking boldly about what it will take to get us there.
This starts with funding the people and movements who are ready to fight for it. Click here.
To see our full redistricting analysis, click here.
* Deep democracy is our modern political framework that observes the modern political ecosystem and and identifies counties and districts with high concentrations of people of color, Millennials and Gen-Z, and educated suburban voters. It also looks at concentration of movement organizations within these counties to understand where and how donors and philanthropy should invest their money.
** We identified these incumbents based on the demographic and political composition of precincts where these challengers have succeeded in the past and found that precincts with more Black voters, Latino voters, and voters who backed Bernie Sanders in the presidential primary were more likely to vote against incumbents in primaries.
*** After publishing of this blog, we learned that the legislature has proposed small changes to Brockton’s Senate map, adding Avon and precincts in Randolph. This will likely align the district more with proposals from Drawing Democracy advocates, but no details have been released.