Is there an electoral glass ceiling in the South?

Left: Congressman Mel Watt's famous "Interstate 85" district, in red


538.com has a thoughtful piece today on why there aren't more African-Americans in Congress and state governorships. He wonders if a big chunk of the reason lies in the safety-valve of congressional politics the last twenty years:

I suspect that a lot of the problem, however, is that as Congressional Districts have become more and more gerrymandered, leading to the creation of more and more majority-minority districts following the 1980 and 1990 censuses, the black political apparatus has become more and more 'ghettoized'. Black candidates have not had to develop a message that appeals to white voters, because most of them don't have very many white voters in their districts (about half the nation's African-American population is limited to the 60 blackest Congressional Districts). Nor do they have very many conservative voters in their districts, and so they have not had to develop a message that appeals to conservatives, even though the black population itself is far more diverse in its political views than is generally acknowledged.

Because they are not very representative of their states as a whole, moreover, these districts are also not likely to be very good launching pads for ascension to the Senate or to the governor's mansion. Do I think Jesse Jackson Jr. would have some trouble winning statewide office? I do -- but I also think that Pete Stark, who lives in a mostly white and Asian but extremely liberal district in the Bay Area, would have trouble becoming a senator in California.

Conversely, of course, the majority-minority districts drain black voters from surrounding districts, and so white politicians have not had to develop messages that appeal to black voters. This may be particularly problematic for Republicans, who went from winning 16-18 percent of the black vote for the Presidency in the 1970s to only about half of that now.

Democrats ought to be mindful of these things when redistricting occurs again after 2010, aggressively challenging Republicans on both the wisdom and the legality of creating ghettoized Congressional Districts. Majority-minority districts harm Democrats by creating surplus Democratic votes, and in the long run, they probably hurt African-Americans too.