Democracy has finally caught up with Michigan Republicans | Opinion

Don't look now, but while their compatriots across the country were holding off a red wave, Michigan Democrats ran the table Tuesday, sweeping statewide races and winning majority control of both legislative houses for the first time in 40 years.

If the pasting Republicans took in this week's election were a whodunnit, it would end like Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express," in which a dozen suspects are exposed as collaborators in the murder victim's demise.

Rage at the abrupt reversal of Roe v. Wade, the malignant shadow of Donald Trump, a GOP ticket led by a singularly undistinguished trio of conspiracy-mongering wingnuts: All these doubtless contributed to a Democratic rout that was, in the lingo of social scientists, over-determined.

But none of these factors was as consequential as the record turnout by Democratic voters across the state — and a citizen-led reconfiguration of political boundaries that made Democratic votes matter more than they had in a generation.

Diluting the Democratic vote

The stage for Tuesday's historic GOP defeat was set four years ago, when Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment that wrested the authority to draw congressional and legislative boundaries from state lawmakers and vested it in a new citizens redistricting commission composed of voters were drawn from both parties.

More:Find all 2022 Michigan election results here

More:Whitmer, Democratic lawmakers look ahead to policy, logistical changes as party in power

As GOP leaders who vigorously opposed the amendment feared, the significance of this change was seismic. For decades, Republicans who controlled both houses of the Michigan Legislature had used their redistricting authority to draw maps that packed Democratic voters into the fewest number of districts and distributed GOP voters in a manner calculated to ensure the maximum number of safe Republican seats. The result, for the first 20 years of the 21st Century, was an arrangement that ensured Republican legislative majorities would prevail even when a majority of voters cast their ballots for Democratic candidates.

So it was that in 2018, when Gretchen Whitmer soundly defeated her GOP rival Bill Schuette, Republicans easily defended their majorities in the Michigan House and Senate. The same pattern repeated itself in 2020, when the Democratic presidential candidate carried MIchigan by 150,000 votes.

It wasn't that voters who cast ballots for Whitmer and Joe Biden also favored GOP legislative candidates; Democratic votes simply had less impact in legislative and congressional districts that had been configured purposely to dilute them.

An election un-rigged

Then, late last year, the first Citizens Independent Redistricting Commission unveiled a new political map that was explicitly designed to put both parties' voters on a more equal footing. Instead of tailoring district boundaries to guarantee the maximum number of safe Republican seats, the citizen commissioners endeavored to fashion districts in which both Republican and Democratic candidates enjoyed a fighting chance.

Tuesday's election ballot — the first based on the new districts — featured competitive contests in dozens of legislative districts that had previously been gimmes for one of the two major parties. When the votes were counted, Democrats had won narrow majorities in the state House and Senate, reflecting the advantage their marquee incumbents — Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson — enjoyed at the top of the ticket.

The explanation wasn't that those who had voted Republican in the past switched teams: Tudor Dixon captured almost 100,000 more voters in this week's election than Bill Schuette, the GOP's gubernatorial nominee in 2018, won four years ago.

But this year's record turnout inflated Whitmer's vote totals, too — and this time, those voters lifted Democratic candidates to victory in many of those newly competitive legislative districts.

This was a populist triumph in the best sense — an example of democratic principles (one man, one vote) prevailing over the narrow partisan interests of elected politicians.

Diverging from the mainstream

The leveling of Michigan's political playing field also exposed, in much sharper relief, the degree to which Republicans had parted ways with the mainstream consensus on two critical issues: abortion and voting rights.

Pragmatic Republicans had long suspected their party's historical opposition to most abortions might become a political liability in states like Michigan, where polls consistently revealed broad, bipartisan support for more liberal access to the procedure. But GOP leaders seemed caught of-guard when conservative Supreme Court justices handed Republicans their holy grail, overturning the landmark ruling that had barred enforcement of Michigan's draconian abortion ban for half a century.

The prospect that Michigan might begin throwing doctors and nurses in jail lent new urgency to a ballot initiative that proposed to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, and that energized Democratic voters as few issues in memory had. A few Republican legislators saw the danger and scrambled to cobble together a modified ban that would permit terminations in the first trimester of pregnancy, when the vast majority of abortions take place. But their initiative fizzled — and Republican primary voters soon compounded their party's disadvantage by advancing a gubernatorial nominee whose absolutist position repelled most women.

Voting restrictions are unpopular

The abortion issue's impact on Michigan's election has been well-documented. But it wasn't the only instance in which the Republican Party line clashed with sentiments shared by a large majority of their constituents.

In 2018, Michigan voters enthusiastically embraced a constitutional amendment that made it legal, and easier, for almost any registered voter to cast an absentee ballot. Some Republicans were skeptical, but a bipartisan majority shrugged off Donald Trump's warnings that any increase in mail voting would invite widespread fraud.

Even after 2020, when Trump falsely insisted that phony absentee ballots had cost him the election, Michigan voters seemed reluctant to relinquish the new options they had approved two years earlier. When Republican legislators realized a GOP-backed ballot initiative designed to make absentee voting harder would likely be rejected in a popular referendum, they made plans to adopt it themselves, exploiting a constitutional loophole that would protect the new voting measures from the Democratic governor's veto.Like its uncompromising opposition to abortion, the GOP's hostility to absentee voting triggered the proposal of a new constitutional amendment that promised to make voting even more convenient, mandating nine days of early in-person voting and establishing constitutional safeguards against the voting restrictions Republicans hoped to impose by 2024.

And just as Michiganders decisively endorsed the abortion rights enshrined in Proposal 3, they approved the expansive menu of voting rights guaranteed by Proposal 2.

The latter may turn out to have the most enduring impact on future Michigan elections. It's uncertain whether first-time or occasional voters mobilized by the prospective loss of abortion rights will be as eager to participate in future elections, now that those rights have been secured. But Proposal 2 will make it easier to vote in 2024 and beyond, a change that may spur turnout for many election cycles to come.

Election Day victories are notoriously ephemeral. Michigan voters remain closely divided, and there's no indication that Tuesday's election heralds a significant or durable change in their partisan sentiments.

But Michigan's new political map has allowed an unprecedented number of mid-term voters to express those sentiments without distortion — and the unambiguous verdicts that emerged from Tuesday's referendums on abortion and voting rights have stablished a new baseline for discussions about our state's future trajectory.

Brian Dickerson is the Free Press' editorial page editor. Contact him at bdickerson@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Opinion: Michigan's new political map makes Democratic votes count