Send the Washington Post editors back to (grammar) school! An editorial today about redistricting in Virginia and Maryland asserted that they engaged in “gross gerrymandering,” with the result that “both states have less competitive districts than they should.”
This assertion can mean one of two quite different things, one of them inanely fatuous and the other only marginally more sensible but glaringly ungrammatical.
Let’s start with the distinction between “less” and “fewer,” which is straightforward 6th grade grammar (or at least it was 6th grade grammar back in the dark ages when I was in 6th grade). This is how two popular online grammar sites put it:
Less means “not as much”; fewer means “not as many.” Trust your ear: if you’d use “much,” use “less”; if you’d use “many,” use “fewer.” You earn less money by selling fewer products; you use less oil but eat fewer fries. If you can count them, use fewer.
If you can count it; it’s “fewer.” So you can have “less salt” or “fewer grains of salt.” Despite what they say in advertising, you cannot have “less calories” — it’s fewer calories, as all of us who count them know.
So, the WPost‘s assertion is grammatically correct only if it means that, collectively, all of the districts in each state are “less competitive” than they “should” be. What an airheaded observation! Could the editors really mean that? There are virtually no competitive districts in the whole country; why pick on Virginia and Maryland? But that’s the meaning of the sentence as written, and so it just may be that is what the editors meant, especially since the editorial also states that redistricting “should be an opportunity to make districts competitive and, thereby, to hold incumbents accountable despite the changing demographics of a state.” “Should,” indeed.
The alternative meaning — that each state has fewer competitive districts, i.e., fewer districts that are competitive, than it “should” — makes only marginally more sense. How many competitive districts “should” a state have? Who (other than the editors of the WPost) is to say? Is gerrymandering O.K. but “gross” gerrymandering not?
I suppose it doesn’t matter much which of these two meanings the Wpost intended, since neither one carries much weight.
There is, however, one other interesting thing in the editorial — this one a double standard, not a double meaning:
Both Maryland and Virginia last time around experienced ugly redistricting fights: Democrats in Maryland squeezed Rep. Constance A. Morella out of her seat, for example, while Virginia Republicans packed minority voters into noncontiguous districts. (Emphasis added)
Through Nexis I looked at a number of past WPost editorials on race and redistricting (several of them actually entitled “Race and Redistricting”), and each one supported racial redistricting.
A few examples, all commenting on the infamous North Carolina 12th that entertained the courts for so long:
“A Threat to the Voting Rights Act,” 6/30/95
The Voting Rights Act is not overturned, but how is it to be put into effect if race becomes a suspect factor in drawing boundaries?
“Race and Redistricting,” 11/30/2000
Race-conscious redistricting is troubling, but it is one legitimate tool if the alternative is to have minorities perennially underrepresented in Congress.
“Race and Redistricting,” 4/20/2001
THE SUPREME Court on Wednesday upheld the latest incarnation of North Carolina’s 12th Congressional District against claims that it is a racial gerrymander designed to create a district with a near majority of African Americans…. [It] doesn’t entirely clear things up, but it is a welcome clarification that race-conscious line-drawing is still permissible….
The Supreme Court, reversing the lower court by a 5 to 4 vote, pointed out that the district’s shape and composition could be adequately explained by the state’s desire to create a safe Democratic seat and to protect incumbents. These objectives are indisputably constitutional, and they overlap significantly with race — since African Americans tend overwhelmingly to vote for Democrats. The court’s ruling clarifies that the burden is on those who bring challenges to show that a district’s oddities could not have resulted from factors with which race might correlate.
At first glance these editorials (and others I didn’t quote) may seem inconsistent with today’s editorial dump on Virginia Republicans for “pack[ing] minority voters into noncontiguous districts,” but further reflection reveals a fundamental difference between the racial gerrymandering the WPost supported in the past and the racial gerrymandering that it opposes today: the good racial gerrymandering was all done by Democrats.
