Is it possible that the current Republican party could overreach so far and become so unpopular that even Gerrymandering won’t fully save their hold on power?
This of course assumes we continue to have fire and fair elections but even with districts completely redrawn to cut Democratic areas into ribbons could they be so unpopular that the actual voters in their engineered districts become disillusioned and stay home or switch their vote?
Sure, anything is possible, but I think your hypothetical is unlikely.
It depends on the physical/geographical limits of gerrymandering, and whether the courts will throw out such obvious ribboning in a way that is enforceable.
Even if you have a 70% blue vote, in an 8 member district you can engineer a 5-3 red majority with 3 90-10 blue districts versus 5 60-40 red ones. Recently, a 20 point swing is not unheard of in special elections, or if a candidate is particularly personally unqualified/scandalous. But that never happens in elections in general. Plus, that would require a 40 point swing toward the dems in the first place to even make that possible. If you have a state that is closer to 50-50, you can engineer a 6-2 majority extremely easily and safely.
Again, that’s just the raw numbers. I don’t know if everywhere it is possible to get such a huge disparity and still hang on to a “majority”.
Yes, but I think you’re ascribing too much power to the recent gerrymandering. I think, even if the current wave of gerrymandering goes as bad as possible for Democrats, the map will still not be as stacked for the GOP as it was in the 2010s. Democrats won two majorities out of the five elections held in that period (and not the three they should have had).
This may be paywalled for some, but the NYT published an analysis of the proposed changes, and even if Texas, Missouri, Utah, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas redistrict and the California referendum flops, Democrats would only need to win overall by about 2.4 points to win a majority. You’d rather it be right at zero, but winning an election by 2.4 points is totally possible. And if California pulls through, which is looking likely, it would go down to 1.4 points.
The Supreme Court case on the Voting Rights Act could make it worse. Democrats could need to win by upwards of 6 points, which is still possible but substantially tougher. But that may come down so late that it doesn’t change the maps until 2028.
What you seem to be missing is exactly how popular the current regime’s actions are. I see more, not less, trumply enthusiasm in my wanderings around my very purple area.
For sure vehemence is a separate idea from numbers. But IMO every noisy trumper is the visible tip of a much larger retinue of quiet satisfied trumpers. Remember that according to their media, they are winning, and winning bigly against the forces trying to destroy America. You know, the evil criminal Democrats.
It’s possible, but if happens it won’t be due to GOP overreach, It’ll be due to the Democrats figuring out how to effectively counteract the attraction that the GOP holds for young men. In the thread on gerrymandering in Texas, I noted that the strategy Republicans are using isn’t the old fashioned “let’s disenfranchise racial minorities by making a bunch of 60% white / 40 % minority districts with a small handful of 90% minority / 10% white districts”. They are instead taking advantage of the move to the right by young men, including those that are Latino and Black. Until Democrats figure out a way to win back that demographic, gerrymandering isn’t going to break. Although if Democrats do figure it out and things backfire on the Republicans, it’s probably going to result in a massive blue wave.
Will Democrats figure it out? I don’t know, but that’s what it depends on.
I don’t think they’ll break gerrymandering; if anything, I think they’ll break the party system.
In a State where a majority of the voters are Dems, but the Republicans have managed to gerrymander things enough that the Dems never win a majority of the seats/districts, at some point, Democrats will realize that their only way to be represented is to switch to the Republican Party, and take over via the primary system. Nominate, and then elect “RINOs” who will technically be Republicans, but who will vote against MAGA, and for Democrat initiatives.
Sure, the “Real” Republicans will cry foul, but it would be legal, and they can stuff it.
If the majority of voters in a state are Democrats, then that state should have a Democratic governor since that gan’t be gerrymandered. That is barring bad luck by the Democrats accidentally nominating someone that has a scandal come out after they were nominated.
ETA: AFAIK, there isn’t currently any such state. That is that there aren’t any states in which the majority of the voters are Democrats but the state is gerrymandered in favor of Republicans. The closest might be the traditional “swing states” of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, but those are so close to being even that I wouldn’t put them into the category that you’re describing.
North Carolina is around 50-50 voting-wise but has a lower house that is 71-49 GOP. They’re notorious for gerrymandering. Plus I also think that they’re one of those states whose GOP likes to give and take away powers from their governors depending on if the governor is a Democrat.
Speaking of which, that’s another factor preventing a simple Democratic majority from wielding power as a governor. If you’re in one of those states with legislative supremacy regarding governor’s rights, they can strip them of power to veto the gerrymandering.
Apparently North Carolina fits the bill:
On Wednesday, the North Carolina state House approved a redrawn congressional map that is expected to give Republicans one additional seat in the House. Because the state Senate passed the map on Tuesday, and because Democratic Gov. Josh Stein is unable to veto redistricting maps, the new lines are now law.
North Carolina is the first swing state this year to enact a new Republican gerrymander.
The new map is expected to give the GOP control of 79% of North Carolina’s U.S. House seats—11 out of 14—even though the state is effectively a political toss-up. An average of the last three presidential contests, the most recent governor’s race, and the last Senate race puts the state’s partisanship at D+0.7, according to a Daily Kos analysis.
Democratic governor, and a slight edge in other state-wide races, but a large majority of the seats are Republican.
One thing I’ve read/heard is that in making more GOP districts, they have to make them all less certain (same would hold in Democratic gerrymandering, of course). So any shift in how popular MAGA is will have a larger potential impact.
This surprises me. While I’m in a very Blue area, I do know a number of MAGA, and in Southern NH where I spend a fair bit of time there are MAGA pockets, and I’m seeing less enthusiasm in both populations.
I can think of several houses that were decked out with Trump signs (and one larger than life cutout) for years that have suddenly been scrubbed.
The converse is true though as well. Every No-Kings/reproductive rights/etc… protester or angry internet person is just the tip of a lot of other dissatisfied people out there. I’m not hearing a lot of pro-Trump anything; if anything what I’m hearing out of otherwise conservative voting people is “I’m not a fan of the Democrats, but fuck Trump for what he’s doing right now, and Congress for letting him.” I feel like they’re the population that the Democrats should be desperately trying not to alienate with policies that are too far left.
What is the purpose of requiring districts? In actuality it is to keep the 2 parties in power so that you cannot have third parties/independents represented as you could have in let’s say proportional representation. But what do the politicians claim is the reason? If I’m not mistaken it is to say that your representative is local to you. But is that really the case it District 1 runs along a freeway for 10 miles to make an enclave in the heart of District 2? At that point, districting has lost its purpose for those enclavians. So again, why requiring districts or at the very least districts that can be gerrymandered?
It is also possible that SCOTUS could step in if the gerrymandering were so bad it violated the 1-person; 1 vote doctrine. If you have a state that is 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans but the state is so gerrymandered that all 8 Representatives are from one party, that would seem to me to be unconstitutional as the state is deliberately denying any representation to half of the people.
That was argued before the Supreme Court and completely rejected in 2019:
This Court’s one-person, one-vote cases recognize that each person is entitled to an equal say in the election of representatives. It hardly follows from that principle that a person is entitled to have his political party achieve representation commensurate to its share of statewide support. Vote dilution in the one-person, one-vote cases refers to the idea that each vote must carry equal weight. That requirement does not extend to political parties; it does not mean that each party must be influential in proportion to the number of its supporters.
Not just local to you, but also specifically beholden to you (the generic voter “you”). They owe their seat in Congress to the people of that district, and so are expected to be responsive to those people (of course, in practice this often fails).
With pure PR, the individual Congress critters are more beholden to the party bosses, who decide which people get the X% of seats they won, and so when you have a complaint, there’s no one person you can call with any expectation that they’ll answer the phone.
I have a way around that but I’ve been warned in another thread not to discuss PR in a gerrymandering thread.
Good point. But then the question with gerrymandering is how do the needs of people in an urban area match those in an suburban/rural enclave 5 miles away.
That would also be mathematically impossible. If a state were 51% democratic, it could theoretically have all of its eight districts democratic at 51/49. To get republican districts, the democratic voters would have to go somewhere. Making one district unanimously democratic would let the other seven be republican squeakers.
Districts which have been newly drawn to craft a narrow Republican edge and now are at risk because of Trump’s declining popularity are the districts where the bulk of the voter intimidation efforts will be targeted.
ICE is gleefully accosting brown citizens on the streets in major cities; the storm troopers will have no reluctance about threatening Latinos in voting lines.
Agree. I know this board is pretty progressive, and so this won’t be popular, but the Democrats’ positions during the Biden era were simply too far left on certain issues for the voting public. That’s not an endorsement, but it is reality. IMO.
I’m afraid at this point, “far left” now means “I think heavily armed masked men should probably not shoot unarmed priests in the face with pepper balls during a peaceful protest”
That kind of thinking means you are a Soros funded Antifa lefty terrorist.