Discussion:

The US is slipping away from Democracy toward one party rule. I have never heard the Democrats claim “Dems 4 Ever” but Wednesday morning I saw a number of webpages that touted this image: “GOP4Ever”. The GOP are corporate controlled and as such it is about power not governing, control is all they care about and then paying back those who gave them that power.

Liberals also tend to cluster in large urban areas. Perhaps a remedy would be to force people at gunpoint into the the countryside. Like the Khmer Rouge did.

Unfortunately, those districts are, for the most part, quite Constitutional. As long as their population is close to equal based on the last Census, and they aren’t collectively drawn so as to dilute out the voting strength of a protected class on a state-wide basis (specifically, racial or religious minorities, because it’s not possible to gerrymander the other protected classes of gender and, ironically, age). It is possible for a district to be drawn so bizarrely that it draws judicial scrutiny, but as a practical matter, as long as population equality is fulfilled as closely as possible and a state’s districts as a whole don’t squeeze out minorities (i.e. as long as legislators in populous states carve out a minority district or two, depending on the size of the state’s delegation), purely partisan gerrymandering has explicitly been held to be okay. Which is, to say, someone did try to change it and lost their case.

As long as the basic rules are followed (and they were not in some states, Texas particularly) there are only two ways to “reform” districts: a) demographic change that upsets the partisan balance of a district drawn with “just enough” voters of the party that drew the district and b) pulling your ass off the sofa and voting in redistricting year elections, no matter how much butthurt you’ve got over your party’s failure to achieve utopian perfection in the preceding two years. And only b) is actually controllable.

This problem is solely the chronic, virtually defining, inability of Democrats failing to grasp the importance of midterm elections. And I’m afraid it’s hardwired, because, as a general proposition, presidential elections are about voting for something and midterms are about voting against something and Democrats tend to be people who want positive motivation, who want vote for something, while Republicans, with far more uniformity than among Democrats, are the kind of people who always want to vote against something.

In my opinion, midterms were the absolute worst idea, not related to slavery, that the Founders had. On balance, we’d have been far better off if every office had a four or five year term.

Voting for Reps is done by district. If there are 10 districts, and 7 of them are 60% Republicans and 3 are 75% Democrats, you’re probably going to have more Republicans elected than Democrats even if Democrats win a majority of the statewide vote.

When the founders wrote the Constitution, they intended for Reps to represent the people at a somewhat more local level and for Senators to represent their entire states. Hence, in theory at least, a balance between more populous states and less populous ones.

Very well stated. So the Dems should give us something to vote for in the midterm. As long as we accept your premiss we are stuck with it.

This is an issue that will be heard more often as we go forward… Here in iowa we already have three legislatures (one being Greg Heartsill district 28) that sponsored HJR 20088 asking the Iowa legislature to State Legislature to begin the process of repeal of the 17th Amendment . They claim this needs to be done to make Senators more responsive to the states (never have been able to figure that logic). Reading about this phenomenon it seems the conservative groups feel they did everything they could do (mostly gerrymandering) to elect republican legislatures and governors and still the voters elect republican senators. The repeal of the 17th Amendment would fix this. Folks, elections matter and sit on your hands moderates, progressives, & liberals are allowing us to go down a very slippery slid.

That should have been HJR 2008

The new maps wouldn’t be in place until the 2022 election though so that’s why he’s saying that. The Dems would need to win a lot of governorships and state legislatures in the 2020 election to be able to control redistricting. Those maps wouldn’t be in effect until the 2022 election so that’s why he’s saying 2022. Even then, half the governorships are up during midterms so the Dems would need to do well in 2018 and 2020. Unfortunately, turnout for them always sucks in off presidential elections. They need to figure out how to fix that problem.

Baloney!!!

Dems can’t win because they don’t stand for anything. Period.

There are probably only 100 districts that cannot possibly be won by a party that proudly fights for policies that benefit the average American.

This article is the kind of Beltway thinking that got us into this mess.

The issue is money. As long as Dems are forced to beg for money from the same huge corporations that own the GOP, the Dems will be afraid to talk openly about any policies that benefit the people. So why should any average American vote for a Democrat?

Exactly. The voter turnout will be more representative of the electorate as a whole and not the AARP.

Best districts money can buy. They really aren’t red or blue. It’s what rich people live in that district and can they consolidate and keep the riff raft in their own districts.

Let’s not forget that economics determine where a person lives and concentration caused by NIMBY policies against low-income housing in the suburbs only serves to solidify that concentration in the urban areas. It may not be fixable but needs to be calculated in the equation.

All that is necessary now is for the gerrymandered state legislatures to vote to move away from the winner-take-all mechanism of awarding electoral votes to electoral votes awarded by congressional district. Then the takeover will be complete.

There is for the moment a fairly muted movement afoot in the republican party in those big electoral vote states to change the way those EVs are rewarded by CDs rather than popular vote. That would mean the party that holds the House would also occupy the WH for possibly generations. It’s probably unconstitutional since it would eliminate the independence of branches of government and the check/balance mechanism that comes with it. But I somehow suspect that won’t deter people who want total (i.e. totalitarian) control of government and will do anything it takes to get there.

Brilliant.

On the face, this comment sounds crazy, but I absolutely believe it. The continual concentration of wealth in the hands of so few has turned us into a “banana republic” with the electorate being the ones who are bananas. Before Raygun, the top tax rate in US was 70% and with lots of brackets between top and bottom. It has been simplified to just a few and maxed at 34%. The wealthy just don’t pay their fair share anymore. To make it worse, there is no inheritance tax, so some of the vast wealth is not siphoned off for the public good and to prevent total concentration of wealth among so few. Worse yet, professional investors get to decide when the profits of their gambling has to be taken as profit.
“Trickle down economics” like “death tax” were just Madison Ave image lines intended to make this wholesale shift in tax policy to benefit the truly wealthy sound good to working people. The money not paid in taxes, rather than invested in factories, commercial buildings and jobs were instead gambled in hedge funds and fraudulent “investments” like credit default swaps and securitized debt.
We’re doomed because I feel like I’m the only Great Society Democrat left in the country. This crap matters, and not just for sake of give-and-take discussions. This son of a sharecropper’s life was completely altered because of Social Security disability benefits, youth employment programs and the Farmers Home Administration for rural housing. I’m more than pissed that we let the oligarchs steal the higher calling of government simply because they have no concept of the “ENOUGH.”

Can we please stop the “woe as me” attitude. It was one election. A mid-term where the GOP was predicted to pick up seats. It’ll swing back in the general election in 2016. We may not pick up the house, but the senate will swing back and the presidency we’ll keep. I’m confident of that.
Let’s not over analyze what happened in the is election. Old white voters turned out and the Democrats didn’t. The Dem candidates ran away from Obama and his record which pissed off many black voters. It’s as simple as that.
We as Dems and liberals spend too much time wallowing in shit and crying “woe is me, all is lost.”

Department of Commerce IMHO will be a target for these folks,now elected to the house.

Chuck Todd is really showing his true colors.

Don’t know where my brain was… The concern is even after gerrymandering for "all republican " house members the voters still will elect Democratic Senators.

And this would happen how with a solid GOP majority in, wait for it, the House?