Here's some surprising news that might cheer you up a bit:
National update: on the current trajectory, there will actually be a few *more* Biden-won congressional districts after redistricting than there are now (224/435).
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 22, 2021
Dave Wasserman knows as much about this stuff as anyone alive, so if he says redistricting isn't hurting Democrats—and might even help them a little—then that's probably the case.
Now, he also warns that there are going to be a bunch of very close seats that will hinge on Joe Biden's popularity. So it's still a tough year. But maybe not quite so tough as we thought.
I'll believe it when I see it. Waiting for final state supreme court decision following public comments here in the old dominion.
I'm guessing that the proposed maps will not be the final maps - I bet the DOJ forces them to fix the packed majority minority districts.
Maybe - if the DoJ doesn't have too many fires to put out. Will never forgive the Roberts court for its decision. Hope that Spanberger can pull off a win despite the fifty-mile problem.
My assumption is that if the DOJ was interested in doing something they’d already be doing something. I think that the DOJ has made the institutional decision that putting a handful of MAGA-insurrectionists in a jail for a few months will send a sufficient message to the Republican Party and everything can safely be left to someone else.
I think this is a fatal mistake but it does seem to explain a lot about the department’s inaction on Trump’s crimes, inaction on MAGA threats against teachers and inaction the leaders and organizers of the January 6th insurrection.
Isn't the problem here that Roberts has taken away too much power from the DOJ by abandoning pre-clearance? Seems to me it is better for the DOJ not to try than to be certain to lose, try anyway and thereby make its powerlessness even more official.
“Whoever fights can lose but the one who does not fight has already lost”
Bertolt Brecht
The proof is in the voting.
Saying that more biden won seats is not quite the same as saying that democrats won the redistricting. Since biden won popular vote, it was a slightly dem leaning year presidentially . More so than with congress.
In a year where it is really even and the house is on knife edge, a biden +1 district will lean a bit to Republicans. How many districts more than biden +1 or +2 is likely a better measure. But maybe still same result that more. Also matters the distribution of over +2. If more biden +2 and +3 seats, and more biden plus a huge amount, but a huge amount less biden +4 to 10 seats ., not good for dema.
Sweet spot is probably around a lot of districts that you will on average win by maybe 4 or 5 in a neutral year .
But , so far , looks to me that Republicans have " won " for a republican wave year such as likely 2022..so they will take a bit bigger majority than otherwise. And even for a dem wave, where they will not go so low.
But dems may have won for a neutral year where control is in the balance. Dems focused in some places exactly on best districts for them in such a neutral year . And to hell with what happens in either type of waves. Look at Nevada. Would have been easy to try to create 4 seats that dems could win in a dem wave year . But then 3-1 dem is locked in - one seat solid rep. And could have a map limiting their loss in a rep wave year. But in 2022 dems could lose all seats to reps 4-0. But , in a neutral year , the map makes 3-1 dem very likely ( while a neutral map probably 2-2).
New Mexico, Oregon etc . Same thing . But reps were just not as ruthlessly effective and did not focus on that important neutral year. The Texas map while a gerrymandrer , is a fairly mild pr really poorly constructed one.
It was amazing how, in places like Nevada, they simply ignored the parochial concerns of their incumbents, threw them under the bus and did what is best for national party . Not sure when there was ever a cycle with that being done so much. Reps mostly mapped to help their local incumbents and national party benefit was just a side effect.
I would guess this round increases the AVERAGE number of seats held by reps over the decade with a mix of dem , rep and neutral years. But increases the chance of dems controlling the house and that is what really matters .
So, we have Rational Thoughtless's Doomerism from the Right/GQP, lambasting the soyboibetacuck Democrat Party. Is the Doomerism from the Left, courtesy Mitch Guthman, below?
My apologies. I’ve been remiss in bring a little bit of doom and gloom into this thread. I’m always happy to make all my friends here happy, so let me give it a try. The fundamental difference between, say, the California version of redistricting and that of Wisconsin is that one is arrived at through a fair and neutral process whilst the other is done to explicitly maximize Republican districts.
The fact that the California map will create a few more Democratic districts than expected is a pleasant surprise. But it doesn’t change the problem with gerrymandering; neither does it discourage future gerrymandering by Republicans. It’s an incremental improvement which means that maybe, if everything falls into place, there’s a path for the Democrats to hold the House. Still an extremely long shot.
But why is it a long shot for the party that consistently gets way more votes? And the answer is that in red states the GOP gerrymanders to maximize their gains. They concede nothing to fairness. Democratic states, on the other hand, allow a fair process which allows Republicans to win far more seats than would be possible if the Democrats matched the GOP gerrymander for gerrymander. In that case, it would be an uphill battle for Republicans and it would be they who would need to play a perfect game to have any chance of winning.
This is a very good article:
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/07/31/no-one-can-out-organize-the-gop-plot-to-end-american-democracy/
Yep. Unilateral disarmament on gerrymandering is the mother of all own goals. The stupidity of the Democratic Party really does make the mind reel at times. Tip O’Neill is rolling in his grave. As is Lyndon Johnson.
Another dumb ass from Michigan succumbs to Covid.
https://wwmt.com/news/local/man-who-kept-diner-open-to-pay-bills-dies-after-covid-19-12-23-2021
Parney wasn't vaccinated against COVID-19 but had pledged during his illness to get a shot "because the battle, at that point, was worse than any training he endured in the military," his family said.
What a traitor to the cause. Real conservatives go to their death proclaiming “it’s only a bad cold!”.
"I had underlying health issues due to my own choices!"
like the old song says, "it's my body and i'll die if i want to, die if i want to ..."
Leslie Gore was a lesbian so algore could be practically estrogenic enough to be lactating.
In fairness, I don’t think this guy died trying to own the libs. The article is pretty clear that he understood the risks but felt that he had no realistic choice but to keep his restaurant open. At the risk of being roundly sneered at, this man and his family were victims of neoliberalism.
As the article makes clear, one of his most pressing issues was the financial crisis brought about by his wife’s cancer. It seems to have been the impetus for keeping the restaurant open. A system of national health insurance would have made all the difference in the world.
Similarly, we had trillions of dollars to subsidize the rich and big companies but nothing for the small businesses that are the backbone of the national economy. If we could give him and his workers a small amount of money so that he could have afforded to shut his restaurant while we got Covid-19 under control, it would have been better for everyone.
Small business the backbone of the economy. This is a truism that keeps being repeated in spice of the fact that it is obviously not true. The big bones in our economy are GM, GE, facebook, Amazon, Citibank et al.
Small business is small bones. And don't sneer at small bones: Some of the tiniest bones in our bodies are responsible for our ability to hear. Small bones are as essential as big bones.
Small business ought to have been supported appropriately (if it wasn't--some folks complaining does not constitute evidence of failure) out of fairness, regardless of bone size.
It is a truism but it’s also a true fact that’s often overlooked. Small businesses “are the lifeblood of the U.S. economy: they create two-thirds of net new jobs and drive U.S. innovation and competitiveness. A new report shows that they account for 44 percent of U.S. economic activity.” And they do this without the massive subsidies given to nearly every large business and, again unlike huge corporations, they also pay taxes and are therefore more valuable overall than large corporations.
https://advocacy.sba.gov/2019/01/30/small-businesses-generate-44-percent-of-u-s-economic-activity/
His stand against business closures took place a year ago. His stand against getting vaccinated was ongoing until his death.
I think there's just a lot of ambiguity. And there's a lot of vaccine hesitancy that needs to be addressed. My impression from the article is that this guy was reachable with the right incentives and support. Not everyone who is hesitant about the vaccines is a Fox News MAGA-asshole.
I think one problem is a regrettable tendency to focus entirely on the Fox News people and not take the time and effort to reach those who are reachabe.
In a somewhat similar vein, one of the more upbeat (less worrisome?) assessments I saw a while back said the Ds already took their heavy midterm losses in 2020 and so didn't expect to see dramatic changes this time around-- the 2011 gerrymandering was already so aggressive and sophisticated that there wasn't much more to be gained. Wish I could remember where I saw this, but I sure hope it's right.
There comes a point at which, in trying to get your party a few additional seats through gerrymandering, you have spread your voters so thin that some seats become less than safe - in a wave election for the other party, you can lose them. Gerrymandering is self-limiting, unfortunately, not enough so that one person, one vote is maintained.
True, unless in the meantime the party in charge (= GOP) rigs state and local election procedures so that no matter what, any election that Dems win is declared invalid.
Exactly.
Gerrymandering is an effective political tool, unless you get greedy and over do it. Never underestimate the capability of the right wing know-nothings to screw up.
Absent an all out assault on democracy like Georgia or Texas yes. In Virginia the horrible 2010 Gerrymanders led to a bunch of seats flipping in 2018.
David Brat won the battle over RINO Eric Cantor, but lost the war.
It's still a truism in American politics, however, that Republicans never suffer any blowback for the disasters they cause, and Democrats never earn any credit for fixing the clusterfucks they inherit from Republicans. That's the quandary for 2022.
Read here about The Freedom to Vote Act and the Guarantee clause of the US Constitution,
https://www.rawstory.com/voting-rights-2656094670/
Kevin’s full of sunshine and roses for Democrats this week, isn’t he?
Must not have been any outbreaks of Woko Harem.
Maybe once the kids are back on campus after winter break, Kevin Friedersdorf -- I mean, Drum, sorry -- will have more kooky nuts to pick.
I expect that most of the states controlled by Republicans were also controlled by Republicans in 2010, where they got gerrymandered, and not much more can be done with them in 2020.
And the state of Texas sort of disproves that - really depends on how far the US Supreme Court will gut voting rights - but they are attempting to gerrymander out all black representatives in Texas.
There is always some power to get out of gerrymandering because your old gerrymander is now ten years old. Also the victory of republican court packing means gerrymandering can be more extreme now.
But they are going up stream against the higher blue area population growth.
Yes.
This is especially true when there are big coalition shifts like we have seen , with higher income suburbs which used to republican going Democrat and working class suburbs which used to be democratic strongholds going republican.
Consider nj. With their system with two partisan maps being picked between by a tie breaker , you tend to have alternating soft gerrymanders as some tradition of taking turns. Has to be somewhat soft as tie breaker will not give you " your turn" if you go too far by tradition. And of course matters if tie breaker is neutral or leans one way .
In 2011, Republicans got " their map" which was a soft republican gerrymander. And it worked fairly well at first getting Republicans a good share of seats in a largely dem state.
But by last election, it had turned into a dem gerrymander . More rural and working class suburbs had turned solid but not overwhelming rep districts into rep voting sinks . And high income suburban districts intended as solid but not overwhelming rep districts ( which is what you try for) into solid dem seats .
And this year the map is a soft dem gerrymander , and even harder than normal as the tie breaker was a solid dem partisan in a " their turn " year . And result may likely be reps picking up seats in 2022 and just maybe in a neutral year .
The 2011 rep soft gerrymander just may be a more effective dem gerrymander than the actual dem gerrymander by 2021.
Now most states are not as dramatic as nj. The Ohio gerrymander held up fairly well but still had lots of room for improvement. One district intended as a dem voting sink was just barely dem by end and would have been rep if they had used slightly different lines in 2011.
And of course there is fixing prior errors even within shifts . The old Arkansas dem gerrymander was incredibly stupid and ended up locking in a 4-0 rep delegation for a decade. Some of the rep maps this year, while not as bad , just are not very smart as gerrymanders.
In terms of gerrymandering competency, ignoring whether it is right, dems deserve an overall A- and so far reps maybe a C. Ny and fla still to go so that may change. I think maybe some dems are top overconfident of the competence or willingness or ability of ny dems to do a really hard gerrymander.
That's not a very convincing analysis. What are these "Biden-won districts"? Last year was a vote for or against Trump, including within Republican-leaning-but-not-hardcore districts. Biden's winning of those districts is meaningless as a predictor of future congressional elections. They're still Republican-leaning. And the legislatures doing the gerrymandering know it.
Wish I had Kevin's optimism, but barring huge revelations from the house investigation of 1/6 showing unequivocally how antidemocratically corrupt the GQP members of congress are, I'm afraid we're in for a rude awakening. That's why the GQP is doing everything in its power to delay these hearings until after 2022.
Population growth in blue area has been a lot higher than in red areas so blue districts were overpopulated and red underpopulated.
Republicans gerrymander a lot more and seem to have been able to largely negate the effect of population growth, but they are still swimming up stream, and had already gerrymandered pretty heavily in 2010.
I'm honestly not surprised. The combination of rural hollowing in the states losing population and urbanization in many of the states gaining made it easy to cut R seats in the former and harder to add them in the latter. FL is an outlier because of its generally conservative retiree population.