Great news, if long overdue.
One of the key differences between “conservatives” and progressives has been that the Right will work for years, even decades, on its priorities, not abandoning them even when they are ridiculed. And so, positions that were (rightly) ridiculed are now taken as normal parts of the political discussion. Many of them have been enacted into law. Progressives, on the other hand, tend to pay attention to an issue for one campaign, or maybe a year or two, then move on to the new shiny toy. We need to change that.
Too bad that Obama wasn’t paying attention to this in 2010, and neither was his hand-picked Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine.
Starting from firing Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, Obama and his Democratic National Committee Chairs have been huge failures in getting Democrats elected.
Huge failures. The numbers don’t lie.
Strongly agree. I can’t think of too many things that would help the progressive cause more. Gerrymandering gives the SOBs far more influence than they could have playing fair.
Just a reminder, district lines are usually rewritten by the State legislature, so GOTV locally in EVERY ELECTION if you want to see real changes.
They have until 2020 to get this right, but between now and then, I hope the focus is also put on the importance of mid-term elections. Maybe with a visionary involved in the effort people will be persuaded to vote. First he’ll have to get the past the accusations of this effort being part of his third term.
@georgeh Blame all the Democrats you want including the president but to ignore the influence of Koch money is to be blind about the facts on the ground. It’s not clear from this story how much Democrats plan to spend on the redistricting effort, but right now the repubs are planning to spend $125 million.
There you go. The actual RIGGING. Turns out fixing it will require hard work and determination. Not so much angry stupid middle of the night tweets. I’m glad President Obama is going to be on the job.
Beautiful. A grand idea for his post-presidency. He’s still the greatest community organizer of all time. When Michigan votes overwhelmingly by popular vote for Democrats in both national and state elections, and yet our fucking State legislature is manipulated and concocted to be Republican dominated…you know something is terribly wrong, wrong, wrong. Republicans have worked assiduously by going hog-wild at trying to game the system, by re-drawing seats into highly gerrymandered districts, and its deeply hurt the country at large with a total lack of accurate representation. So glad to see this will be Obama and Holder’s next incarnation on the national stage.
Matt, I recently learned of a group of people in PA working on just this issue - fairdistrictspa.com - and I’m going to get involved after this election cycle is over.
Just the idea that PA GOPers considered ramming thru new legislation to assign electoral college votes based on who won these gerrymandered districts was appalling! I’d also like to see PA’s voting options changed so that we can join the 21st century. Same-day, in-person only voting is ridiculous as are the odious rules regarding qualifying for an absentee ballot.
Yeah, he was busy with that whole Obamacare thing we’ve been trying to get passed for 70 years. Maybe you’ve heard of it?
I’m committed to volunteering on a regular basis from now on, not just election to election. And the next mid-term will probably be crucial.
This is the kind of thing that only a really anti-democracy partisan can oppose. I hope Obama uses his bully pulpit well. (And imagine what the house of representatives would look like with seats even roughly proportional to votes. Ditto state legislatures.)
Schadenfreude thought of the topic: with proper redistricting, there will be a bunch of rabid republicans running against each other.
I am hugely condemnatory of Obama, who has been a huge dissapointment, and has never done much with his great promise. Obamacare is exploding, he gave millions of jobs to foreign workers, etc.
But this is a very good idea, and one that I fully back.
Gosh, and I was hoping he was going to star in a reality survival show in Hawaii.
Except in 2008 and 2012 when Obama was actually running and when Democrats actually ran with him instead of running away as they did 2010 and 2014. You can’t help candidates get elected when they’re acting like they don’t know you.
This is huge and not widely understood.
The worst thing to happen to progressive politics was the disaster of 2010. Our losses to the GOP allowed the Republican to redistrict almost every state so tight has to guarantee them control of the House (and many state houses) for decades.
Here is an example. In 2012, Democrats for Congress received 600,000 more votes nationally than did Republicans and the House stay in GOP hands. This year, that 600k number will likely be higher and the odds of the House flipping are almost zero. And even if we did retake the House, it would be gone in 2 years.
And because of the gerrymandered control of state houses where re-redistricting takes place, how do we ever get a fair election in any state for Federal district? We don’t, is the answer.
So, we have to end Gerrymandering and the only way to do this is by amending state constitutions as Florida (of all states) has done.
My friends, this is HUGE! If I was mega donor, this is where my money would go.
That is no excuse. Tim Kaine and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz were horrible DNC Chairs. Horrible.
Had Obama aggressively focused on building the Democratic majority, the Democrats could have controlled the Senate and the House for both Obama’s terms. Instead, Democrats lost both the House and the Senate under Obama.
Every single one of these states are considered what they call swing states except for Illinois and Maryland. Both of those states were gerrymandered in the opposite direction by Democrats.
Kaine was terrible, but DWS had mixed results. People like to forget about the 2012 election and instead focus solely on 2014. And let’s not forget that if Dems do well this year it’ll be due in large part to the plans put in place by Schultz and her team.
ETA: And you and others are ignoring the unprecedented obstruction, partisanship, and general hate and anger that had taken over much of the electorate on the right. Candidates like Allison Lundergan Grimes here in KY were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. They could neither run with Obama nor completely run away from him. There are/were serious problems facing any Democrat running in a purple or red state during midterm elections that have only been greatly exacerbated over the last 8 years. To ignore those problems, many of which are completely out of the reach of the president and party leaders, is really unfair.
Bullshit.
The Democrats turned out in record numbers in the off year of '06. We turned Dallas Co. blue in '06.
In '04 I belonged to a voting rights PAC in Dallas Co and the Democratic (I swear to god they have me doing it - democrat party ick) Party was totally moribund in the state that year and it had been for awhile. It was barely alive. With Dean’s help as well as the DCCC and the DNC, we rebuilt the party in Texas and it’s very very active and busy these days.