David Blaska spent this past week demolishing, on Right Wisconsin, the state daily newspaper crusade to disenfranchise Republicans — I mean, change the way legislative districts are drawn.

Blaska started by examining whether or not third-party redistricting is actually nonpartisan:

Iowa’s legislative reference bureau is directed to draw the maps without regard to election results or the home addresses of legislators, under the direction of a five-member commission of legislators. It submits its product for legislative approval. If the legislature turns down three successive redistricting plans submitted in this process, the Iowa Supreme Court decides but hasn’t had to in the three redistrictings since the system was adopted after the 1980 census.

The National Conference of State Legislatures tells that 13 states submit reapportionment entirely to a non-partisan third party. (Those states are Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington.) (Main and Vermont have advisory commissions.)

“There are pros and cons to removing the process form the traditional legislative process,” the NCSL’s Tim Storey relates. “Reformers often mistakenly assume that commissions will be less partisan than legislatures when conducting redistricting but that depends largely on the design of the board or commission.”

At the behest of self-styled centrists Sens. Tim Cullen, D-Janesville, and Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, the non-partisan Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) drew its own maps this year to support the two retiring legislators’ Senate Bill 163. The bill would designate the LRB to conduct redistricting, subject to final legislative approval, as its counterpart does in Iowa. The agency would be directed to draw its maps without regard to party or incumbency.

Cartographer David Michael Miller examined the issue for Madison’s Isthmus weekly newspaper. “Slaying the Gerrymander” concludes that under Legislative Reference Bureau’s maps, if voters had voted the same party for legislative races as they did for President, today’s Assembly would be 55 Democrats and 44 Republicans. But, undermining his argument,  if they voted consistent with their choice for governor in the original Walker-Barrett matchup in 2010, the Assembly would be 68 Republicans to 31 Democrats — even more lopsided than the 60-39 split that actually resulted from the 2012 elections.

However, the model LRB maps create 22 competitive Assembly districts as compared to 15 under the actual map, if competitive is defined as an election decided by less than 10% of the vote.

But then, “District-based elections hardly ever produce a perfect fit between votes and representation.” That was the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1986 in Davis v. Bandemer.

After the State of Indiana redistricted in 1982, Democratic candidates for its lower house received 52% of votes cast statewide, but 43% of the seats. They brought a lawsuit (as Wisconsin’s Democrats did in 2011).

In the Indiana case, the high court in 1986 ruled that only gerrymandering by race, “an immutable characteristic,” is suitable for adjudication. Highly mutable, by contrast, are political allegiances. They can and do change, the Supreme Court noted. Consider that Madison — deep blue today — elected a Republican to the State Assembly throughout JFK’s and LBJ’s presidencies. What’s more, the more ambitious the gerrymander, the potentially more self-defeating.

“In order to gerrymander, the legislative majority must weaken some of its safe seats, thus exposing its own incumbents to greater risks of defeat …  Similarly, an overambitious gerrymander can lead to disaster for the legislative majority: because it has created more seats in which it hopes to win relatively narrow victories, the same swing in overall voting strength will tend to cost the legislative majority more and more seats as the gerrymander becomes more ambitious.”

What about Iowa and its prized redistricting system? Like Wisconsin, the state could be described as purple. Unlike our state, politics throughout Iowa’s geography are fairly evenly balanced, whereas Wisconsin has Democratic hotspots in Milwaukee and Madison, Janesville and Kenosha.

Isthmus may celebrate Iowa’s greater number of close elections. But Iowa has retained 97% of its incumbents since the first use of independent redistricting three decades ago, the liberal Center for Voting and Democracy points out.

Schultz and Cullen claim that there should be more Democrats in the Legislature because more Wisconsinites voted for Democratic legislative candidates in 2012. (Which means that Schultz, who represents a Senate district that has sent exactly two Democrats to Madison since statehood, is in favor of disenfranchising his own constituents. Someone in the Southwest Wisconsin news media should ask Schultz why he wants to do that.)

Blaska proves that not only is journalism the opposite of math, politics is also the opposite of math:

When Democrats lose, it seems from here on the other side of the political spectrum, they tend to blame the system. That is what former Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz was doing when he threw down the challenge flag.

“It’s important to remember that Democratic Assembly candidates received some 193,000 more votes than Republicans in the 2012 elections. Republicans hold a 60-39 lead in that chamber only because they made gerrymandering into an exact science when they redistricted Wisconsin.”

Well, that’s his theory. But there is no instant replay in politics–and there are better theories.

Democrats received more votes in the aggregate because they fielded many more candidates. But Republicans won more races because they fielded twice as many incumbents. Incumbency, as the credit card company might say, has its advantages. That’s the third factor in Republican domination of the State Assembly in the 2012 election. (Unlike the Senate, the lower house elects all 99 of its members every even-numbered year.)

“We know that incumbency is a powerful factor,” say John Sides and Eric McGhee of George Washington University, “bringing candidates greater visibility, adding to their campaign coffers, and deterring quality challengers from running.

“The researchers give incumbents a 5 percentage point advantage no matter their party label.

Of the 78 Republican Assembly candidates, 52 were incumbents. Put another way: in two-thirds of contested seats, a sitting Republican legislator was running on what amounted to a referendum on Act 10 enacted the year before. Just that June, Scott Walker won his recall in a heavy statewide turn-out by a healthy 7% margin. So were Wisconsin voters going to reward the governor in June but punish his legislature in November? Not likely.

By contrast, only 12 of the Democrats in those 74 contested races (not counting write-ins) were incumbents— putting them at a 4 to 1 disadvantage to Republicans.

In the 2012 State Assembly election, Republicans fielded twice as many incumbents as Democrats — by a 52 to 26 margin. What’s more, GOP incumbents were concentrated in the 74 races contested by the two major parities — by a 48 to 12 margin. That helped Republicans win 56, or three-quarters, of those contested races.

The GOP had more incumbents to put in the field because they came into the election with a 59-39-1 advantage. That majority was achieved in the 2010 election. That’s right, the election held before Republicans emerged from the catacombs with their crooked maps and sputtering candles! Who drew those maps? A federal judge!

The difference wrought by redistricting? The one, conservative-leaning independent who did not seek re-election in 2012 gave way to a Republican for a 60-39 Assembly advantage. The state senate remained 18-15 Republican; the U.S. House was unchanged, also.

Blaska uses the People’s Republic of Madison as an example of what compact districts are:

Incumbents have a built-in advantage in fund-raising and name recognition. That’s one reason true free speech advocates disdain campaign spending limits as nothing more than incumbent protection plans.

If Wisconsin Democrats lost the battle of incumbency, they also misfired on geography. That’s another reason Republicans dominate the State Assembly by a 60-39 margin, despite fewer aggregate votes.

Equitable legislative districts are judged on five concerns: population equality, municipal splits, communities of interest, contiguity and compactness. The original gerrymandered district that benefited one Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts in 1812, was none of those things. In fact, it resembled a salamander, hence the term.

Look again at the 76th District, it is entirely surrounded by Democratic Assembly Districts, equally lopsided. To the west is Terese Berceau in the 77th and Brett Hulsey in the 78th, like Taylor’s district, part of Fred Risser’s Senate district. Fred’s been there since James Duane Doty was rolling barrel hoops in the meadow. To the north in District 48 is another unopposed freshman Melissa Sargent; due east is Diane Hesselbein in the 79th and Gary Hebl in the 46th. To the south, Robb Kahl in the 47th — Mark Miller’s Senate District. All Democrats.

But all are compact and contiguous. All respect communities of interest. Cities, villages  and towns are not split (except, of course, for Madison, which is too populous to be contained within one Assembly district).

One would have to snake the district along the median strip of East Washington Avenue through U.S. Highway 151 all the way past Sun Prairie to Columbia County to pick up significant Republican votes. Such a district would be neither compact, contiguous, or respect communities of interest.

Milwaukee and Madison — like big to large cities across the nation — vote overwhelmingly Democrat, or worse. Chris Taylor’s 76th District contributed a significant vote to the national Green candidate ticket (Jill Stein and Ben Manski, anyone?). That vote, combined with the Democratic Obama-Biden ticket, outpolled Romney-Ryan by over 5 to 1. Are the libs ghettoized in the 76th? Probably.

And irredeemably. “Democrats receive more votes than seats,” write Jowei Chen of the University of Michigan, and Jonathan Rodden of Stanford, in the Jan. 26, 2014 New York Times. “because so many of their voters reside in dense cities that Democratic candidates win with overwhelming majorities, while Republican voters are more evenly distributed across exurbs and the rural periphery.

Chen and Rodden put their non-partisan computers to work on drawing maps. “The results were not encouraging for reform advocates. In the vast majority of states, our nonpartisan simulations produced Republican seat shares that were not much different from the actual numbers in the last election.”

“A motivated Democratic cartographer could produce districts that accurately reflected overall partisanship in states like these by carefully crafting the metropolitan districts and snaking districts along the historical canals and rail lines that once connected the non-metropolitan Democratic enclaves. But such districts are unlikely to emerge by chance from a nonpartisan process.”

That’s what southern Democrats and the ethnic Democrats of the North did for decades relates nationally respected redistricting expert Jim Troupis, of Middleton. “Create ‘Pie’ districts, dive into neighboring areas, no longer within the community and thus disenfranchise those added. That’s what they did to eliminate black representatives over decades: create white districts by cutting the black community to pieces.”

Take heavily urban Milwaukee. “Presumably, no Milwaukee African American wants to represent Brookfield,” Troupis told RightWisconsin. So, necessarily, the districts remained urban. Geography controls the result.

Chen and Rodden agree: “In short, the Democrats’ geography problem is bigger than their gerrymandering problem.”

I’ve lived in two enormous Senate districts which have a common border — the 14th and the 17th. They include a lot of rural areas. The reason those Senate districts are so large is that the law requires that legislative districts be as uniform in population as possible, within 10 percent from biggest to smallest. Given the shift of population from rural areas into metropolitan areas, you’re going to have either really large Senate districts or really small Senate districts. And if you stick people from, say, Waukesha into a Milwaukee district, or people from Richland Center into a Madison district, those people will be disenfranchised for two reasons summarized in one sentence: Big-city Democrats do not represent the interests of rural or suburban Republicans.

Blaska further exposes the lie that Iowa redistricting produces more competitive races:

… Iowa’s non-partisan Legislative Services Bureau threw incumbents together in 13 of that state’s 100 lower house districts, according to Ballotpedia. That occurred in only two Wisconsin Assembly districts. First-term Republican Evan Wynn lost to Democrat Andy Jorgensen in the southern Wisconsin’s redrawn 43rd. In the mid-state 61st, Republican Samantha Kerkman defeated Democrat John Steinbrink. (Again, for simplicity’s sake, we are focusing on the lower house where all members are elected every two years in both states.)

Perhaps more head-to-head combat among incumbents really would make for better government. Wisconsin tried that after the 1990 Census, remembers redistricting expert and Middleton attorney James Troupis, who counseled mappers in the most recent process, as well.

“In 1990 our maps paired more legislators against each other” Troupis remembers. Federal District Judge Barbara Crabb “undid all the pairings! Judge Crabb explicitly approved the use of incumbency as a basis to draw districts.”

Absent running incumbents head to head, the case could be made that open seats, absent any entrenched incumbent on the ballot, are more competitive. (We are counting as an incumbent a candidate who served in the previous term even if running in a district that is entirely or partially altered.)

In that measure, Wisconsin and Iowa can lay equal claim to good government. Of Wisconsin’s 99 Assembly races, 23 ballots listed no incumbent. In Iowa’s 100 lower house races, 22 featured only newcomers.

David Michael Miller in Isthmus defines a competitive election as one in which the opposing candidates’ vote totals within 10% of each other. Again, if Iowa is the standard, Wisconsin’s 2012 Assembly map passes the test.

Iowa’s vaunted non-partisan mapping system produced only 16 races decided within 10% among its 100 lower house seats. That compares to Wisconsin’s 15 of 99.

Incumbency retains its advantages, even in Iowa. Incumbents there won a staggering 91% of their races despite the mapping turmoil created by the census redraw. (We define incumbents as candidates who had served in the previous session of the legislature.) Wisconsin’s incumbents were similarly successful; voters returned 95% of those seeking re-election.

Raw numbers tell the story in more prosaically: Wisconsin ran more incumbents — 52 to Iowa’s 42 — good for a 2 to 1 advantage over their Democratic opponents in the Badger state. Incumbency in Iowa was more evenly balanced between the two major parties.

The case could be made that the Democrats, with 19 seats unchallenged to 13 for Republicans, could have tallied a majority of votes — while still remaining in the minority — had they run as many candidates. But certainly, the disparity of uncontested seats between the parties was greater in Wisconsin. Seven times more Democrats than Republicans ran unopposed in the Badger State.

Troupis tells RightWisconsin “The idea that competitiveness is a criteria is truly unbelievable. What does that mean? What does it have to do with communities of interest? How do you judge it? Seriously, I view it as pernicious on so many levels, including locking in even more the dominance of the two parties.”

For not the first time, newspaper editorialists pontificating on the evils of a political process fail to correctly identify the problem. If a supposedly neutral redistricting process results in exactly 4 percent fewer incumbents getting reelected, that’s not much of an improvement. If the researchers are correct that incumbency gives an incumbent a 5-percent vote advantage, maybe the media should look in the mirror at why that is — the media’s uncritical reporting of what politicians do, for instance.

There is one sure way to eliminate the advantage of incumbency: Eliminate incumbents. That is, ban anyone running for the Legislature from serving more than one term at a time. That used to be the law for Wisconsin sheriffs; into the 20th century they could serve only two-year terms and were banned from succeeding themselves. (Of course, that resulted in such shenanigans as wives of sheriffs getting elected and appointing their husbands as undersheriffs.)

The bigger thing the opinionmongers are missing is why politicians are acting so … political. The reason is that the stakes are too high for winning elections. State legislators are paid nearly $50,000 a year, which is 80 percent more than an average Wisconsinite makes in a year. Government at every level has too much power, which increases the importance of winning elections in our zero-sum-game political world. From that comes the big-money donations, because for professional politicians there is nothing — nothing — more important than winning elections.

This is a divided political state — more apparently than Iowa, and probably more than most states. Everyone who pays any attention to politics knows where the Democratic and Republican strongholds are. Changing redistricting won’t change that — Madison and Milwaukee will elect Democrats, the Milwaukee suburbs and the Fox River Valley will elect Republicans, and rural areas will elect politicians from whichever party is strongest in their area.

Blaska is absolutely correct in asserting that those who want to change the process don’t like the result. Losers blame the process instead of themselves.