The Democratic-Republicans appear in these excerpts in a single connection: as the political party whose interests Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts advanced when he drew state Senate districts in Essex County in 1812, the episode from which the practice of gerrymandering takes its name. The excerpts do not describe the party’s founding, its platform, its leading figures, or its history apart from this one redistricting episode and its immediate aftermath.
The 1812 Massachusetts gerrymander
According to Nick Seabrook, the common origin story of gerrymandering holds that Elbridge Gerry, as Governor of Massachusetts, was attempting to consolidate his own power over the state. Gerry was worried about the Federalists in the state Senate and the fact that they were thwarting his legislative agenda. He therefore drew the boundaries of the state Senate districts in Essex County in order to ensure that the maximum number of Democratic-Republican candidates would be elected. Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022)
Seabrook stresses that Gerry did not accomplish this by manipulating the populations of the districts, placing a lot more people in one and a lot fewer in another. Instead he manipulated who lived in particular districts. He found that by packing as many Federalists as possible into a single district in Essex County, where they represented an overwhelming majority of the population, his political party, the Democratic-Republicans, would be able to win all of the other districts in the area. Seabrook identifies this as one of the most common techniques in gerrymandering, known as “packing,” in which the influence of opponents is reduced by cramming them together into as few districts as possible where they make up massive supermajorities, allowing the mapmaker’s party to win the rest of the seats by smaller majorities. Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022)
In the same exchange, Seabrook notes that there was a lot more to the story than he had anticipated when researching his book, and he characterizes the account as the common origin story rather than a settled one. Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022)
Aftermath and effectiveness
The Democratic-Republicans’ gains from the Essex County map did not last. Seabrook states that the gerrymander from Massachusetts basically worked for one election, and then the Democratic-Republicans immediately lost their majority in the next election and the map that they had created was swiftly repealed. He offers this as an example of a pattern that recurs frequently in the historical gerrymanders he analyzes: they were not especially effective, largely because the tools used to create them were fairly blunt and fairly ineffective. Districts in that period were drawn using pen and paper or quill and parchment, with mapmakers patching together districts from reams of census statistics and making their best guess about how those districts might vote in the future. Who’s Electing Whom? Politicians or the Voters? (2022)
Seabrook contrasts this historical gerrymandering, which happened but did not happen all the time and was done infrequently and not especially effectively, with what he calls the modern era of gerrymandering. That era began in the 1960s with a series of Supreme Court decisions establishing the constitutional principle of “one person, one vote,” which required all 50 states after every census to redraw all of their districts at every level of government so that those districts would have almost precisely equal populations. The development was followed in the 1970s and 1980s by the first computer software programs that could be used to draw districts much more efficiently and quickly and effectively than had been possible before. Who’s Electing Whom? Politicians or the Voters? (2022)
The excerpts do not state what became of the Democratic-Republicans as an organization after the repeal of the Massachusetts map, nor do they describe the party’s role in any other state or period.
Across episodes
The same question — how the Democratic-Republicans figure in the origin of gerrymandering — is argued in two episodes, both featuring Nick Seabrook, and the excerpts show no development between them: the 2022-10-31 midterm elections special and the 2022-11-01 episode present the Essex County packing maneuver, the party’s one-election advantage, and the swift repeal of the map in substantially the same terms. Midterm Elections Special: The Surprising History of Gerrymandering (2022) Who’s Electing Whom? Politicians or the Voters? (2022)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not give the Democratic-Republicans’ founding date, their platform, their leadership, or their relationship to the later Democratic Party. They do not name the specific legislation that required members of Congress to be elected from districts, nor the Supreme Court decisions that established “one person, one vote.” They do not state what happened to Elbridge Gerry after the map was repealed, or whether the party contested any election outside Massachusetts.