The Outstater

August 10, 2025

Andre Carson Part III

GERRYMANDERING is not an issue for serious minds. It rests on the absurd notion that legislators should choose voters rather than voters choose legislators. Nevertheless, the meeting here Thursday between Gov. Michael Braun and Vice-President J.D. Vance to discuss redistricting requires that it be addressed anew.

The late Jim Knoop, a friend of this foundation and a GOP consultant, was snooping around in an attic of the Statehouse many years ago and came upon an old chalkboard. As he swept aside the cobwebs, he realized he was looking at a workup of a redistricting plan, one of the first in a long, unbroken string of failed efforts.

Please know that Knoop was the most unabashed partisan you could imagine. Even so, he had concluded that racial gerrymandering or “packing” in the case of Indiana’s 1st and 7th Districts benefited nobody but the most crass political operatives in both parties.

He argued way back in the Orr administration that if anyone were serious about redistricting they would start in one or another corner of the state and program their computer to create legislative and congressional districts that are mathematically identical, adding one citizen at a time, irrespective of race, voting pattern or geography.

His conclusion was based on a dedication to the core function of democratic government set down in the U.S. Constitution, that is, representation of individual points of view on the widest range of issues. Let’s see how Indiana’s 2021 redistricting stacks up:

• GOP schemers left our most important city, Indianapolis, in the hands of a bumbling Democratic machine, disenfranchising Republicans there so that politicos could have a lock on adjacent districts. 
• Blacks in such a packed district get the false prestige of a House seat but pay for it with unchallenged, inattentive leadership. “I haven’t been able to find a single country in the world where the policies that are being advocated for blacks in the United States have lifted any people out of poverty,” says the economist Thomas Sowell.
• Both Republican and Democrat gerrymandees are ensured seniority and influence in Congress. That, however, mostly benefits the crony capitalists and rent-seekers through pork-barrel projects drawing down tax revenue. 
• Indianapolis in particular needs competitive elections to avoid a stagnant middle class and degraded public safety. (Can you spell Cincinnati?) Again, office-holders in safe districts are inclined to play to their base at the expense of careful thought or compromise on complicated issues.

Some still hope that we can use computers and AI to more or less follow Jim Knoop’s mapping. There are several slick mathematical formulas that would discourage raw gerrymandering by favoring compact districts with smooth boundaries.

Bottom line, though, you’re not going to be able to take the politics out of politics. Few think anything can be done short of a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. That is unlikely anytime soon, the courts having left those who benefit from redistricting in charge of redistricting.

So hooray if Vance and Braun can figure out a way to throw out a second-generation race grifter like Andre Carson. Perhaps the next district election and down-ballot elections will more seriously address the safety and welfare of all types and classes of urban citizens.

For now, let’s be reminded that the House of Representatives was meant to be changed wholesale every two years. The current 90 percent reelection rate, black districts or white, poor districts or rich, defines a broken system. —  tcl

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