If you want to understand what’s happening in the Texas and California gerrymandering wars, you can watch cable news. Or you can turn to Jeff Reichert’s documentary Gerrymandering. A veteran indie film director and distribution executive, Reichert’s 2010 movie tackles the fraught question of legislators contortedly redrawing district lines to gain political advantage.
The film has just been made available for viewing on Vimeo. Watching it now feels a little like unearthing a Nostradamus quatrain just as Napoleon is coming to power. The film in part tracks the 2003 efforts by Texas Republicans to redistrict their state to their partisan benefit, prompting Democrats to flee to avoid a vote — in other words, a perfect echo of today’s headlines. As Texas Republicans move to take five seats from Democrats at the behest of Donald Trump and California governor Gavin Newsom counters with his own mid-decade referendum to restore them for Dems, The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Reichert to gauge the state of affairs as he sees them.
I have to say, watching your film now feels extremely eerie. Did you have a crystal ball on 2025 back in 2010?
There’s no doubt that what’s happening in Texas is the sequel to the original horror movie. And horror sequels are always bloodier, meaner and more violent than the original. When you hear about Democrats forcibly restrained from leaving the capital so they must vote, or two [Republican] legislators trying to out-‘man’ each other by saying they’re going to the FBI — well it would be farce if it wasn’t so terrifying. What it represents for our democracy and how at least one political party wields power in that democracy is just scary.
Mid-decade redistricting — the idea of drawing new districts not based on the census — is, as you document, something that has happened before. And gerrymandering — the original Massachusetts political Gerry who inaugurated the practice — arrived over 200 years ago. Is there any solace to be taken that we’ve gone through this and survived?
You’re right that it’s not new, even in the modern era. But the difference is that there used to be a lot more legal protections back then [in 2003]. The Voting Rights Act hadn’t been chipped away at, as it has by the Supreme Court in various cases over the last 20 years. You have John Roberts saying “it would be nice if there was a standard on partisan gerrymandering” but then the Court ignores the issue. Back with the 2003 redistricting the Supreme Court actually ruled that [Texas23] was unconstitutional because of racial gerrymandering. It’s hard to see who offers that protection now.
Which brings us to California. It does feel like there’s a little bit of other governors taking matters into their own hands, saying if the courts don’t stop this, we will — a Commando or Collateral Damage kind of deal. Which is funny by the way because Schwarzenegger is one of the main characters in your film who successfully takes redistricting out of the hands of legislators when he’s governor of California, with Prop 11. What do you make of this Newsom vigilante-esque approach?
It’s hard because in one sense we were there to document the path to Prop 11. And as a citizen I felt pretty good about what we did. It passed by one percent, and then when there was another initiative on the ballot years later it passed by 20 points. I’d like to think we had some impact — we sent out 7,000 copies of the film [to electeds and advocates;] we were part of a movement to take this out of the hands of legislators. But when I hear Newsom I say “yeah, man, do it.” It feels like an existential moment for democracy, because what other tools are available if you’re a Democrat? So why not go for it.
And you’re not concerned we’ll be right back to where we started with gerrymandering as a partisan weapon, a race to the bottom? Eventually almost no district is ever competitive again, with the opposition party packed into one district or cracked into many small pieces where they have no real influence.
Oh I’m definitely concerned. But I think we’re in an existential moment right now, and we need to make some choices we wouldn’t otherwise make. This Newsom referendum is set up so that California would go back [to the independent commission] after the 2030 census. So it’s an emergency measure. The best case for democracy here is that Texas does their thing — that die has been cast — and California movies forward with their thing. And then the parties look at each other — in places like Illinois and Missouri and Maryland and Florida and New York — and say “this is mutually assured destruction” and stop. I don’t know that that’s what will happen. People are not thinking about the future or legacy right now. They’re thinking about survival. But I hope it does.
And what about the odds for doing something more fundamental? Instead of hoping for detente, we could overhaul the whole system legislatively, like Andrew Yang’s proposal this week that we create much bigger, multi-member districts and use ranked-choice voting to select a slate of them?
I’m not as familiar with Andrew Yang’s proposal but there’s clearly a way we could go where we’re not just choosing one member in these very small districts and it’s first-past-the-post. But I don’t think it can be a jungle where everyone in a state ranks all the representatives either — there should be a geographical component.
Yang’s proposal is cool because it still gives you some geography. It would just be a much bigger area, and you’d get several representatives, like a delegation. Presumably almost everyone who lives in that bigger district would feel like they at least have someone who represents them.
That is interesting and would solve some of the issues. There are a number of other proposals. Mike Lawler, the Westchester Republican Congressman, wants to ban redistricting by politicians nationwide. John Tanner, a former Congressman from Tennessee, tried to do that a couple of years ago. The idea is instead of just some states trying to move to an independent commission Congress would just take the power away from the states and hand it to a national commission.
Of course Lawler is someone who would be right in the line of fire if New York redistricts since in 2022 he first won his seat — which itself was in a newly created district — by literally less than 1 percent, just 1,800 votes.
Oh, everybody has an interest here.
Which makes it hard to imagine it would have momentum — there are too many Congress members on the other side who might need a little boost from their state legislators to ensure their seat stays safe. Why would they take that power away from them?
I don’t even think Lawler’s proposal comes to the floor, to be honest. But I do think it’s interesting you’re seeing members of Congress criticize it, even if it’s only because they’re in a state where their party doesn’t control the legislature.
The endgame here of every state except maybe a few purple ones having representatives from only one party is really dispiriting — this clearly is not what the Congressional system was set up to be.
If you look around the world there’s a reason all the other democracies do it differently. No one has emulated exactly what we do. Even in countries where we’ve installed democracies they do it differently. As we note in the movie there are countries that don’t have direct elections or don’t have single-member districts or take so many other approaches. They saw how we did it and said “that’s not going to work.”
I guess it’s the feeling that because we started representative democracy we shouldn’t change it.
The idea that the system that was first out of the gate a few hundred years ago doesn’t need a tune-up is absurd. And yet we’re still stuck doing it the same way. There’s never going to be a perfect system — we have that Thomas Pynchon quote in the film that says that anytime you draw a line you create a certain kind of division, you put people on different sides. But we’re doing it with the worst possible scenario. There are many other ways we could do it.
You do suggest in the film that both parties gerrymander, but that Republicans seem to do it more.
In the current climate redistricting does trend toward Republicans. That has to do with demographic trends and also that Democrats have fewer chambers [because Republicans control more statehouses, largely in sparsely populated states]. But that’s a climate thing right now because of who has the power and where and the kinds of population that’s getting redistricted. It hasn’t always been this way and as we say in the film Democrats do it too, and it’s bad for democracy for politicians to draw the map no matter which party is doing it.
How does watching the movie make you feel now — do you take pride in foreseeing where so much of this went?
It feels like a little bit of a time capsule to me actually. Maybe it’s just recency bias but there’s something that feels different now. In the film we had Hakeem Jeffries saying we can’t redistrict and now he’s helping organize the efforts in his own party. There’s just a tone and tenor in our post-COVID politics that’s different.
You say time capsule, I say origin story.
Ha, well in cinematic terms that does feel appropriate.
Is there anything that gives you hope? You’ve studied this for years, thought about the arc of the story. Is there any happy ending?
The best hope might be the voters. They could say “something’s rotten in the state of Texas” and vote out the party that did this there, for example. Things like that have happened before. You go too far, you carve up the district too much, and people resist at the ballot box.
You’re saying voters get what’s going on.
There’s a common sense aspect to this. If you explained that a Republican, say, got 55 percent of the presidential vote in Ohio and they have 60 percent of Congress, most voters get that. But when it’s suddenly 85 percent of the seats they feel something’s off. So maybe they resist and send a message to politicians. But I don’t think that’s what happens. I’m quite nervous in fact. I think we’re get a continued wave of redistricting between now and 2026 in states both red and blue. It will create a lot of voter confusion and maybe make some people not participate. Redistricting is a symptom, one more way we cast about using any tool necessary to perpetuate power. I don’t see the disease cured anytime soon.
