Erika D. Smith: Democrats are fighting back on gerrymandering. Do they mean it?

Earlier this summer, pollsters with the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research asked voters for a word to describe their political party. Republicans said “strong” and “patriotic.” Democrats chose words like “weak,” “apathetic” and “ineffective.”

“They’re spineless,” one Democratic voter from Iowa put it. “They speak up a little bit, and they roll right over.”

Such polling is key to understanding the rapidly escalating partisan fight over redistricting ahead of next year’s midterm elections. In countering President Donald Trump’s shameless push to get Texas Republicans to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts to retain a GOP majority in the House, the Democratic Party has finally found a way to show voters it is willing – to quote Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin – to “fight fire with fire.”

“This is not the Democratic Party of your grandfather, which would bring a pencil to a knife fight,” Martin said this week. “This is a new Democratic Party. We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight.”

That will be necessary if Democrats want to bring demoralized and disengaged voters back into the fold. Other than making long-winded speeches on Capitol Hill and holding rallies across the U.S., the party has few other options to prove how serious it is about opposing the Trump administration, given that Republicans control all branches of government in Washington.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has largely led the way in setting the newly combative tone for his party about redistricting. This week, as Texas Democrats went on the lam to deny their Republican counterparts a quorum, Newsom announced a Hail Mary plan to flip as many as five of his state’s congressional seats.

“It’s cause and effect, triggered on the basis of what occurs or doesn’t occur in Texas,” he told reporters. “I hope they do the right thing and if they do, then there’ll be no cause for us to have to move forward.”

If California does move forward, state lawmakers will have less than a week to draw new congressional maps and approve language for a ballot initiative asking voters to temporarily overturn the state’s independent redistricting commission. A special election would then be held on Nov. 4.

It’s politically and logistically complicated, but if Newsom can pull it off, a gerrymandered California would offer Democrats the most new seats of any state, which would help the party retake the House next year and negate the five seats that Republicans are trying to add in Texas.

An early poll, conducted by Newsom’s pollster David Binder, found that 52% of California voters would be willing to let state lawmakers redraw congressional districts if Texas did it first. After all, only about a third of voters in the state hold a positive view of Trump, and the Republican Party hasn’t won many fans since the administration started targeting the state with aggressive federal immigration raids that have rocked communities and disrupted multiple sectors of the economy.

Of course, the fight goes far beyond California.

The Democratic governors of Illinois, Maryland and New York are also jumping on the gerrymandering bandwagon. “I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,” New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul told reporters on Monday. “With all due respect to the good government groups, politics is a political process.”

Trump, meanwhile, is pressuring the Republican-led states of Ohio, Missouri and Indiana to start a mid-decade redistricting process to add more GOP seats in the House.

Letting politicians pick their voters, rather than the other way around, is corrosive and, in general, polls show most voters oppose it. As the leader of California’s Progressive Caucus, state assembly member Alex Lee, told Politico: “Trying to save democracy by destroying democracy is dangerous and foolish. By legitimizing the race to the bottom of gerrymandering, Democrats will ultimately lose.”

Moreover, as many good-government types have pointed out, Democrats likely won’t win an advantage in the House if there is a full-blown, tit-for-tat, national redistricting fight. Republicans control 23 states, compared with only 15 for Democrats – and, like California, many of the states in the latter group have independent commissions that would make sudden gerrymandering much harder.

But merely sitting back and watching as the Trump administration works to game the system so that Republicans hang onto power in Washington isn’t a winning strategy for Democrats either. As California’s former Secretary of State and current US Senator, Alex Padilla, put it, the stakes are “simply too high” to do nothing.

“The economic stakes. The state of our democracy. The health of our institutions. The checks and balances in our country,” he recently told CNN. “So, I guess California and others are going to look at what options we have to defend what we believe America should stand for.”

If it works, “fighting fire with fire” might end up being about more than just redistricting. It could change the whole “weak,” “apathetic” and “ineffective” way Democrats do politics.

Erika D. Smith is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She is a former Los Angeles Times columnist and Sacramento Bee editorial board member.