Surprise as Black Democrats work with Republicans to undo electoral maps

A lawsuit brought by Black Democrats who partnered with Republican attorneys has undone Michigan’s first independently drawn legislative maps, in a development some other Democrats have labeled a GOP “power grab”.

Republicans for decades controlled all or part of the state legislature, and developed districts that a judge in 2019 characterized as a “gerrymander of historical proportions”. Democrats in 2022 took control of the state government for the first time in over 40 years after a nonpartisan independent redistricting commission implemented more balanced maps.

But a Republican-majority panel of federal district court judges appointed by a Republican circuit court judge ruled in early January that the maps diluted Black voting power and were drawn based on race, thus splitting communities that would otherwise vote in a bloc.

Several Michigan Democrats who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to publicly criticize members of their party expressed dismay because a Republican judiciary now controls the redrawing process, and they fear the new maps will be more favorable to the GOP.

Constituents in Detroit and elsewhere in the state will suffer if the legislature is turned back over to Republicans, some Democrats said. Michigan now has its first Black speaker of the house and more Black committee chairs than it has ever had, the maps’ supporters noted, and the speaker’s district is one of those included in the lawsuit.

But former Michigan state representative Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, one of the lead plaintiffs along with a group of Black voters, told the Guardian her colleagues’ arguments were “ludicrous”. The new maps carved up Detroit into more districts than before, and that destroyed