Because those lines are drawn to maximize the chance that a specific party will win, and the choices of where to draw the lines are being made by members of two specific parties.
Maybe, but what you’re describing only exists in Nebraska and Maine. Interestingly, the 2016 election was the first time one of these state split their electoral votes, though no third-party congressional candidate came close to winning. For states that don’t stage presidential elections by district, gerrymandering is irrelevant because the state borders don’t change.
Hence I’m okay with regarding gerrymandering as irrelevant to the presidential election, and I’m not clear what distinction between Westminster vs presidential you’re trying to establish.
Sure, a political party is going to want to get the presidency and congress, but the people drawing district lines can really only influence the elections for the latter. I seriously doubt “fracturing” in an issue to them.
Yeah… I don’t care. The Presidential elections are outside the scope of the gerrymandering issue, except for the minor influence of Nebraska’s and Maine’s district systems.
And you would not be remiss in doing so, but I maintain my view has merit.
Now that is interesting and I admit a factor I’d not considered. If American congressional districts didn’t have primaries, would the local competition and contention force the creation of local third parties, which would start to coalesce into statewide and possible national third parties? If a sufficiently ambitious local Democrat (say) realized he had little chance of convincing the local Democratic machine to dump their incumbent Democrat congressman, could he be moved to form (or join) a third party and hope to address enough discontent among local Democrat voters to convince to vote for him in the general?
As it is, the existing primary mechanism looks somewhat self-destructive to me:
The people who are going to bother to vote in a congressional primary are likely to include a disproportionate number of those who have more extreme views than the general population, therefore
If an incumbent gets dumped, it will probably be for someone who appeals to those extreme views, hence
Over time, the party’s congressional candidates get more and more extreme.
Of course, that opinion is informed by the Tea Party successes of 2010 and such.
Here is a Google + GIS map I produced that shows all congressional districts.
If you click “Map Tips” in the upper left corner that you will see a web page with several large buttons. Please click the button labeled “Bizarre District Maps.”
You now see 21 map links. Each map link is for a different state and highlights one congressional district with an extremely weird shape.
@OP, if you believe that these super weird shapes were not the result of gerrymandering then what alternate explanation do you offer?
The main reason for few so-called third parties in the US, is that as soon as one of them gets big enough to have any effect, the two main parties shift their platform to start stealing supporters away from them.
The only reason why the Tea Party still has any significant members at all, is that they sold out to the Republicans, while keeping their official name.
Gerrymandering is not that influential in American politics. The Senate can not be gerrymandered, nor can the presidential election. The House races can but the effect is very small. Political scientists Jowei Chen, of the University of Michigan, and Jonathan Rodden, of Stanford University, did a study that estimated that gerrymandering costs Democrats about six to eight seats in the House. That is 1.6% of the entire House.
Six to eight seats is significant when you’re figuring out majorities. That’s a turnaround of 12 to 16 votes, or between 2.23 and 2.97%, which makes things quite a bit closer currently in terms of elections in the House.
Funny how it always seems to favor Republicans, huh?
In the 2012 Congressional election, the Republicans won 234 seats vs. Democrats 201. But if you look at the popular vote (i.e. number of voters who voted for each party’s candidate), the Democrats won by 1.2%. At least some of the discrepancy is likely due to gerrymandering.
No, that’s not caused by Gerrymandering. But it is caused by the same thing that allows Gerrymandering to happen: the use of single-member district plurality voting system. Which means if the Green Party had 20% support in every district, it still wouldn’t get any seats in Congress.
Many (most?) other countries include at least some sort of proportional representation system, so that minority parties have some representation in the legislature. E.g. Japan’s congress has 35 members from the Japan Communist Party, which wouldn’t win a plurality in any district.
Gerrymandering isn’t that big a problem in Congress, but it is a major disaster at the state level. The drawing of assembly district boundaries within a state can effectively disenfranchise half the population. Look at North Carolina.
Does North Carolina have any sort of a referendum mechanism in which half the voters could alter the state government and force redistricting to be done by judges or a non-partisan commission?
Either Schwarzenegger doesn’t understand how the votes are actually counted for U.S. Senate seats, doesn’t know what “gerrymandering” actually is, or he is using “gerrymandering” as an excuse not to run against the incumbent U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein.
I live in the 25th. The 21st is two blocks south of me. Four blocks to the north, you’re in the 10th. A straight shot to work (7 miles) means crossing through four different districts and crossing lines 7 times.
In a couple of years, it could make a helluva lot of difference. But for the present, it would make it even more difficult for the Orange Orangutan to get support for his policies, which he’s already having trouble with.
You seem to think that the Republicans are an all-out solid voting bloc, but they’re not anymore, especially when they don’t have a clear adversary like Obama. Now it’s on them to get things done, and they’re out of excuses (at least with independents…Republicans could turn the country into a fascist dictatorship and a substantial part of their base would suck it right up without complaint and praising them all the way.)
I think gerrymandering is a huge problem in many if not all states in the Union. It divides areas of states into nonsensical shapes with the clear purpose of increasing the majority party’s power at the time of a census in future elections. Some cities in my state are cut up into four or more districts.
That said, there is an issue with how to actually ensure that minority power is not minimized. On the one hand, if you spread them out in districts, they are not in the majority in any district and thus would effectively have no power while we continue our zero-sum political climate. On the other hand, if you pack them into a few districts, you give them a majority in a few districts while giving them even less voice in others. Given how we are demographically segregating in many parts of the country, even drawing sensible districts can lead to the latter result.
This may arguably be a false dichotomy, but these are the two prevailing thoughts right now among politicians as far as I understand. The latter position was largely used in response to laws against the former position IIRC. This is why some argue for at-large districts instead of strictly using our current system.
You’re conflating two separate issues. He was contemplating a run for the Senate, and later said that instead he’d campaign for redistricting reform. He never said that gerrymandering affects Senate races. In fact, considering that he was involved with the very same thing when governor, I’d expect that he has a pretty clear concept of it.
Very little of it. Democrats tend to be highly clustered in urban areas whereas Republicans are spread out more. Thus the only way to prevent it would be to purposely draw districts to be competitive which would be illegal under the voting rights act.