Indiana, why are you the way that you are?
How 205 years of Indiana history led to our new redistricted legislative maps.
FIRST IN IMPORTANTVILLE: Suzanne Jaworowski, a former top aide to former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, has hired State Sen. Erin Houchin to be her campaign manager as she runs for Indiana State Treasurer. Houchin managed the successful campaign of Attorney General Todd Rokita. Jaworowski is one of four candidates seeking the GOP nomination.
Jaworowski has also won the endorsement of Perry, her former boss. He’ll endorse her in a video this morning. “Suzie Jaworowski was part of the team that made America energy independent,” Perry says. “She was a star on my team at DOE. She is wicked smart, a great patriot, and would make a fine treasurer for the state of Indiana.”
Indiana Republicans rolled out new legislative maps over the last two weeks that will shape Hoosier politics for the next decade. At the congressional level, incumbents will likely see a 7-2 Republican to Democratic split remain intact.
Here, in conversation with Indiana Republicans' and Democrats’ resident historians, Trevor Foughty, a former political and governmental aide who writes about Indiana’s political history, and Matthew Kochevar, an Indiana attorney and a Young Democrats of America National Committee Representative with Indiana Young Democrats, we explore exactly that.
Foughty is a 13-year veteran of politics and government, having worked for the Indiana Republican Party, former Gov. Mitch Daniels’ political action committee, Deputy Chief of Staff for then-Rep. Todd Young, and Young’s U.S. Senate campaign manager. He also publishes the essential Capitol & Washington, the preeminent website, and a collection of databases chronicling Indiana political history. Kochevar is considered his party’s know-everything, go-to source on state electoral history, as well as a rules aficionado in the young Democrats community.
BONUS: Using the shape files published by the Indiana General Assembly, Trevor Foughty has launched a tool on his Capitol & Washington website that allows voters a closer look at the newly proposed House, Senate, and Congressional maps. Utilizing Google Maps, the new tool is the first that allows zooming in to the street level to see where districts begin and end. The tool can be found here.
Together, their brains may contain more factoids about the broad sweep of Indiana political history than any other two in the state.
Below, we talk about how the rural-urban divide has defined Indiana, the state’s failed experiment with an at-large congressional seat, the 42-year period Indiana once went without new maps—and more.
Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images.
For starters, gentlemen, how did we get here—with these maps? What’s the historical perspective to be had?
Foughty: From a historical perspective, I think there are two different strands to follow to properly understand redistricting this year. There is the more obvious history of redistricting itself, and I'll hit on that in a moment. But first, there is a more interesting thing to consider—at least to me—and that's the notion that in the nucleus of Hoosier DNA is a desire for a strong component of democratic representation in government.
We've seen this play out in a big way over the course of the pandemic, with the bristling against running the state via executive order rather than by legislation. I read a lot of James Madison (the IU professor, not the U.S. President) while I was stuck at home for most of 2020 and early 2021. Though it came out a few years before the pandemic, his book "Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana" does an excellent job of illuminating that the claims of executive overreach by many in the state, and especially in the legislature, fits with the arc of our history, and I've explored that idea more in some of my own research. Anyone interested in this really should read Madison's "Hoosiers" because it's more a state biography than a state history—that is, it doesn't just tell us what happened, it tells us (across multiple traits) why Hoosiers are the way we are).
Indiana's constitution created one of the weaker gubernatorial offices in the country, and this was by design. The federal Northwest Ordinance that gave us the Northwest Territory (and later the Indiana Territory) was intentionally undemocratic, because Congress didn't think a democratic government would take hold on the frontier. It allowed for phased-in democracy gradually over time and as populations grew. In the first phase, the territorial governor was appointed, and he appointed (and thus controlled) the legislature and the judiciary. In the second phase, residents could elect members to a lower legislative chamber, but the governor still controlled the upper chamber. Next, they could elect both chambers, but couldn't elect a governor until statehood was granted.
The first Governor of the Indiana Territory was William Henry Harrison. He's remembered popularly today as our first territorial governor, a war hero, and a U.S. President, but he wasn't that popular amongst his constituents in the early 1800's. In a piece about race and politics I wrote earlier this year, I talked about this, as one of the biggest drivers of animosity towards the non-elected state executive was how he allowed slavery in the Territory when it was supposed to be prohibited (and he owned slaves himself). This led some Hoosiers to petition to move into the first phase of democratic government early, which Congress eventually granted. The anti-Harrison political forces won the legislative elections overwhelmingly, and through their leaders Dennis Pennington and Jonathan Jennings they really controlled the Territory into Statehood. Pennington was the first and only Speaker of the House in the Territory, and was later the chief architect of the first state constitution in 1816. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that our state government had a stronger legislative branch than executive branch.
After the state went bankrupt in the 1840's because of a failed infrastructure plan, Hoosiers voted for a Constitutional Convention to write a new state constitution (which was adopted in 1851). Even though it curbed the power of the legislature (which had championed and passed the infrastructure bill that put the state heavily into debt) by only allowing them to meet every other year and forbidding them from obligating new debt, the new constitution expanded on this idea of a strong component of democracy. It did so by weakening the governor further by making the previously appointed positions of Secretary of State, State Auditor, and State Treasurer elected positions. It similarly made the state Supreme Court an elected body, and for 120 years our Supreme Court (and later, Appellate Court) justices were first chosen at state political conventions and then the ballot.
I could go on and on, but I think you get the point that Hoosiers have always wanted as many decisions in government as possible being made by someone whose name is on a ballot (OK, one more quick example: Look at the strong response a popular governor like Mitch Daniels got when he proposed eliminating elected township governments). We made sweeping changes to the state constitution in the 1970's that reformed state government, but probably the biggest takeaway from that is how much stronger it made the legislative branch. This era, to me, is the most important to understanding modern Indiana politics, because everything as we know it today originated in these reforms.
Matthew Kochevar: Generally I agree that the state constitutions we have operated under have created a "weak" executive as compared to the legislative branch, though this has not stopped the executive from acting in ways not contemplated by the state constitution. Gov. Oliver Perry Morton keeping the legislature from meeting in 1863 and essentially borrowing money to keep the state operating is one example. Another is Issac P. Gray and his 1887 machinations to be elected to the U.S. Senate, whereby after his opponents in the General Assembly convinced his own Lt. Governor to resign from office, Gray convinced the Secretary of State to put the office up on the ballot to have it filled by special election, which eventually led to the Black Day of the General Assembly and the ending of that legislative session, and in essence, Gray's political career. Trevor covered this extensively in his three-part series on the role of the President Pro Tempore a few years ago. I too agree that much of how our state government operates today is through the constitutional changes enacted by the voters in 1970. Gov. Otis Bowen, who as Speaker oversaw the passage of those amendments in the House in the late 1960s and then as Governor saw their implementation, including selecting the first appellate judges and Supreme Court justices under the new judicial selection system.
Foughty: Coincidentally, there was another big thing that happened at basically the same time, that's also important for this discussion. From 1921 until 1963, the state did not draw new legislative maps. Prior to that time, it largely followed Congressional reapportionment, which changed at sometimes irregular intervals as the country grew. But as the state became more urbanized—especially as Indianapolis grew—the legislature refused to redistrict so that the rural politicians would continue to hold most of the power. It wasn't until a court ordered them to draw new maps that they finally got around to doing so. Up to this point, legislative district lines strictly followed county lines. But in the early 1960's the "one man, one vote" principle came out of the U.S. Supreme Court, and so all the maps drawn in 1963 were challenged in court and overturned. New maps were drawn in 1965 and similarly challenged, with the Congressional maps being overturned and redrawn yet again in 1967.
Kochevar: Go back even further and you can see that the redistricting of Indiana has been subject to the same issues that Trevor has written about here. If you want to see a lot of the former legislative and congressional maps the General Assembly has adopted since statehood, look at this site that is still maintained by Indiana University. You will notice that in the 1880s the General Assembly passed a number of redistricting plans that according to the case law I am aware of and spoken of in this Norte Dame law review article from 1959, the state supreme court invalidated them because they did not comply with the state constitution.
Foughty: Quick side note here to point out one of my favorite historical oddities in redistricting from this era: In the 1870's, the General Assembly experimented with an At-Large Congressional seat. Indiana had 13 members of Congress, and we drew 11 districts and then had two members elected to the U.S. House by statewide vote. It only lasted one term, in part because of legal issues with such a scheme.
Kochevar: I will add on that the General Assembly, after redistricting the congressional boundaries in 1941, would not do so again until 1965. I have wondered if this failure to draw new maps during this time contributed to U.S. Rep. Ray Madden’s long continuous term in Congress. Madden is the first member of Congress from Indiana to serve more than 34 consecutive years in the House of Representatives. As Trevor can attest, Madden's tenure is only matched or exceeded by Lee Hamilton, Peter Visclosky, and Richard Lugar.
Foughty: This is a great question, and something I'll probably be looking into soon. This also covers most of the tenure of Charlie Halleck, a similar longstanding member of Congress who served as U.S. House Majority and Minority Leader for several years; the lack of redistricting likely played a big role in both men sticking around for so long.
All of this leads us to an era where the legislature will draw new maps every ten years after the decennial federal census, districts split counties (and thus require numbers), and the threat of a lawsuit hangs over every iteration of a map (which probably heightens the partisan stakes even more). When the legislature drew maps in 1971, they passed something like seven different versions of the maps, labeled them A, B, C, D...and on up to G, and basically provided instructions to the judiciary to consider them in that order. When the predictable court challenges happened, the judiciary considered them in the prescribed order, throwing them out until they were able to settle on one they deemed passed muster. We did the process again in 1981, 1991, 2001, 2011, and now 2021, largely under the process that was really just established in 1971. There have been lawsuits in some years (the House had multi-member districts until 1991, and the multi-member concept was the target of litigation through the 1980's), so it's always been contentious. There is a sort of "escape clause" that allows a commission to draw maps if the legislature can't pass them, but it's important to note that commission is basically made up of legislators, and only adds the Governor as a tie-breaking vote.
Kochevar: Yes, thankfully, the General Assembly adopted state laws and followed its constitutional responsibility in Article 4 to redistrict the legislative seats as well as ensured that congressional redistricts are redrawn during the year after the census was taken. I do marvel at how the State Senate went to 50 single-member districts while the State House of Representatives maintained multi-member districts in the populous counties like Lake, Marion, Allen, Vanderburgh, and St. Joseph for nearly 20 years. I will note that the commission Trevor is referring to is the “congressional redistricting commission” in title 3 of the state code (the election code) that mandates that if the General Assembly does not adopt a congressional redistricting plan before they adjourn their session in the year of the census (2021 for instance) then a commission made up of the House Speaker, the Senate President Pro Tempore, the chairs of the House and Senate election committees, and a fifth member appointed by the Governor must meet and draw the new maps. The commission redrew the congressional maps in 1991 and 2001. Both were Democratic majorities given Democrats controlled the House and the Governor's office. I’ll add here, to be clear, that this commission only has the power to draw new congressional districts. The power to redistricting the General Assembly districts rests exclusively with the General Assembly.
Foughty: Excellent clarification on what this commission can and can't do. I think it's important that people understand that while this is called a commission, it is limited in power and it is still ultimately comprised primarily of legislators.
Kochevar: I think the big change in redistricting over the decades is the amount of granular information that can be used for redistricting. This is an obvious given due to the expansion and usability of computers and mapping technology to be able to redistrict seats down to the census block area, thus allowing the map makers to draw districts block by block. Another result of this availability of information is that the majority that drew up the maps have maintained the majority for the entire decade. For the General Assembly specifically, this has never happened since 1903. Now we can argue that if not for this political event like Nixon's resignation, the Progressives splitting from the GOP in the 1910s, the 1929 stock market crash and Great Depression, the 1958 recession, or the BMV issues and Evan Bayh rising to prominence in the late 1980s, that there could have been more decades like the 2010s, but the fact of the matter is this past decade has been different than the past 70-100 years.
Foughty: It is also the first set of decennial maps in Indiana that didn't see any partisan turnover in any Congressional seat. But since the 1980's there has been access to computing power and more granular data for mapmakers; it is more sophisticated today, no doubt, but I would hesitate to ascribe too much credit here to the mapmakers and their technology for electoral outcomes over the past decade. The state—and especially the southern part of the state—has become very Republican since 2010. Over the past decade, Democrats have only won two statewide races, both in 2012 (U.S. Senate and Superintendent of Public Instruction, losing both in their next elections), and Republicans have won a large majority of things like mayoral and county commissioner seats. None of these offices are impacted by redistricting at all, and yet Republicans won and held more of them than they had in past decades. The "Bloody 8th" Congressional district is still etched in many people's minds, but the reason it doesn't exist anymore has less to do with how the maps are drawn and more to do with how overwhelmingly red that part of the state has become. Historically speaking, it isn't uncommon to see eras where one part or the other becomes very dominant. This particular era has lasted a little longer that those in the past, but history also tells us it isn't sustainable for a variety of reasons.
So let's bring these two threads together, and introduce this growing movement in some quarters over the last decade to have an independent commission draw the maps.
Foughty: The fact that this movement hasn't gained more traction broadly across the state maybe isn't surprising, given our history of wanting people whose name is on a ballot--and not an appointed board--making decisions. But it should be even less surprising that the legislature has embraced it. Consider that in 2011, Mitch Daniels was on his way out the door. Mitch was a popular governor with the electorate and used that to exert more power than Hoosier governors are typically afforded. To the extent, the legislature has always been the stronger branch (and to some degree had been slowly growing stronger since the early 1970's), the Mitch era sort of pumped the brakes on that idea. In essence, you had a legislature eager to reclaim some prerogative, and according to the state constitution map drawing is exclusively the prerogative of the legislature, so they draw the maps in 2011.
Kochevar: This is an interesting take on why the General Assembly has not fully considered creating an independent redistricting commission, or something even similar to the Iowa model. But it is not something that I would subscribe to as a reason why the General Assembly has not moved in this direction. I think it is a simple fact that a majority of a General Assembly, meaning as a number and not directing it at any one political party, want to maintain the ability of that body to write those new maps. There may be any number of reasons why individual members of the General Assembly holds this view, from viewing it as their constitutional or historical duty to do so, to that redistricting is a legislative process and so the legislature can only act to redistrict these seats, to just wanting to have a hand in drawing the districts as they see fit. Case in point the reasons are numerous.
Foughty: Matthew is absolutely right here that incumbents, even those in the minority, have strong incentive to support maps that protect their own electoral prospects. I don't mean to downplay this as much as I mean to broaden the context in which to understand recent reform efforts. There are small groups of people around the State House who advocate for such reform, and the self-interest of incumbents is just one of the forces pushing back on them. My point is merely that reform advocates face this pushback in several other directions, as well, and unless there are large groups of people around the state advocating for such reform, we shouldn't expect much to change.
To pivot back to my original thread: Once Mitch leaves in 2013 and they are trying to re-establish themselves as the dominant branch, it's not hard to understand why they aren't going to cede this prerogative to an independent commission without a huge public outcry (especially as many of the proposals give the Governor some appointment power on the commission). It's easy to cast this as a partisan thing when one party is in power, but it's not really a Republican vs. Democratic thing as much as it follows this particular arc of our state history favoring decisions being made by democratically elected officials and/or favoring the legislature. And to the extent we want to look at this into the future, it's not hard to imagine that these dynamics get amplified in a way that makes it hard for independent commission advocates to continue to gain traction. Here, too, we should resist the urge to view it exclusively through the lens of partisanship, because it's really just an extension of an attitude that has existed since before we were a state.
Kochevar: On the point of partisanship, I can agree that no party has been innocent in our state history. At various times the majority in the General Assembly have used redistricting to achieve certain goals, the main one being maintaining that majority. Some plans have been more successful in achieving this goal than others. But I am not Carnac the Magnificent, so there is no telling if a future General Assembly will adopt legislation or will act in a manner so repugnant to the general electorate that it would bring enormous public pressure to demand change, including the establishment of an independent redistricting commission. I will never discount the fact that a General Assembly can, at any time, act unwisely, and that the electorate can respond to that act and achieve public policy goals if there is a groundswell of support.
Gentlemen, to finish up and bring this thoughtful conversation to a close, let me ask you one final question: Trevor, at the outset, you noted that “in the nucleus of Hoosier DNA is a desire for a strong component of democratic representation in government.” We’re 205 years into this project that is Indiana, and we’ve seen massive population and demographic shifts during that time. Can a state’s identity and proclivities change over time? What do you see happening over the next decade or two?
Foughty: If I had answered this question prior to 2020, I’m sure I would have a different answer. Indiana is sometimes referred to as “the middle finger of the south” because culturally we’re more similar to some southern states than to some of the rust belt states that border us. Really, though, the South isn’t as monolithic culturally as is often assumed, because there is the Deep South that was settled and built up by wealthy plantation owners, and then there is the Appalachian South that was settled and built up by poorer pioneers who were often sharecropping on land that was less fertile for big cash crops like cotton and tobacco. The same people who came out of the Appalachians and settled northern Alabama and Tennessee and Kentucky also helped settle Indiana, and they settled it from the Ohio River north. More importantly, they settled the state over land and over generations. Other Great Lakes states and their largest cities saw more growth because of migration over water, and often in waves of foreign immigrants coming in through New York. It’s not a coincidence that Indianapolis is the largest U.S. city that isn’t on a navigable waterway, and that national immigration waves largely skipped our state while influencing other states in the Midwest.
It’s easy to understand how that can shape the broader culture of a state over time, but I always struggled with the notion that it could continue to shape nuanced and evolving politics. And yet watching reactions to executive orders play out over the pandemic, and seeing that reaction mirrored throughout our state history in Madison’s book, was a real light bulb moment for me. Our governor took an approach more similar to other Midwestern governors, but our legislature wanted an approach more similar to Southern states. It’s clear to me that it isn’t as easy to change a state’s identity and proclivities, especially politically, as we might as expect. So much becomes baked into the structure of government that you don’t realize the fundamentals are the same even as issues change.
These things are always easier to see in hindsight than to predict, but I do think what happens with the pandemic over the next year or so will continue to have an outsized influence on what happens to our politics over the next decade or so. It’s almost certainly going to color the working relationship between a new governor after 2024 and the General Assembly, which will set the tone for four or eight years of other policymaking. Additionally, the legislature just made changes to our emergency declaration statutes that fit what they want for this pandemic, but may hamstring us if the next emergency declaration is some sort of natural disaster or terrorist attack. If it looks like the state wasn’t prepared that could sweep a lot of people out of office and change power dynamics; in hindsight, a lot of people would connect a dot to this moment, but it’s tough to predict big events like that. Finally, the trend of urban and suburban areas rapidly growing while rural areas shrink is going to have unpredictable impacts on power dynamics, even with new maps soon to be in place, as does what happens nationally (the 2024 presidential election could be a huge inflection point for the future of the Republican Party nationally, that will almost certainly reverberate at the state level in one way or another; and there is the specter that Indiana could lose a Congressional seat in 10 years). I guess my Carnac abilities aren’t any better than Matthew’s
Kochevar: As Yoda would say, “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.” Certainly, anything and everything can change in the next decade or two. One thing that Trevor mentioned that I would be following is the continuing depopulation of rural areas of the state. On top of it affecting how future districts will be laid out and shift power dynamics in the political and governmental spheres, is what will happen if a small town, township, or even a county decreases so much in population that the government unit is unable to provide basic services established under law. Now small towns and townships have various “government modernization” laws where they can merge with other units of governments to form a larger and more sustainable entity and these laws have been used in various localities throughout the state. But what about a county being unable to operate because of lack of population? How will the General Assembly deal with this scenario? Could this lead to more acceptance of regional forms of government? If a county is merged with another county, what impacts could that region of the state experience? This may not be something we see in two decades but something that could happen in our lifetime. Nonetheless these are questions to contemplate and ponder as we move further into this century.
What I hope will happen, and I am an eternal optimist in this regard, is that when more generations of young Hoosiers reach the voting age, and people move into the state or from one part of the state to the other, is that their desire for democratic government continues to grow, by which I mean I hope more Hoosiers become active voters and exercise their right to vote at every election. In the 2020 general election the turnout in Indiana was 64%, the highest since 1992. I hope that this is only the beginning, and the electorate will return to voting at the levels seen between the 1920s-1980s, Turnout, at least during presidential election years during those decades, where turnout was at 70-85%. I believe the greatest control we can have over our government is at the ballot box. It is essential that we reach those levels again. After a difficult year, or for some people years, I think our fellow Hoosiers can appreciate that the right to vote and using that right is essential to the DNA of our state, but that this right is precise. If the state’s identity and proclivities are to change to have an even stronger desire for democratic government, then it must be through the constant exercise of voting at the next election, and the election after that, and so on. With higher levels of voting participation, we may see a greater attunement of the actions our elected officials take, from township board to Governor, matching the will and desire of the people our officials represent. But as with any prospective question, only time will tell.
