It’s now a given that the Democratic Party will NEVER CONTROL THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES AGAIN, due to Republican gerrymandering. All of the voting districts have been twisted into jigsaw puzzles that favor Republican candidates. Who now fight over the Right Wing and the Insane Right Wing and the Insaner Right Wing to see who grabs the most power.
Now, I’m a good New York liberal, which means I spend most of my time reading comic books, going to the opera, and masturbating to pictures of naked ladies on the Internet. But if I were a Democratic congressman, I would probably have looked up from the porn occasionally and said “HEY! Bad form! Not fair!”
How exactly did the Pubbies put this over? Why didn’t the Dems throw a stick in the spokes?
Congressional districts are controlled by state legislatures (with a couple of exceptions) and not at all by Congress. Republicans control the legislatures in 32 states, IIRC. QED
2010 was a bad year for the Democrats. The rising tide of the Tea Party swept Republicans into office in a lot of state legislatures and governorships. This resulted in the Republican Party having the ability to set district boundaries without having to worry about vetoes, etc.
In addition, 2010 was the first time that computing power and data on voters was sufficient to allow really, really detailed mapping of preferences and trends, sufficient to allow districts to be drawn with almost precinct granularity and confidence in voting outcomes. Many cases of redistricting (North Carolina comes to mind) involved Republicans taking already tortured districts drawn by Democrats, and simply making them even more tortured, in order to accomplish a “better” result for the Republicans.
And this is just…OKAY with all the people living in those districts?
Like Senator Hatch saying “I don’t really care for these rules, so I am just going to suspend them” with the Mnunchkin and Price appointments? All cool, bro?
There was a concerted effort just before the 2010 & 12 state legislative races to raise a shit ton of money and throw it at Republicans running for state races. There was a guy who realized that if they could control a majority of state legislatures just after the 2010 census, they’d control re-alignment of the districts, and thus hold control of Congress (and state legs) for the next 10+ years. I mean, they threw an obscene amount into these races knowing the payoff would be absolutely amazing. And it was. 2010 was also going to be a bad year for Dems, because off-year usually is for the party in the WH-- so this was just the perfect storm.
Here’s a little bit more on it from Rachel Maddow (I know, I know…but she actually had the brain behind it on to talk about it.) It’s about 14 minutes long, but worth the watch.
And the Tea Party came about because of a few tiny matters like Obamacare (“We Have to Pass the Bill So That You Can Find Out What Is In It”). You got what you asked for. You know the saying: “Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.”
Gerrymandering and weird districts have always been with us. The Republicans have done nothing new in that regard. Doesn’t anyone remember how the Democrats controlled the House for 40 years despite Republicans being able to win the White House frequently during that time?
That seems so strange to me. Why isn’t there an independent body that governs this? It wouldn’t solve everything (results can still be unrepresentative even if not gerrymandered), but it would be a start.
Also, I was just doing a quick google search but found nothing: Can anyone tell me how the gerrymanderers (?) defend themselves? Surely a journalist has asked about this before. My guess would be they deny it’s gerrymandering and pretend that it’s a coincidence, or they just cry “but the democrats did it first!”
Not sure if Ukulele Ike is aware of this, but gerrymandering is one of our great bipartisan pastimes. Democrats do it pretty much every chance they get, just like Republicans.
Because, in most states, such a body has not yet been created. The legislature is the primary body with responsibility for making laws creating independent bodies, you see, and the legislature is also the body doing the gerrymandering. In some states, people can change the law by circulating petitions and putting a proposed change on the ballot, but gerrymandering is actually not a problem that galvanizes the public. Most people don’t care, and some people will swallow the arguments used to oppose the change (IIRC Ohio has had several redistricting reform referendums fail).
Oh, there isn’t necessarily any pretense of it being nonpartisan. The defense (a word that implies a level of shame that isn’t felt) is that there was an election, and laws are made by the legislators who were elected, and that’s just how the system works.
One component of successful gerrymandering is packing your opponent’s supporters in a few districts that they will overwhelmingly win while spreading out your own supporters among more districts with a more modest advantage.
At least as it respects Republican efforts at gerrymandering, the natural means of packing Democratic supporters into districts is to focus on the cities. The urban/rural divide in American politics means a Republican led redistricting effort can draw relatively compact districts in the cities, concentrating in Democratic supporters. Then have districts that mostly encompass suburban areas and just a small part of the urban center. In this way not all gerrymandered districts look particularly convoluted on a map.
Finally, certain court rulings almost mandate a certain amount of consideration of the voters’ demographics when drawing district lines. It is considered discriminatory to draw lines in such a way to spread minority populations among several districts and reduce their chance to elect minorities to the legislature. To satisfy certain court rulings legislatures almost have to draw certain districts where ethnic minorities are in the majority. And since minorities tend to vote for the Democrats that just automatically creates a few districts packed with Democrats, leaving Republican supporters to be carefully spread among several districts but always with a distinct majority.
Gerrymandering will end by the efforts only of the Judiciary, no other way. Suits must be brought that emphasize the unequal treatment under the law of voters in disparate districts and which seek a ruling by the courts that will create a non-partisan commission to advance the districting process to create truly randomized and logically connected districts, state, county and city.
The result? Perhaps not so different than you might expect, but likely with somewhat fewer minorities in county and state seats, since gerrymandering more or less guarantees that some ‘far less than a majority’ seats are absolutely going for minorities in order to make the rest of the districts lean toward the Republican party.
Blame Obama. It was the overwhelming win of the Republicans in the 2010 that wiped out the Dems in the State legislatures which is where Congressional Districts are set up per state every 10 years, as I recall.
However do not fret. Political fortunes always change, and this too will pass.
The Dems will lose a few more election cycles and then smarten up move back to the center and gain more seats everywhere. Judging by what I see they have learned nothing in the past election so most likely will take two more cycles. That is my guess.
Just going over the good points made, having had to deal with this up close.
It was mentioned, the requirement to draw minorities-favoring districts has the unforeseen effect of providing cover for the latter-day gerrymanderers – but of course it was done to compensate for how previously the gerrymandering was used in the opposite direction to split and dilute the minority communities and deprive them of effective representation (not even dumping them in one district: artificially dividing them across multiple white-majority ones so they got nothing).
The US Constitution leaves it to state legislatures to rule about district divisions. Some states have by law or state constitution established a method less tied to the partisan body but it’s still very few (and even then, people have sued that the language about “the legislature providing” meant that it could not be another way than the legislature directly doing it). One of the bugs or features depending on your POV is that mostly there is in the state laws or constitutions no requirement the district be compact or be based on some objective criterion of cohesion. Also, the contiguity of borders is interpreted broadly to include surface or waterway rights-of-way so the district may be one avenue wide for miles between populations. This has been seen as allowing the district to be drawn around commonality of interests (e.g. Working Class neighborhoods, college towns) and used historically by both parties to draw themselves “safe” districts that connect a bunch of party-leaning enclaves, or corner opponents into as few seats as possible.
That the latest round of gerrymanders was more sophisticatedly focused per the aforementioned tecnological and methodological advances, and under TP influence, made it so to many it just felt like it was done in a more blatant WTA “woe to the vanquished” attitude. Myself I am not so sure that old-school politicians would have been willing to throw the opposition a “sportsmanlike” bone in the process if they’d had these tools…
Yeah, considering that the term ‘gerrymandering’ is over 200 years old, and this practice has been used ever since to stick it to the party not in power, I’m having a hard time getting my dudgeon up past room temperature.