It ought to be obvious that politics is a blood sport. Beign the nice guy means you finish last. Grabbing for power does weird shit to peoples values.
And it is all about power. Well money too… and a few other dibs and dabs but the biggie is power.
Could you please link to The Economist article where this happened? I am not ‘surprised’ we are considered a Flawed Democracy but I want to see their metrics.
“The reason the Democrats continue to lose is they run bad candidates with bad ideas,” he said by way of mansplaining how R’s gained large majorities in both houses while losing the popular vote by overwhelming margins. “If their ideas were more appealing their districts would expand, that’s the magic of democracy.”
The Radical Reactionary Party: all gaslighting, all the time. Except when they’re grifting.
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Political parties are guests in our country. They have no right to pick and choose who will represent me or anyone.
Citizens decide the rules for them.
Ok, I know this is kinda… nit-picky… but in an article about fairly and accurately drawing political voting lines… can we get a better map? I dunno what happened to that one, but Georgiabama would probably like the other two Senators back—and on the other side of the aisle, Connecticut and Rhode Island have ceased to be. Everyone in southern New Jersey just became Delaware while the northern half annexed the New York islands, and Maryland’s eaten what had been Delaware while ceding the western part of the state to Pennsylvania.
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If Dems want repugs to end it they got to play by the same game. Win big in 2020, and go gang busters on the remaps, super partisan gerrymandering, and also call for reforms to stop it. Repugs wont call for it to end unless it hurts them.
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Projection, 24/7. They can’t win fairly, so they cheat. And then claim the Democrats are doing the same thing. SMDH.
My lord, every single thing that every single quoted Republican said in this article is a gigantic stinking lie. And what’s more, you can hear the rage and outrage in their words. For some of them, it’s faux, performative outrage. For others, the ones who believe their own lies, the rage must be real.
All you need to do is to look at which of these two groups - the Dem one and the GOP one - is supporting independent redistricting committees. That tells you which group is full of lying liars and which isn’t. Of course, by now, the only rational default position to take when listening to Republicans is that they’re lying. Only after extraordinary evidence of their extraordinary claims becomes available does it become rational to believe a thing they say (of course, such evidence almost never emerges).
Indeed, based on years of history and they’re behavior since trump was elected, a Republican claim that the sky is blue must now be considered extraordinary and should not be believed until you’ve gone outside to check for yourself… and then had a few friends check as well - just to make sure you haven’t been swindled into GOP-think.
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I wonder where they found the 5 Republicans. The GOP is dead in our state. Last I heard Republican was behind Decline to State but this lineup may prove that belief wrong.
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Dems would be surprised about 1 group who is in favor of gerrymandering.
Democrats of color.
Because most majority-black or majority-hispanic districts are created by a contorted districting.
A computerized and “objective” redistricting would eliminate a ton of black districts.
Why is gerrymandering successful? Simple, really. Republics know that a specific constituancy, rural voters, will vote R consistently. That means that using partitioning to distribute R voters in a careful manner will produce good results for them.
Or will it? If Dems could appeal to rural voters, gerrymandering would cease to be effective.
Gerrymandering is a symptom, not a cause, of Democratic inability to appeal outside of cities and inner-ring suburbs.
Yet, as the DEM-FARMER-LABORER Party of MN shows, this is not a fact of all time. This is recent. Dems lost the rural voter in about 1960. Until Dems get them back, gerrymandering will continue to work.
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False. In point of fact, many “small” state have well over the average number of voters per district of large states.
CA - 750K/district
NY - 797K/district
Only VT and WY have smaller populations than that.
AK and ND have just about the mean # of residents
In many small states, populations are UNDERSERVED
SD, DE, MT - all have 800K+ - so in these states, residents are worse off than in CA
SD once had 2 districts, but lost the second in 1980
Of course, these states all have 2 Senators, so if those are counted small states do have a better deal. But not for the House, which is the Body with representation based on population, and is traditionally the Body in which more constituant service is performed.
You know what would have kept things from getting to this state? People on the left not thinking refusing to vote was an effective and efficacious way to get politicians to do what they want in 2010.
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Depressing but true…
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There you have it folks. You can either be, the one to choose who will sit on an elected citizen’s committee whose responsibility it will be to determine who you can vote for or, you can decide to let state senators, who can legally take bribes to support the needs of the highest bidder and handle that decision for you.
The problem is that to argue that citizens shouldn’t have more direct say is, in effect to deny democracy, making citizens live with even less say in their lives. The bigger problem is that the modern Trump GOP doesn’t believe in democracy. Given that they have both the executive branch and the courts to battle them out of a jam, it is going to be a titanic battle that will decide the fate of mankind.
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Yes, but you personally have to make that happen. It won’t happen by itself.
Those who fail to struggle are doomed, but courage and sufficient intellect can find a better way. The trick is to not give up the effort, no matter the odds.
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And yet I live in an extreme gerrymander in a Democratic state. Sadly, this one was created by Democrats to put conservatives together, so I am stuck with Andy Harris no matter how many times I vote against him. Eradicating the partisan gerrymanders is a battle that needs to be fought and won, but it is going to be a long, hard slog.
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I have a friend who has been a writer for The Economist for decades. They were taking about this message as early as last year…
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That’s not really a feat, it’s the STATES that we need to take back.
In a democratic republic like ours, the seat of power STILL resides in the states.
See the ERA to confirm…
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And lest we all delude ourselves, that battle was joined by the right in 1984 with the election of St Ronnie Raygun.
We are far, FAR behind the curve…