Even though she’s been the most powerful Democrat in Congress for six, going on eight years?
I think, as someone who can’t vote in American elections, I have a little more justification in treating politics as a spectator sport and only paying attention to the fun parts. 
Ok maybe “would have no idea who she was” is an overstatement, but definitely her most salient feature to me is “woman who pisses off right-wing blowhards”, rather than anything she’s actually done in her job.
Very much this. Consider my congressman here in Northern Virginia. He’s gotten a lot of federal funds toward improving roads in the area, keeping military bases in the area for jobs, all this sort of stuff. Of course people in this area are going to like having better roads and more jobs. But at the same time, a lot of people in this area get upset about subsidies to corn farmers, the car and bank bailouts, and all of that even though a lot of that is more or less the same sort of thing.
I find it hard to believe that a significant number of people believe that about my Congressman.
In general, I don’t think people are really more attached to their Congressmen than to their president.
I think it’s more that the media, being national, focuses for commercial reasons on the one national race we have. So politicians who are not running for president receive less popular awareness.
Consider that most of the candidates for president who flame out and prove ridiculous in the harsh light of a presidential campaign already had careers in public office. The media just don’t pay that much attention to one of 400 Representatives, one of 100 Senators, or one of 50 governors, unless the guy says something really embarrassing and juicy, like Todd Akin. And the media that do pay attention have lower readership.
So it’s partly the national media.
And then there are a lot of potential candidates who never bother challenging even an unlikeable incumbent because they think there is no use. The illusion of futility is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And internal party politics can be designed to stop anyone being primaried, even if he led us into war.
And many voters have a sort of resignation to being ruled by jerks, and have no expectation of improvement. It can be hard to get some voters to care.
And a few voters are actively hostile to “upstarts” and change, even if it would make things less awful. Alternatively, some voters hate to admit they have ever been wrong about anything, so they will not change their vote from the way they voted last time! That’s pro-incumbent bias, both for incumbent candidates and incumbent parties.
With the Presidency, the media hype the race enough to balance all this silliness out. For lower races, that doesn’t happen to the same degree.
Yup. This is precisely what causes it.
However, that being said, both sides DO gerrymander, at least historically; its just that in 2010 the Republicans had an upswing, so gerrymandered very heavily.
Interestingly, the people of California got tired of it and passed a law against gerrymandering, and the state got degerrymandered. The Republicans there (who previously had heavily gerrymandered districts) got slaughtered and lost large numbers of house seats.
Write your congressman and ask them to pass a national version of it. The Republicans would vote it down, but then they’d be on the record voting against it at least.
It is actually true to some extent.
Take Oregon’s folk for example. They voted for additional payments to the timber counties here to “make up for lost revenues due to losing timber money” (due to a reduction in logging). Problem is, those payments were supposed to be temporary and started in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and it is now 2012. The counties also have ridiculously low tax rates and refuse to raise them. They need to be left to burn, but the guys get votes by getting them money from the feds. Its pretty terrible, and I complain at them when I see them (which is rarely, but they’re busy guys).
Though I think most people are pretty happy with at least one of our senators.
I.e., the riots in the stands.
Nope! My rep is a conservative Republican party line-voting twit! :rolleyes: 
Not that I wouldn’t love to see nonpartisan drawing of districts all over the country, but beyond the practicalities of getting it passed, I wonder about constitutional challenges.
We had a ballot proposition in Ohio this past election to establish a commission to set district boundaries. Democrats mostly supported it, Republicans treated it as a satanic imposition from hell, and California was cited as a horrific example of how such a system could be gamed. :dubious: The end result was that voters bought the scare tactics and the proposition lost heavily.
We need to get smarter and take these decisions out of the hands of whatever party hacks happen to be in power.