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TAYLORVILLE, Ill. — On a warm Friday night in the St. Mary’s Catholic Church parking lot, sweating men sipping cold beers dipped fish fillets into bubbling deep fryers as children played on the bouncy castle.

This down-home fish fry used to be a regular stop for U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, a moderate Republican who grew up in this former coal town in Central Illinois. But that was before new district lines drawn in 2021 pushed him into far more conservative terrain — and into competition with a fellow GOP incumbent.

A series examining the ways Americans feel unrepresented by a political system struggling with a collision of forces both old and new. 

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/18/american-democracy-political-system-failures/" target=_blank>Read more about the project here.</a>

To keep his job in Congress, Davis had to square off with Rep. Mary E. Miller, a member of the right-wing Freedom Caucus who closely aligned herself with former president <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a>. In the primary campaign, she assailed Davis for his willingness to compromise with Democrats and to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Miller, the hard-liner, won the 2022 race. Davis, the consensus-seeker, was out.

The bitter Republican feuding was not merely a symptom of the broader civil war in the national party. Rather, it was prompted by the actions of Illinois Democrats, who used their supermajority in the legislature to redraw district lines in a way that would strengthen their already titanium-solid lock on power.

The strategy worked, adding one Democratic seat to the Illinois delegation and trimming two Republican ones as GOP voters were packed into a smaller number of districts.

The new map also accomplished what experts say gerrymandering does with ruthless efficiency, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are responsible: hollowing out the moderate political center and driving both parties further toward the ideological fringes.

“Gerrymandering undermines a key element of democracy, which is competition,” said Harvard University government professor Steven Levitsky.

Politicians representing more-evenly split districts fear general election competition and therefore tend to govern more moderately, Levitsky said. But those in lopsided districts worry more about primary challenges and become responsive to the extremes in their party.

The consequences were on vivid display during the past couple of weeks in Congress as a small group of hard-right Republicans drove the government to the brink of a shutdown and then expelled Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from the post of House Speaker, the first speaker in the nation’s history to be ousted by members of his own party. The eight GOP members who voted to reject him represent districts that are safely Republican, with little to fear in general-election contests against Democrats.

Miller was not among those eight dissenters, but she was part of a larger group of hard-right Republicans that had earlier blocked McCarthy’s spending plans — forcing him to work with Democrats to avert a government shutdown, a collaboration that helped to seal his fate.

Levitsky, a co-author of the book “Tyranny of the Minority,” said the push to the extremes has been particularly evident in the Trump-led Republican Party and that gerrymandering is one cause among many.

“What’s really new about our politics today is that the radical fringe on the right, who are pretty authoritarian and pretty nativist, are now exercising outsize power,” Levitsky said.

But for both parties, the primary election — dominated by the most ideologically committed voters — has become more important as districts with competitive general elections have dwindled. Over the past quarter-century, the number of House swing seats, as calculated by the Cook Political Report, has been cut in half — from 164 in 1999 to an estimated 82 in next year’s election. Only 25 incumbents — 6 percent of the House’s 435 seats — were defeated in 2022. Sixteen of them lost in primaries.

Gerrymandering isn’t the only factor driving that phenomenon; geographic sorting, in which cities have become bluer and rural areas redder, has contributed mightily.

Drawing lines to favor your own party also is not a new dynamic. But it has become more common and aggressive with the rise of supermajority state legislatures and a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that federal courts have no role in policing partisan efforts to rig district maps.

In recent years, Republicans have used their dominance at the state level to create highly favorable maps in large states, such as Texas and Florida, as well as smaller ones, including Tennessee and Utah. But where Democratic legislators control the process, they’ve proved equally adept at creating maps advantageous to their party.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a nonpartisan group that studies the issue nationally, gave the Illinois map an “F” rating and classified none of the state’s 17 congressional districts as competitive.

Although Democratic voters unquestionably outnumber Republicans in the state — Biden defeated Trump by 17 points in Illinois in 2020 — the effect is exaggerated by district lines that have helped to give Democrats a 14-3 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation. In a comparison with a baseline map with no partisan advantage, Princeton researchers found that Illinois Democrats had given themselves three additional seats — a total matched only by Republicans in Texas.

Illinois’ new district lines for 2022 made the few GOP districts that remained even redder, which created a problem for two moderate Republicans. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an outspoken Trump critic who was certain to have drawn a strong primary challenge in 2022, opted to leave Congress. Davis fought to stay but found his moderate record used against him in his reelection bid against Miller.

His willingness to reach across the aisle had made him a favored partner of Democrats and had helped him win general elections in his politically balanced district. But that instinct for compromise, he said in an interview, became a liability under the new Democratic-drawn map.

Davis said he was hammered in the primary for “pictures with Biden. Pictures with Obama. Not Trumpy enough. Voted for common sense immigration reform, etc., etc., etc.”

Davis called the gerrymandering and Miller’s attacks on him unsurprising.

At the Taylorville fish fry, some of Davis’s former constituents were more pointed.

“Rodney got screwed,” said Bob Davis, 88, a retired school administrator having dinner with his family at a picnic table. “I think it should be illegal. When you intentionally draw the lines for political reasons, I think that’s wrong.”

Joshua Lott

Manipulation of voting districts has been around since at least 18th-century England. It became known as “gerrymandering” in 1812 when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry approved a district whose odd shape reminded people of a salamander.

The new 13th District in Illinois more closely resembles a snake. It squiggles across 175 miles of lightly populated and Republican-leaning farmland and connects the more urban and Democratic-leaning areas of East St. Louis, Springfield, Decatur, Champaign and Urbana.

It is a safely Democratic district, which was won in 2022 by first-time candidate Nikki Budzinski, a longtime labor union official who also served in the Biden administration.

Taylorville had been part of the old 13th District, which was split fairly evenly between Republicans and Democrats, with just a four-point GOP advantage, according to the Cook Political Report. Davis won the district first in 2012 and was reelected four times, serving 10 years largely as a center-right moderate.

Then, in the most recent redistricting, Taylorville was moved into a new 15th District, a largely rural and conservative bloc that almost completely surrounds the 13th and that had been made significantly more Republican by the shifting lines, giving it a 22-point GOP edge.

As Davis fought to stay in Congress last year, he stressed his Republican bona fides: Campaign materials reminded primary voters that he had been “proud to work with President Trump,” and he sought the former president’s endorsement.

But his opponent, Miller, was quick to note that Davis had also voted to certify Biden’s 2020 election victory, which she called “tainted,” and supported the creation of a congressional commission to investigate the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/january-6-capitol-riot/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Jan. 6</a>, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In a matchup of Republican incumbents, it wasn’t even close: After Trump came to the district to campaign for Miller, she cruised to a primary victory, 57 percent to 43 percent.

In sharp contrast to Davis’s approach, which he describes as “principled compromise,” Miller is rated by Voteview, a nonpartisan research group that tracks congressional voting and ideology, as more <a href="https://voteview.com/person/22138/mary-e-miller" target=_blank>conservative than 98 percent</a> of current House members.

She has called for the impeachments of Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and a ban on further funding for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion.

Miller did not vote to remove McCarthy when he was ousted from the job Tuesday, explaining in a statement that she wants her party to be “focused on stopping the radical Democrats.” But she has repeatedly sided with a small group of hard-right Republicans that frequently sparred with McCarthy and ultimately doomed his speakership.

Alex Wong

Michael B. Thomas

Miller, whose office did not respond to requests for an interview, voted against McCarthy’s getting the job of speaker in January. In June she voted against suspending the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/26/debt-ceiling-explained/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">debt ceiling</a>. Then she voted against the bill that averted the government shutdown.

Political scientists and analysts said that when state Democrats packed so many conservatives into a single district, they created the environment for Miller to win despite holding views that are out of step with most general-election voters in Illinois and even with most GOP House members.

“Gerrymandering really disincentivizes reasonableness and bipartisanship,” said Riley Berg, a senior adviser at Country First, a nonprofit organization founded by Kinzinger after the Jan. 6 attack. “We end up with choices in the general election that are not representative of the vast majority of the electorate.”

Davis said the impact of unchecked gerrymandering was simple and stark: “The cost is Congress not working as our forefathers intended Congress to work.”

“You have people in Congress, in both parties, who are rewarded for not working with the other side,” he said.

Gerrymandering was given a boost in 2019 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 that partisan redistricting is a political question that must be decided by legislators, not federal courts. The court upheld earlier precedents when it ruled this year that gerrymandering for racial reasons still violates the Voting Rights Act, even as Republican-dominated Southern legislatures, such as Alabama’s, have resisted making maps that comply with the court’s orders.

In most states, the legislature is responsible for drawing district maps. In many of the growing number of states where one party holds a supermajority in the legislature — enough votes to override any veto by the governor — the process of drawing districts for federal and state offices has become increasingly partisan.

At present, 19 Republican states and nine Democratic states have supermajorities. That includes Illinois, where the governor, both U.S. senators and two-thirds of the state legislature are Democrats.

Democrats in the state deny that the lines drawn in 2021 amount to gerrymandering.

“I would say it was a fair and equitable process,” said state Sen. Robert Peters (D). “We took feedback from stakeholders in the community throughout the entire state. And we held hearings all over the state and followed the guidelines to create the map.”

Justin L. Fowler

Republicans dismiss such defenses, saying that Democrats used their political supermajority to muscle through a blatant gerrymander.

“Illinois Democrats will tell you they believe in gerrymandering reform, then laugh all the way to drawing districts that eviscerate Republicans,” Davis said.

The parties have different stances on how to address gerrymandering. Democrats have pushed for federal legislation that would require that maps be drawn by independent commissions; Republicans have largely resisted those calls.

For the redistricting process that followed the 2020 Census, 10 states had independent or bipartisan <a href="https://www.cookpolitical.com/redistricting" target=_blank>commissions to draw legislative districts</a>, according to the Cook Political Report. They included Democratic-dominated California and Colorado and the key swing states of Arizona and Michigan. Other states had commissions that answered to a partisan legislature.

In states that did not have commissions, Republicans controlled redistricting in 17 and Democrats in seven.

As both parties focus on shoring up their bases, fewer Americans are identifying with either. According to Gallup, close to 50 percent of Americans now consider themselves <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx" target=_blank>political independents</a>, while only about a quarter identify as Republicans or Democrats. Two decades ago, independents, Republicans and Democrats each had about a one-third share of voters.

“The middle in America wants its voice and choice back,” said Kent Thiry, a former executive in the health-care industry who runs a group called <a href="https://www.uniteamerica.org/" target=_blank>Unite America</a> that is fighting to reform gerrymandering and the primary voting system. Change is needed, he said, in a political system where “if you cross the aisle, you are not reelected.”

Davis, 53, was born and raised in Taylorville, a town of 11,000 people about 25 miles southeast of Springfield, the Illinois capital. Many storefronts along the central square are empty, but a few restaurants and shops are busy. One building still lists the office of “Congressman Rodney Davis” as a second-floor tenant.

When coal was king, the town was pro-union and a Democratic stronghold. But in recent decades, Taylorville has shifted further toward the Republican Party. Mayor Bruce Barry said the town’s strong history with both parties made it fertile ground for a centrist Republican such as Davis.

Miller’s hard-line views, by contrast, don’t “really represent Taylorville,” said Barry, whose position is nonpartisan but who considers himself a centrist Democrat in a moderate Republican town.

“We’re strong Republicans down here, but I don’t think we’re out there way right,” he said. “We look more for common-sense decisions.”

Barry said the town is feeling the sting of Davis’s absence as an advocate for its interests in Washington. Davis, a longtime congressional staffer before he ran for office, was instrumental in getting a $650,000 federal grant for a new industrial park on the edge of town, as well as $2.5 million to resurface West Main Street, a key local thoroughfare, Barry said.

“These are projects that we depend on. We don’t have the tax base that others do,” Barry explained. He expressed frustration that Miller has not applied for funding for local projects in her district.

The House Freedom Caucus, of which Miller is a member, wants a ban on such “earmarks,” often called “pork-barrel” projects. The caucus believes that government spending is out of control and that earmarks represent a lack of fiscal responsibility in Washington, according to its <a href="https://perry.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hfc_rules_reforms_proposal_7.25.2022.pdf" target=_blank>public statements</a>.

“Earmarks facilitate federal overreach by spending taxpayer-dollars on personal pet projects of lawmakers and lobbyists. Earmarks also extend Congress’s power of spending beyond items genuinely connected to the nation’s welfare,” according to the caucus’s rules.

Seth McMillan, a Taylorville native and a former chairman of the Christian County Republican Central Committee, said Davis had been positioned to rise in House leadership and “could have gotten some things done for Central Illinois.”

“People can debate the federal budget all day long, but your job as a representative is to bring dollars back to your district,” McMillan said.

Oakland is a 90-minute drive east of Taylorville on roads dotted with silos cutting through vast fields of corn and soybeans. In this town of 739 people, residents said they have to drive 20 minutes to get to the nearest large grocery store.

Many storefronts on the small central square have closed, and one features a sign that says, “Pritzker Sucks,” a slam on Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and a hint at the town’s conservative leanings. Coles County, which includes Oakland, voted 62 percent for Trump in the 2020 general election.

The Millers, a prominent local farming and political family, have lived in the Oakland area for decades.

Mary E. Miller, 64, originally from the western Chicago suburbs, is a longtime area resident who is married to Chris Miller, a Republican state representative and fourth-generation local farmer. They raise cattle, corn and soy on the family farm.

<a href="https://marymiller.house.gov/about" target=_blank>According to her website</a>, “Mary is a wife, mother of seven, grandmother of twenty, and local farmer who serves as a voice for families and farmers ignored by D.C. insiders in the swamp.”

In the most recent redistricting, Oakland was shifted from the 15th Congressional District, represented by Miller, into the 12th Congressional District, which stretches about 200 miles to the southern tip of the state.

But Hindsboro, a town six miles west of Oakland where a Miller spokeswoman said the congresswoman and her family moved earlier this year, is in the 15th.

The district is widely considered the most conservative in the state. After beating Davis in the primary, Miller crushed a Democratic challenger in the general election with 71 percent of the vote.

“I have conversations with Mary quite a bit, but we can’t elect her,” said Oakland Mayor Jack Turner, a Republican who has known the Miller family for decades. “That was taken away from us, and I think that’s unfair.”

Turner, 57, with a bushy gray beard and a sleeveless T-shirt that said, “Stars and Stripes Since 1776,” said that Miller’s conservative politics represented the town well and that he believed the community was harmed in losing her to a partisan gerrymander.

But he also lamented the loss of the moderate center in both parties and expressed disappointment in the Republican rebellion that ended in McCarthy’s removal as speaker.

“Now you’re either way left or way right,” he said in an interview in the town’s tiny municipal building. “There used to be a middle road, and the middle road was fine. Why does it have to be this extreme?”

This story is part of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/18/american-democracy-political-system-failures/?itid=lk_inline_manual_222" target=_blank>Imperfect Union</a>, a series examining the ways Americans feel unrepresented by a political system struggling with a collision of forces both old and new.

Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, 2003 (with Mary Jordan)

George Polk Award, 1998

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Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, 2019 (part of a Washington Post team)

Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland

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Georgetown University, Japanese, 1994-1995

John S. Knight Fellowship, Stanford University, Spanish, 1999-2000

Kevin Sullivan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning senior correspondent who covers national and international affairs. He was previously The Washington Post's bureau chief in Tokyo, Mexico City and London.

Kevin Sullivan

Columbia University, BA in Philosophy, Minor in Statistics

Clara Ence Morse is a political data reporter at The Washington Post. She joined The Post as the Investigative Reporting Workshop intern with the Data team, and previously served as the editor in chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator. She lives in Washington, D.C.

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Illinois Democrats drew new maps. The changes pushed the GOP to the right.