Illinois Highlights Wide Use of Tilted Maps

BY JOHN MCCORMICK

When Democratic lawmakers from Texas arrived in Chicago early this week fleeing a congressional redistricting vote back home, they touched down on some of the most gerrymandered soil in the nation.

The way Illinois draws political district boundaries has been criticized by good government groups for decades, with the process often described as lawmakers choosing their voters rather than voters picking their representatives. The result has been districts that are often nowhere close to compact or contiguous, two criteria traditionally applied in nonpartisan designs.

Just three of 17 Illinois congressional districts are represented by Republicans in a state where President Trump won 44% of the 2024 vote. The nonpartisan Gerrymandering Project at Princeton University awarded the congressional map approved in Illinois in 2021 with two “F” grades, one in the category of partisan fairness and another for geographic features.

“It is certainly the case that Illinois has one of the most extreme congressional maps in the country, along with Texas and North Carolina,” said Sam Wang, the project’s director. “There is a lot of negative craftsmanship that went into Illinois.”

Democrats and Republicans alike have for decades gerrymandered in states without a nonpartisan process. Current efforts by Republicans in Texas, designed to help Trump hold on to congressional majorities, have set off a nationwide arms race as Democrats pledge to offset GOP gains.

Playing host to the largest group of fleeing Lone Star State legislators is Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a likely 2028 Democratic presidential candidate who first discussed a possible exit from Texas with their leadership in late June. His involvement has rankled some Republicans.

“It is the height of hypocrisy for Gov. Pritzker,” said John Curran, the Illinois Senate’s GOP leader and the highest- ranking, state-level Republican. “He does not have clean hands on this topic.”

District lines adopted after the 2020 census, which Pritzker signed into law, have resulted in overwhelming Democratic legislative majorities in Illinois, with 78 in the 118member House and 40 in the 59-member Senate.

“We passed a map in Illinois that follows the Constitution and that is not what Gov. Abbott is trying to do in Texas,” Pritzker told reporters shortly after the Texans arrived when asked about his state’s own gerrymandering.

The Illinois governor argued the Democratic control of 14 of the state’s 17 congressional districts is the result of his party proving it was good at “delivering for the people of Illinois” and not fair to be compared with trying to redraw districts in the middle of a decade.

Pritzker appeared Tuesday in suburban Chicago with the Texans. They were joined by Democratic National Commit--tee Chairman Ken Martin, who vowed his party would do whatever it takes to fight any GOP district gains made in Texas.

“Now is not the time for one party to play by the rules while the other party has completely ignored them,” Martin said. “They decided to cheat, and we’re going to respond in kind.”

Pritzker hasn’t exactly delivered on his pledge as a firsttime candidate for governor in 2018 to push for an independent mapmaking commission to reduce partisan gerrymandering. He has since argued he can’t control the state legislature— something Republicans suggest is untrue—and signed into law the highly partisan map passed by Democrats.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Pritzker have clashed in recent years after Abbott bused and flew thousands of immigrants from the southern border to Chicago, a “sanctuary city” that has spent hundreds of millions in recent years on the influx. Abbott has also sent immigrants to other Democratic- led cities.

Pritzker told reporters he has no plans to personally pay for lodging for Texas Democratic lawmakers or the fines Republicans have threatened against them for no-showing in Austin. His campaign staff is helping with their logistics.

Illinois has played host to Democratic state lawmakers fleeing other states on several previous occasions.

In 2011, Indiana Democrats fled to Illinois for five weeks to deny a quorum over Republican efforts to weaken labor unions and create school vouchers. That same year, Wisconsin state senators temporarily moved to northern Illinois to try to block legislation pushed by then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, to restrict collective bargaining rights for public employees.