The Democrats will NOT retake the House of Representatives
As explained at
Moyers&company:
The reason why is simple, structural and too often absent from the
conversation: It’s the radical GOP gerrymander imposed after the 2010
census on purplish states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin
and North Carolina – all of which are likely to go for Clinton, while
also electing a bright-red Republican delegation to Congress. Even if
Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in a landslide, there are simply not
enough competitive districts remaining to give the Democrats any chance
at winning the House...
Democrats, however, prefer to raise false hopes — and raise money — by
pretending the House is in play. The media, desperate for any
suspenseful narrative, pretends that gerrymandering is politics as usual
and that both sides do it — stubbornly refusing to understand how the
brazen and technologically savvy 2011 remapping was different from any
other in modern political history...
It takes no imagination at all to conjure suburban Republican voters in
northern Virginia, Denver, Pennsylvania and elsewhere who believe Trump
is a line too far — but who also cringe at the idea of giving Clinton a
blank check in the House. Republican leaders and financiers are already
planning on siphoning money away from Trump and using exactly this line
to defend Congress.
TMI about
gerrymandering.
It's also the reason the Dems may retake the Senate: Senatorial districts (which don't exist) can't be gerrymandered.
ReplyDeleteLurker111
(I posted this once on ABCNews.com, aka Limp Story*, and the post was deleted in ten minutes.)
*As opposed to Raw Story.
Both parties are flagrantly guilty of doing this. It makes me sick.
ReplyDeleteDemocrats need to pay attention though.
ReplyDeleteThe reason the map is such is mess is because Republicans won the disastrous first midterms after Obama took office during most of the hype along Obamacare. 2020 is the next census year. And also a presidential election year.
Obama left teams in Texas and other heavily latino states with the intent of developing Democratic talent in school boards and county boards that could rise to the state and federal level once those states reach the tipping point. For instance, in Texas, that could be in 4 years or so.
Once Republicans loose Texas, Democrats will control congress for years.
However, it is crucial that Democrats win in 2020. It might be more important than winning this cycle. Republican will gerrymander even more if they get an opportunity (and so will Democrats, but somehow I care less about that - which is the entire problem).
This is one of my pet peeves. It is time to remove humans completely from the establishment of district boundaries. All you need to do this is information on where the populations live (census data) and the geometry of the state. Computation makes the whole thing easy. There are several algorithms. Here are two:
ReplyDeleteRedistricting by shortest
average distance to district center
Redistricting by shortest splitline