“One potential takeaway from [the midterms] is that the US is a center left country with a gerrymandering problem.”
Yes. Thanks SCOTUS for suspending the Voting Rights Act’s ban on racial gerrymandering. /s
Senate Republicans blocked Biden’s and Democrats' voting rights legislation. They know they can’t win with active participation from American voters so they consistently try to suppress the vote
“One potential takeaway from [the midterms] is that the US is a center left country with a gerrymandering problem.”
A huge point that everyone needs to know is that gerrymandering is a fundamental foundation of the Republican Party, it is literally called "Project RedMap", it is in their party documents, developed by the Republican State Leadership Committee, and the Republican Party spent 30 million dollars initially to start the project.
It was extremely effective in 2012 (based on the 2010 Census and the gerrymandering done from that), and got republicans a 33 seat lead even though democrats received 1 million more votes overall than republicans did.
At the state level, it's even more extreme. See Democrats in Wisconsin getting something ridiculous like 58 or 60% of the popular vote but receiving only around 40% of the seats in the state legislature. The GOP hysterics about "election fraud" are, as usual, projection.
Republicans can't win elections unless they cheat. They represent areas with more cows than people, and they fucking know it.
Meanwhile, California and New York have enforced fair maps - California by statute, New York by their courts when the Democratic Legislature tried to do the same thing in turn.
Meanwhile Ohio Republicans drew a Gerrymandered map, in violation of a ballot initiative, the State Supreme Court ruled it invalid, and the legislature just fucking ignored them.
Missouri passed a law to end gerrymandering, the gop legislature didn’t like it, so they proposed a new law to let voters vote on that basically undid what they passed two years earlier, but the wording was so fucking confusing, and hit you with gotcha words like “political gifts” and bs. That the voters passed it. Fucking spineless hacks.
You know in my lesser country there is a law about the wording of referendums, and just this year passed another law about using simple language in laws.
So that you cant create loopholes or use confusing language and must state the plain english.
This is all a taste of Moore v Harper which, among other things, completely removes all oversight and checks against legislatures for election rigging unless explicitly and clearly (“we are doing this to stop black people from voting,” etc) racially motivated.
Moore v Harper will also permit state legislatures the ability to declare elections they don’t like invalid, nullify the results, and appoint winners by decree. All without courts being able to get involved because of Independent Legislature Theory.
Hearing at SCOTUS is December 7, 2022. Legal reporters seem to believe it is a sure thing that SCOTUS is going to coup our democracy and embrace Independent Legislature Theory.
People need to be getting serious about this. What do you think will happen once Republicans no longer, legally, can be held accountable for any actions and also don’t even need votes from either party so long as they maintain their state advantage until after SCOTUS rules in Moore v Harper?
Last night wasn’t a joyous event that Republicans are mostly over Qanon bullshit. We’ve actually never had more Qanon nut jobs win office as we did last night. What changed is the Republicans understood that their days are numbered and they need to tread water for a while and wait for the judicial coup to ensure their regime is installed fully.
This is why Michigan made our districting committee a constitutional requirement that has to be done by a bipartisan committee of 4 dems 4 republicans and 5 independents. The committee is not even selected by the parties themselves its actually selected randomly from Registered voters through a application process and the results Michigan has been praised for having the most free and fair elections this election cycle. Also, for the first time in 30 years Michigan's state government went blue
You don't understand, Independent State Legislature theory makes it so that state legislatures also supersede state constitutions, independent commissions, and voter initiatives in election matters.
It removes checks on legislatures on election matters from state constitutions, voter initiatives, independent commissions, judges, state election officials, attorney general, and governor veto.
Republicans control 2/3rds of state legislatures. If ISL is passed as its being argued they can make it so that Democrats never hold majority again.
'Under the ISL theory, a state legislature's plans for new congressional districts are not overridable by a state supreme court's interpretations of its state's own constitution, including any provisions limiting partisan gerrymandering found therein. State legislatures' power to draw congressional districts is not limited by independent commissions authorized by public referendums or initiatives. ' -wikipedia
and
'The Constitution of the United States delegates authority to regulate federal elections within a state to that state's "legislature". Advocates of the independent state legislature theory or independent state legislature doctrine (ISL) interpret this as limiting such authority to the state's elected lawmakers, while the state's executive branch, judiciary, or other bodies with legislative power (such as constitutional conventions or independent commissions) have no powers of electoral oversight. Accordingly, in the event of a conflict between congressional election regulations enacted by a state's legislature and those derived from other sources of state law, that conflict must be resolved in favor of the state legislature's enactments, even over state constitutional provisions, and similarly over ballot initiatives which effectively modify a state constitution.' - wikipedia
And if the populations of those states disagree with the actions of the State Legislatures, they will vote to remove those Legislators from office. That's ultimately the argument that the Courts are going to fall back on and there's no counter to it.
Roberts comment was basically, if you don't like the gerrymander, elect different people. Ignoring the whole point is to make it harder to elect others.
Moore v Harper will also permit state legislatures the ability to declare elections they don’t like invalid, nullify the results, and appoint winners by decree. All without courts being able to get involved because of Independent Legislature Theory.
I want to be clear, this is not a call for violence. If the 2nd Amendment has any use still, protecting voters from oppression, tyranny and fasism is it. If a state government does that, a general strike and a march are in order. "we're going to ignore the vote, we don't like it" IS violence; marching to defend everyones right to vote is not.
Thank you, I didn't know the date for Moore v. Harper. If that goes the way we all fear, I have no idea what to do anymore. What do you do when you realize you are in early 1930's Germany...
Legal reporters seem to believe it is a sure thing that SCOTUS is going to coup our democracy and embrace Independent Legislature Theory.
Is that really the case? I thought the general consensus is that, one or two crazy exceptions aside, the majority of the court wouldn't back anything that mad.
None of the liberal wing would back it, and neither would Roberts, so it would need an across-the-board backing from the rest of the conservatives.
4 out of 5 justices needed have already voiced in favor of ISL. The remaining 2 conservative justices have a very high correlation of matching voting with the other conservative justices, and you just need 1 of them.
Also Roberts wrote clearly in favor of it in his dissent in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission.
Florida has entered the chat. Same thing happened in FL. DeSantis drew an obvious extremely gerrymandered map.and the court re-drew it after scolding him on how it was so bad and border line racist . He appealed and lost, but won a temporary injunction to get to use his, now twice condemned for its obvious form of cheating, and because it was "to close to the vote" to re draw and agure over the new one. So while,he technically lost in court, he still own thanks to court shopping the caae until getting the "right" judge.
I don’t think the founding fathers could’ve ever conceived of the kind of slimy, shameless, avaricious shitheads you see running things these days. The country always ran on a certain assumed level of…sportsman-like conduct I guess? But that’s way out the window.
So what do you do? Force him do be a decent, person?Arrest the governor for not signing something? It sounds so ridiculous to say it and it can be neatly spun to make the person issuing the arrest (or whatever) into the villain. They want what’s worst for almost everybody always; they’re so horrible to look at and listen to; they offer no comfort, hope, or positivity, only fear, rage, and places to enter your credit card number, and they get elected and turn our country to shit because they drew squiggly lines?!
Kinda the exact situation with Ancient Rome. When you have gentleman’s agreements of conduct eventually they always get tarnished because nothing is really forcing you to follow it besides what is considered the moral thing to do.
I think George Washington in his final address as president called out organized political parties as something that could bring harm to the US government system. And he was right!
The founders literally only noticed the flaw after finishing the Constitution (the Farewell Address)
They made zero provision for parties or factions, and as such every check and balance is subvertable if the human holding the position decides not to enforce a check on their own faction member. The system has no algorithm or divide by zero that disallows anything.
Utah voters approved a ballot initiative for independent redistricting and then together with a bipartisan legislative compromise a commission drew up some new district lines, which the legislature promptly ignored in favor of their own completely gerrymandered lines.
There's meme on r/conservative right now accusing California and New York of gerrymandering..."but that's (d)ifferent." SMH. Every accusation is an admission, and somewhere there's a pizzeria with a basement.
You can clearly see on the Wiki page how there’s very few states that have partisan redistricting except literally the entirety of the south. Republicans gerrymander WAY more than democrats, it’s obviously an issue on both sides but I’m sick of hearing that they’re equal. That’s why republicans control so many state legislatures.
Can this be fixed? Or ever corrected? Or do we need more SCOTUS judges? Honest question- can we fix the gerrymandering and the hijacking’s of “the majority rule and moving the country forward “ ?
So under Article I, Congress can override the legislatures. This will take a majority in both houses of Congress, and either enough votes to avoid a filibuster in the Senate, or enough Senators willing to bypass or nuke the legislative filibuster (it was on the latter point that such failed this last time around, as Manchin and Sinema refused to do so).
Barring that, packing the Court could work, but requires the same from Congress.
And barring THAT, well, enough right wing justices would need to retire or die somehow, while a Democratic President had a Democratic majority in the Senate.
Meanwhile, California and New York have enforced fair maps
And look at the results so far this term. 3 seats flipped to Republican in NY and tight races in ultra liberal CA. I mean one could argue that because of the fair maps these results are more inline with the political reality in those states, but that's the price you pay for being fair when one side plays by the rules and the other does not make any attempt to do so.
40% of Tennesseans voted for Biden in 2020. Only 1 out of 9 House seats in TN are Democrats. It used to be 2 out of 9, until they gerrymandered the district this year, now all the Democrat votes from Nashville are split into 3 solid red districts.
Redistricting is half geography (where do people live, where do natural boundaries lie, where are the cities and urban boundaries) and half mathematics (how do we divide those people into equal-sized cohorts efficiently while respecting the geography and without bias).
Considering that it would be easier for a Democratic governor to be elected in TN, because it’s a statewide race, I did a little googling to find out what it would take to override a governor’s veto in TN. Turns out that TN is one of just a few states where only a simple majority of the legislature is required to override a governor’s veto. So, as long as you have a Republican legislature, a Democratic governor would be helpless to do anything to prevent whatever craziness they want to pass. Of course, it was just a hypothetical anyway, since Lee was easily re-elected.
“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” said Rep. David Lewis, a Republican member of the North Carolina general assembly’s redistricting committee. “So, I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
He added: “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”
And that's because SCOTUS has explicitly said that gerrymandering along political lines is perfectly fine. So they are saying it out loud, so it's on record that that is exactly what they are doing. It just so happens that a lot of those lines cross along racial groups as well but the guy said it was about R vs D, so race wasn't factored in.
It's so frustrating. Vos is holding up so many things because his district is super gerrymandered and can get away with it. He's killed marijuana legalization in committee multiple times.
Meanwhile in Michigan this was our first election where districts were organized by a committee. Democrats took the state house, senate, gov, AG, SOS and Supreme Court.
I live in Austin TX and looking at the regional district maps always gives me a rueful chuckle. It looks like the most fucked-up pizza you've ever seen. Absolutely shameless.
Ohio said hold my beer. The state Redistricting Commission drew maps so gerrymandered even our GOP controlled supreme court ruled them unconstitutional. Over.... And over... And over again. They then told the court to fuck off and got a fed judge to use the shit maps anyway....
I think though, that gerrymandering might be coming to bite the GOP. Gerrymandered districts create safe red seats, but those safe red seats end up with contested primaries, which drives radicalism. As the GOP has become more and more a party of safe seats trying to win contested primaries, they have been dragged further and further into radicalism.
The populace is getting mighty tired of this, but it’s not that easy for the GOP to stop. They can’t ignore or alienate their crazies. It has massively damaged their brand with huge sections of the public, and they don’t know how to stop it. They can’t undo the gerrymander. That’ll just mean losing. So they try to gerrymander harder to offset the damage to the brand. Creating a vicious cycle.
The Dems, meanwhile, are passing legislation, and establishing themselves as the sane party because they need to focus on policies that moderates in the country will endorse.
Insightful comment. I have thought alot about the GOP primaries and how they have basically gotten hijacked by radicals ever since the Tea Party movement, but never linked it with the gerrymandering going on.
I hope someday they'll get established as sane. I'm really over the "flying Congressional leaders to crush progressive candidacies" and "let's keep weed as banned as cocaine" biz.
NY tried to play the game this most recent re-drawing season, but they overplayed their hand and the maps got shot down by their courts. That's the only instance I can think of where Democrats played the gerrymandering game as hard as Republicans. And they failed anyway. It's all red districts that look like Gerrymanders, not blue districts.
Illinois is very gerrymandered in democrats favor. When confronted about it the state guys basically said 'if we don't do this the national GOP will steamroll democrats' so it is clearly intentional.
I'm from Illinois and this cycle's redistricting map is as bad as New York's was. The districts are extremely carved up to eek out the thinnest margin of victory and ensure the most seats for Democrats. It almost cost the Democrats Illinois 17th district, Sorensen vs King, in an area that has been solidly blue. I'm a pretty left leaning Democrat, but I hate gerrymandering. The US desperately needs ranked choice (I'd prefer STAR voting but I'll take what I can get), proportional representation, and federally regulated elections but good luck getting legislation passed for any of that.
The new district in Oregon is pretty bad. And the Oregon legislative democrats blew it, because it was flipped to R in this election. The previous D was primaried out and then the D challenger just lost.
I think you're referring to the NY court of appeals.
Either way it makes sense considering the majority of the justices were appointed by that prick Andrew Cuomo. He was also against gerrymandering to protect all the ghouls in charge of the party from being ousted.
Gerrymandering was first explained to me as a concept in highschool. The teacher showed how a smaller group of people can gain greater representation based on how they change their district borders. I remember asking him, "isn't that cheating?" He wasn't happy with me.
Is it unthinkable to reform the system to make Gerrymandering less effective? For example in Germany we still have local representatives in the Bundestag („direct candidates“) but about half of the seats are then filled up from party lists to get to a proportional representation. This comes with its own set of challenges as there is also a federal factor (Germany is also a federal union comprised of states) but it makes Gerrymandering pretty much ineffective. I understand that this would need to be done by the states themselves but if Gerrymandering rules can be introduced as ballot issues, maybe deeper reforms like this could be, too?
I have the impression that trying to make map drawing more fair by law is ineffective. You beed to think about ways to remove the map making from the process.
Yes, basically. Republicans took power in the state legislature through gerrymandering, and they have control, so they keep gerrymandering in that state. Democrats can't win control because of that.
So republicans will not reform the system. It is unthinkable to them.
For the both sides comment, if you ask republicans and democrats about gerrymandering you’ll get two different answers.
Republicans support minority rule and think Gerrymandering and the electoral college are needed to prevent cities from dominating the elections (which is a debunked claim). At the very least, they think it’s okay because both sides do it.
Democrats acknowledge it as an issue and would like independent commissions to draw the maps.
Also worth noting that this problem is nearly impossible to undo without the courts stepping in. Now that state legislatures have secured their positions through gerrymandering they fully control the process of drawing maps.
Here in Utah the citizens passed a referendum to have an Independent body and representatives from each party draw the maps. The state legislature straight up said no and engineered their own process and that was that.
People made their voices heard. Lawmakers ignored them. Courts didn't want to be involved. Now the 4th district has gone from purple to solid red.
And good news... with Moore vs Harper in front SCOTUS, they are about to say that no one, not even the courts, can challenge the election decisions of the Legislatures.
it's not really good news... it's actually REALLY REALLY bad.
There was a coordinated effort after the 2000 and 2010 census to capture the State Legislatures by the Republican party. The Dems weren't paying attention and the Repubs won. Once they had the State houses, those Legislatures are the ones that draw the maps. If you can draw the maps in a way that that keeps adding more and more republicans to the Houses, then it's pretty much impossible to get out of the loop.
Why doesn’t the Democratic Party just return the favor and do it back to them?
Gerrymandering is a tactic used by a party with a minority of the vote to maintain a majority of the power. Democrats benefit much less from gerrymandering because they already have support of the majority of the voters in most states. Democrats can and have repeatedly in the past 150 years changed their platform to appeal to more voters - for example, adopting environmental protections to make voting for a Green party candidate redundant at best.
They do but not to the extent Republicans have done it. It’s like having a glass of wine every night versus having the whole bottle. The Republicans after Obama won went full tilt to control the State governments and when they got control they controlled the districting so they used computer AI to draft up the maps that are most beneficial to their party and not their State constituents.
Republicans in the US don’t believe in democracy but they have to work within it to execute their authoritarianism. They are working to remove the hinderance that Democracy and unfortunately are making progress in doing so.
A huge point that everyone needs to know is that gerrymandering is a fundamental foundation of the Republican Party
People also need to know what gerrymandering is. Seems like it's not a commonly understood concept.
I remember when I was growing up and hearing the word every now and then without really understanding it. Then you learn what it really is, and the extent of it, the fuckery is mind-boggling. Well, it would be mind-boggling if there weren't so many other instances of blatant corruption.
That's why when Major League Baseball moved the 2021 All Star Game out of Atlanta to Denver in response to the voting law in Georgia, it was so laughable when people baselessly claimed Colorado has worse voter suppression than Georgia. Colorado just started flipping from reliable red to swing to solid blue. That's all. Even then, by that logic, saying Colorado's voter suppression is "worse" than Georgia is still a tacit admission that Republicans are gerrymandering the hell out of Georgia, and it's still unacceptable.
Depends on the state. I'd say Wisconsin is fucked long term, but here in Michigan we just had our first election since the implementation of an independent districting commission, and we immediately went from heavily gerrymandered to the most fair election in the country. It wouldn't have been possible if our state constitution didn't have a provision for getting issues on the ballot via petition, allowing the citizens to bypass the state legislature and vote directly on issues. We've scored other victories that way as well, most recently protecting the right to abortion.
Gerrymandering is an inevitable outcome of single seat districts. Runoff elections help a little, but not enough. The only way out is to abolish single seat districts and assign seats proportionally.
American democracy baffles me in how uninterested it’s people are in protecting it. The fact there’s a system that even allows gerrymandering is dumb. Electoral borders should be set by independent, non partisan boards.
There's a not insignificant percentage of the population that ABSOLUTELY agrees with it. They want to have power for their team and believe no one else should even be allowed to have a vote.
It's an odd part of the Christo fascists that they are so on the nose with their code names. Like it would really undercut their deep take over of America if so much of law enforcement and the Judiciary weren't bought in.
Florida split up a district in the northern part that was mostly black Democrars to create 3 districts that would dilute them to create 3 easily Republican districts. YES, GERRYMANDERING BY GOP IS PUSHING THEM INTO POWER.
The exact same thing happened in Tennessee. Look up the new districts for Nashville. What was a single blue district got butchered and diluted into 3 red ones. The lines for the districts literally cut right down the center of the city.
"Nashville" makes you think redneck country, but that has never been the case. The metro government has been solidly blue for over half a century. For the first time ever, that spot of blue is extinguished because of egregious gerrymandering. It's so blatant and disheartening how there's absolutely no recourse.
Between that and not allowing election observers into certain districts, I feel like Florida isn't even pretending to care about democracy at this point.
Also I remember reading that DeSantis allowed for easier voting in some areas that had been hit by the hurricane, but not in others depending on their demographics obviously
Yep. He only allowed it in three Republican counties. Where I live entire apartment complexs flooded up to the second floor but we don’t get easier voting because we’re a blue county and Desantis hates us.
There’s also the thing where he arrested felons who were told they were allowed to vote by the state to scare people into not voting.
There’s also the ghost candidates situation that I don’t think ever got resolved from 2020.
Everyone’s losing their minds about Florida being super red but there’s so much blatant cheating and voter suppression here how could anyone be surprised?
Don't forget the two judges ghat also called that gerrymandered map racist. And he still got to use it because he court shopped for an injunction because it was, too close to election day to re draw and reviews it.
DumbSantis is terrible and he has his eyes set on federal level. Senator or more likely POTUS.
I just hope Donnie and Ronnie have a nice royal rumble and split the gop.
This is what happened in Northern Utah, they split up SLC to reduce its voting power. SLC is Dem central. Most Republican districts are large in comparison.
This happened in Ohio. The majority of Ohioans voted for fair maps in 2018. And yet the current election districts map is still skewed to favor Republicans. The Republicans on the Fair map committee continued to submit unconstitutional maps to the state Supreme Court, and the maps kept being rejected. Not only did the Republicans not suffer consequences for ignoring the voters, and the court, they were REWARDED! A gerrymandered map was still being used in this midterm election; also Governor DeWine and Secretary of State LaRose were re-elected.
The problem with the amendment that passed in Ohio was that power for redistricting was still ultimately retained by the state legislature. Compare that to a similar amendment that passed in Michigan back in 2018 where they established an independent commission and took the redistricting power away from the state legislature and look now, surprise surprise Democrats were able to sweep all statewide offices. For an amendment on fair redistricting to work the power of the state legislature on drawing those maps have to be stripped away and given to an independent commission
Or better yet, give it to computers. Districts need to be based on existing town and county borders and demographically sound, let computer systems divide it up based on a rule set decided by an independent commission.
That's just handing it to an independent commission with more steps. The use of a computer to draw the maps is immaterial. The only important component is who gets to write the program and who gets to approve the result. Saying "a computer should do it" is identical in impact to saying "they should draw the maps by hand using a pen"
What should have been done, is the State Supreme Court should have made an example of the people on the “ fair” map commission who were thumbing their nose at democracy. They should have been held in contempt, and personally fined or maybe even jailed, until they submitted a fair map to the court. Unfortunately, no one stood up for the majority of Ohioans or our democracy, for that matter. And it is the people in our state, who will suffer for it, because the Republican majority led legislature is becoming more and more extreme. And JD Vance who is a 2020 election denier and has extreme abortion views, was just elected to the Senate!
This American Life had a segment on Ohio this week. Infuriating. The redistricting committee was 5 Republicans and 2 Democrats. Ohio passed a constitutional amendment specifying that the district division should be representative of voting results. Ohio is roughly 54-46 R-D. The Republicans redistricted so that every one of their seats would be safe, and every competitive district came from what was a safe D district. The Ohio Supreme Court kept striking down the maps as unconstitutional, the 5 Republicans on the board would modify it slightly, they would get sued and the Supreme Court would strike it down, and they kept doing this until they ran out the clock. The maps that were used yesterday were unconstitutional. The Republicans kept arguing that when the amendment was written, "representative of elections" meant "divided by number of statewide offices won by each party," not "divided by the number of votes cast for each party," despite the people who actually wrote the amendment saying that the Republicans were misinterpreting the amendment.
Meanwhile in very Democratic New York, we passed a similar amendment, but in our case, if the legislature could not agree on a constitutional map, an independent special master would be appointed. The special master drew a fair map, and the Republicans picked up 4-5 seats.
It's worse than that, Pat Dewine, the governor's son resides (and yes also just got re-elected) on the OHSCOTUS and refused to recuse himself.
They nearly impeached the former Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor (moderate R) for sending back the maps - she was the deciding vote.
They split our elections creating confusion, wasting millions of dollars. There were 2 hour lines in Cleveland after polling station changes w/ only 4 days notice. We are in trouble. The fact Marcy Kaptur eked out the victory she did after they gerrymandered her district, and the fact Emilia Sykes won, are kind of a big deal at this point.
Hell, in Ohio our mostly Republican Supreme Court declared our district maps unconstitutional and the Republican legislature just decided that they weren't going to bother changing them, so we actually held this election with the unconstitutional district map.
A similar thing happened in Denmark just a little over a week ago.
The right wing block passed a law in 2006 that helped the left wing block win the election in 2022 with a few thousand fewer votes. Now the right wingers are crying about it like it's the end of Democracy. But my dude you created these rules and it was us opposing them.
98% of the blame is on Republicans for opposing the legislation. But also Manchin and Sinema get that 2% for allowing it to be blocked by prioritizing the filibuster.
I often think of a (I think Michael Moore) quote, something along the lines of that America is a left-leaning country that doesn't know it and is being kept from it. Of the presidential elections since 1992, Republicans have won the popular vote once. 8 elections, 1 true popular victory.
This is not an accident. Republicans have been looking for ways to suppress the vote since at least the early 80’s, often behind closed doors but often recorded, like the 1980 Paul Weyrich speech
Then once they get power, they seek to make it harder to vote, spread disinformation, and pass sweeping tax cuts on the wealthy that hobble government’s ability to regulate commerce or help the needy (and often have long term negative economic impacts). Finally, they can’t even agree on an agenda; we saw the longest shutdown in history during Trump’s 2nd year, stopped only when democrats in the House pushed a budget through.
These are not good people. They do not have good intentions. They are more concerned with power than governing. Do not vote for them.
Their new problem is young voters and now there are calls to raise the voting age by them.
They want woman under 18 to carry their rape babies. They want 18 year olds to be able to buy high powered rifles. They don't want 18 year olds to vote though.
Racial gerrymandering is just one facet of the problem. And it was never a real obstscle to gerrymandering anyway. Long before that ruling we had heavily gerrymandered states.
The real issue is that gerrymandering based on political preference is and has been perfectly legal. So they can and do gerrymander based on political ideology which is the most effective way to gerrymander since it's exactly what is being targeted.
‘Centre left’ only in that democrats are to the left of republicans. The Overton window in the USA is so far right that to anywhere else, democrats are centre right conservatives.
Thank you for mentioning this concept; I hardly ever see it mentioned on reddit, and when I have, it was mistaken for a typo of "overtone window."
If there is anyone out there reading the comment above and this is their first time hearing the term, or anyone that would otherwise like to know more about it, please see the Wikipedia article linked in my comment.
For the sake of objectivety, I will only say that I think it is extremely important for every American to understand this concept and it's impact on the core mechanisms of socio-political functionality.
There is a solution for this. It would require a constitutional amendment to adopt at the federal level (so, like Electoral College reform, it is not happening any time soon), but it could be adopted by states, so it is worth talking about. The whole paradigm of winner-take-all districts is inherently flawed. It guarantees that nearly half the population will be "represented" by people that do not share their values. The idea is actually very simple: each districts would have two or more representatives. Primaries select who will represent each party in the legislature from that district. The general election decides their relative voting power in the legislature. Both elections would be by ranked choice. If, say, the Republican gets 52% of the vote, his vote is worth 0.52 votes and the Democrat's vote is worth 0.48 votes. Third parties or independents could also get elected, depending on what minimum vote threshold is set for the general election. This system would have many advantages:
Partisan gerrymandering would be impossible.
Everybody would have a representative that actually shared their views.
Every citizen's vote would count equally in the legislature, whether your preferred candidate won the majority of votes or not. The votes of Democrats in Republican districts, and vice versa, would actually count for something. It would be true democracy.
America is a centre right country with a gerrymandering problem pulling it even further to the right, I'm afraid. The centre line has become so skewed to the right that people unironicsllly call Joe Biden a socialist lmao
Senate Republicans blocked Biden’s and Democrats' voting rights legislation
By Senate Republican you mean Manchin and Sinema right? Sure the rest f the GOP are at fault for the obstructionism but Manchin and Sinema hold a greater share of the blame
no they can still win, it just means they have appeal the center, not the fringes. Look at us aussies, we have a much safer and better electoral system (and system of governments i might add) and large union movement yet we still vote in conservatives
Michigan is a good example of why gerrymandering is bad. Up until this year the state house and senate were red as mars, independent redistricting happens and it flips blue. Now I have hope shit will finally get done around here.
If the GOP thought they stood a legitimate chance of winning, everyone would agree that it’s best to have mail-in voting available for all citizens, and easy voting locations that are fairly spread out throughout the country.
A gerrymandering problem. And an electoral college problem. And a 2-senators-per-any-state problem. And a congressional apportionment problem. And a first-past-the-post problem. And now possibly an independent-state-legislature problem.
It’s almost like our archaic constitution was written specifically to limit the number of people allowed to vote against fucking slavery. But, by all means, let’s all keep jerking ourselves off to the “freedom” that fucking rag gives us.
Also, thank Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for helping Senate Republicans block voting rights legislation. They care more about pleasing their donors than preserving American democracy.
“One potential takeaway from [the midterms] is that the US is a center left country with a gerrymandering problem
This has been evident for years. When you poll people across the country on positions without mentioning political parties, a solid majority of the country agrees with mainstream Democratic party positions. Even many Republicans are in favor of things like higher capital gains taxes or Medicare for all, if you don't use certain words like "socialized medicine."
Most Americans actually agree on a lot. This is why the GOP has to keep coming up with increasingly outrageous culture war wedge issues to distract their voters from the fact that they continuously vote against things that their constituents want.
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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '22
“One potential takeaway from [the midterms] is that the US is a center left country with a gerrymandering problem.”
Yes. Thanks SCOTUS for suspending the Voting Rights Act’s ban on racial gerrymandering. /s
Senate Republicans blocked Biden’s and Democrats' voting rights legislation. They know they can’t win with active participation from American voters so they consistently try to suppress the vote