Fayetteville’s current congressman weighed in on congressional redistricting Friday, calling a plan to move the city to another district “absurd” and asserting it makes Fayetteville a pawn in a larger Democratic scheme.
He’s right. And his Fayetteville audience clearly agreed.
Third District Rep. Steve Womack, R-Rogers, drew extended applause from the Northwest Arkansas Political Animals Club on Friday when he said the plan should be “rejected out of hand.” The club is a bipartisan group with members from all over the region.
Womack is one of many people crying foul.
Contrived by Democrats trying to improve the chances of electing Democrats to the Congress in future elections, the plan should more aptly be called the “1st District Reclamation Proposal,” Womack said.
Arkansans elected Republicans in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Districts in 2010. Democratic losses in the 2nd and 3rd were expected. The loss in the 1st was not.
Dubbed by some as the “Fayetteville Finger” or the “Pig Trail Gerrymander,” the House committee-approved redistricting plan would reach into Washington County to pluck Fayetteville out of the 3rd Congressional District and move most of the city and a swath of Washington and Crawford counties into the 4th District.
Note that two Fayetteville voting precincts, where voting definitely trends Republican, were excised from the plan. They’d stay in the 3rd District while the rest of Fayetteville as it exists today would shift to the 4th.
The 4th District now extends across most of South Arkansas to the Louisiana line and stretches north along the state’s western border. The newly drawn 4th, if approved by the full Legislature,would lose some significant Mississippi Delta counties to the 1st Congressional District while the 4th would reach farther into the northwest, adding Johnson and Franklin counties, a tiny bit of Crawford County (two rural precincts) and a sizable chunk of Washington County.
The counties the 1st District would add are deep Delta counties that more reliably vote Democratic. Also, the 1st would lose Republican-leaning Baxter County to the realigned 3rd District.
The plan is well gerrymandered and clearly designed for a Democrat to regain the 1st Congressional District seat while adding some Democratic votes from Fayetteville to the 4th District. (Apparently, state-level Democrats don’t realize that Fayetteville, like most of Washington County, has been trending Republican over recent years.)
Nevertheless, the “Fayetteville Finger” is being pushed by state Democrats and opposed by Republicans, who are outnumberedif the votes run along party lines in the full Legislature, as happened in the House committee that sent House Bill 1836 to the full House last week. State Rep. Uvalde Lindsey, a Fayetteville Democrat, is one Democrat who’ll vote against the plan, which he and others here have said would disrupt the cohesiveness that Lindsey says has been the strength of Northwest Arkansas for 20 years.
Womack, mayor of Rogers during some of those years, made the same point to the political animals. Dividing the region into different congressional districts, he said, would “undermine years and years of work to put Northwest Arkansas together as a region” and undercut its collective influence.
Notably, Womack had planned to stay out of the discussion on just where the lines should be drawn for the new district. He would have, he said, if the plan made sense but compared his comments against this idea to a quarterback calling an audible “to prevent a disaster.”
The ones who can actually prevent the disaster are Rep.
Lindsey and other Democrats who might break party lines on this vote. If House Republicans stay together, he only needs a handful of Democratic allies to defeat the proposal in the House.
There must be at least that many lawmakers from the 4th District who are distressed about what’s being proposed here. It’s no better for them - and probably worse - than for Northwest Arkansas.
Not only would Fayetteville become the district’s largest city overnight, the population in Fayetteville right now is larger than that of 26 of the 28 other counties in what would be the new 4th District. Only Garland and Jefferson counties have populations larger than Fayetteville’s.
In the 10 years this plan would be in place, Fayetteville’s expected growth compared to the rest of the district would just increase the imbalance.
The tail (or the finger) could potentially wag the dog, which is the only argument for Fayetteville to support this cockeyed plan but not reason enough to carve the city out of the 3rd District.
BRENDA BLAGG IS A COLUMNIST FOR NORTHWEST ARKANSAS MEDIA.
Opinion, Pages 14 on 03/27/2011