The people who come to the State Capitol seeking to save representative democracy from undemocratic perversions are a tenacious bunch. That's to their credit. They'll need persistence and more to prevail in their quest to avert a looming threat — partisan gerrymandering of this state's legislative and congressional maps.
Looming? you ask. When the 2020 census hasn't started counting, and the drawing of new maps to equalize district populations is a job constitutionally assigned to the 2021-22 Legislature, not the current one?
Yes, looming, I say — and so do the dozen or so prodemocracy organizations that together are asking the 2019-20 Legislature to give an independent commission a leading role in the next decennial redistricting. That's what 13 states do in a variety of fashions. It's what a bipartisan panel of Minnesota elder statesmen, including one former Democratic vice president and two former Republican governors, recommended in 2008.
Wait until 2021 to push that change, the reformers argue, and the temptation for the party then in charge to hang on to the power to draw advantageous districts will be too great to overcome.
Make that temptation plus opportunity. Even in a state so politically purple that it has elected a divided state government in 14 of the past 15 elections and is home to the nation's only divided legislature this year, chances are uncommonly high that that one party will run the whole statehouse show in 2021.
Consider: The DFL grip on the governorship is now assured through 2022. DFLers control the state House by a 16-seat margin and are within striking distance of a Senate power switch in 2020. Republicans have a precarious 34-32 Senate majority, with one seat up for grabs in a Feb. 5 special election.
More's the point: 2020 will be a presidential year, ensuring the high turnout that has historically helped DFLers in this state. And the Republican standard-bearer appears likely to be a fellow whose approval rating fell to 34 percent in one national poll last week, and who was blamed by 3 out of 5 respondents in another poll for this year's federal government shutdown.
Political winds can shift quickly, of course. Only two years ago, the same would-be redistricting reformers were coming to the Capitol in numbers I considered surprising to block a preemptive move by Republican majorities to keep redistricting out of any hands but the Legislature's own. Republicans then were plausibly predicting that they would be able to run the boards in 2021.