Wrong. Gerrymandering has been used to ensure that minority groups receive elected representation.
In addition to its use achieving desired electoral results for a particular party, gerrymandering may be used to help or hinder a particular demographic, such as a political, ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, or class group, such as in U.S. federal voting district boundaries that produce a majority of constituents representative of African-American or other racial minorities, known as “majority-minority districts.”
*A majority-minority district is an electoral district, such as a United States congressional district, in which the majority of the constituents in the district are racial or ethnic minorities (as opposed to white non-Hispanics). Whether a district is majority-minority is usually ascertained using United States Census data.
Majority-minority districts may be created to avoid or remedy violations of the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s prohibitions on drawing redistricting plans that diminish the ability of a racial or language minority to elect its candidates of choice. In some instances, majority-minority districts may result from affirmative racial gerrymandering. The value of drawing district lines to create majority-minority districts is a matter of dispute both within and outside of minority communities.*
I’m always amused by the “we have demographics on our side!” line of reasoning. From howdone of y’all talk, you’d think that voting patterns are set in stone or something.
Well, that’s your fantasy, your take on the numbers. I prefer to take the numbers straight up. I wasn’t one of the ones predicting a sure Democratic upset when the polls were showing things were much closer than expected, because they still slightly favored the Republicans. Now you face the Blue Wall and claim that it doesn’t exist. Good luck with that.
Republicans were sweating the Democratic demographic shift long ago – Democrats didn’t just make it up … Rove’s “permanent majority” idea was a plan to deal with it. Didn’t work. Worrisome, eh? How to get those brown voters over to your side without losing your base of white bigots? All the numbers indicate things are only gonna get worse for Republicans … and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch!
2004 was a presidential election with high turnout. The Republicans won. (Since your user name is a failed Democratic candidate from that election, one would think you’d know that.)
The pattern of the Democrats winning in presidential elections and losing in the midterms has held for only the last 4 elections. That’s not a big sample size.
The really amusing part of this nonsense is that the only fixed and immutable part of the American political landscape is that, owing to the construction of the senate and therefore the electoral college, rural states wield disproportionate power. And the GOP=rural, Dem=Urban divide is both strong and long-lived.
2004 was 10 years ago. You just proved the demographic tide argument all of us are making. In 2004 young people weren’t as liberal (Kerry only won the youth vote by 10% or so) and non-whites made up a smaller % of the electorate. The electorate changed between 2004 and 2012.
Take that trend (more millennials who lean democratic, more non-whites who lean democratic, old age death among the silent generation and boomers who lean rightward), the decline of religion, etc and the trend continues.
As for people saying demographics aren’t destiny, I agree. But a big reason young people and non-whites lean democratic is because the GOP offers them nothing. On economics, social safety nets, science, environmentalism, health care, etc. etc. the GOP is openly hostile to the needs and wants of non-whites and millennials. And I don’t see that changing. Right now all the GOP offers is condescending speeches about how ‘you don’t know whats best for you’ or trying to take plutocratic agendas and rewrite them as pro-working class which isn’t selling well among millennials and non-whites.
Of course the electorate is not fixed and immutable, but the way elections operate are kind of … fixed. And the political landscape rarely changes on a dime. The author didn’t postulate some new phenomenon, just pointed out that, just as electoral circumstances were rigged against the Democrats in 2014, they’ll be rigged against the Republicans in 2016, with the additional problem of an increasingly young and brown electorate facing the Republicans. It’s really hard to argue against that and remain rational.
Sure, the Republicans can TRY to improve their image with both groups, but that’s going to be a tough row to hoe, given that their record to date wrt both groups has been horrible. Plus any move toward young and brown voters will probably cause losses among their core demographics of rural bigots and elderly bigots.
To be fair, the Democrats face a similar problem. The Wall Street types who fund their campaigns are opposed to the kind of economic reforms that will appeal to their base of middle class and poor people. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t adopt the kind of economic reforms that would please their base without losing their campaign funding. So they stand in jeopardy of losing their progressive base, though really, the problem is more, they stand in jeopardy of not being able to improve the economic lot of middle class and poor voters, losing them regardless of ideology.
Young and brown voters stayed away from the ballot boxes in droves in this election. Centrist Dems are convinced it’s just the fact that it was a midterm. They could be wrong about that. Very wrong.
LOL. Yes, ancient history. A bygone time, never to return.
Your first sentence disagrees with the rest. Even if we grant the truth of the last sentence, the needs and wants of people change, as do the nature of political parties.
Do you know that one of the stronger divides in the American electorate that nobody talks about is marriage? Married=Pub and Single=Dem has been a solid correlation for several decades now. The media talks endlessly about the gender divide, but it’s really a marriage divide – married women are pretty much 50/50, and married women (and men) with kids break solidly Pub. Guess what milennials will be doing over the next 10 years? Getting older, getting married, getting kids, getting into a higher tax bracket, and getting a different set of needs and wants. The fact that the Pubs opposed Gay Marriage way back when won’t matter in ten years, when everyone does.
And as much as you may wish to think that the GOP is now and forever the party of old white men, the reality is changing. I’d bet cash money they have a woman and/or person of color on the ticket in 2016. Americans of all races strongly express the desire of for a "colorblind” society, where race ceases to be a divisive issue; it was a strong part of Obama’s appeal (you may find that desire naïve or idealistic, but voters don’t). Outside of Cory Booker, though, I can’t think of a single rising Democrat that has that appeal. The Pubs, in contrast, have a load of rising “ethnic” pols that can appeal across racial lines - Scott and Haley and Jindal and Martinez and Cruz and Rubio. It’s going to be hard to sell “Republicans are Racist” in 2024 when it’s the Marco Rubio/Mia Love ticket.
For that matter, even to the extent that Pubs are seen as the “white folks party,” I think you overestimate how much of a detriment that is. Working-class whites are a vital part of the Democratic base, but they’ve slowly been slipping to the Pubs for years. Unions kept them loyal in the past, but unions are dying, and many of the issues that Dems use to maintain their hold on blacks and Hispanics (e.g. affirmative action) hurt them with blue-collar whites, and will only hurt them more and more as time goes on, and the pre-Civil Rights era becomes ancient history (and no, Joe Six-Pack is not really interested in hearing your intellectual theories about how internalized and subconscious systemic racism is even worse than overt discrimination). Illegal immigration is the most prime example of this. Honestly, if I’m a Pub strategist thinking long-term, I’m kind of bummed that Obama didn’t go farther than he did last week.
Yes, by 2050, nonwhites will be a slight majority. But given that whites will still be overwhelmingly stronger socioeconomically, and still likely to be more active and engaged politically, and given that (again, like it or not) many nonwhites aspire to the petit-bourgeois status that “whiteness” connotes, I think the Pubs will do just fine with being labeled as the party for white people.
This part is true enough. The problem is, the Presidency by itself is only a firewall. You need Congress too.
This is where it all breaks down. Sure, the Dems may have this better grasp, but if it doesn’t help them win elections, then they can’t do the things the public wants done.
I still remember how bad it sucked to be a Republican from January 2011 through now, when the Dems controlled the White House and had a Senate majority to boot, which is what the situation probably will be in 2017.
The trouble now is that Republicans want to dismantle the electoral firewall. There are some reliably blue presidential states with red legislatures: MI, WI, OH, FL. They are seriously considering abandoning the winner take all electoral system in favor of electoral splitting. This could potential cost Demcrats tens of electoral votes. There is no equivalent- no reliably red presidential states with blue legislatures so only one side can play this card. Of course, Republicans never cared about fairness.
State’s choice. If a state wants to change how it’s electoral votes are used to represent the voters of that state, it’s up to that state to decide.
If, as you suggest, the Democrats do not want to see a state’s electoral votes divided in a way that more closely represents the actual voting preference of the voters, the Democrats will have to find another Gruber-esque spin doctor to convince the voters that better representation is not really what they want.
Not really. People get tired of one party rule. Gore lost in 2000 despite the Clinton years being pretty good. I don’t forsee a permanent democratic majority in the presidency anytime soon, but the window has moved to the left and it is easier for a democrat to win the presidency.
Like I said earlier, 2020 is the big election from a demographic POV. Plus that is when redistricting will be done again.
This is my thinking as well. President Hillary Clinton is a disaster that creates another lost decade for the Democratic Party. Even if Senator Elizabeth Warren or some other Democrat willing to publicly fight for regular Americans were somehow able to get elected they couldn’t accomplish anything in this lost decade and you have to figure voters would punish the Democrats for that in 2020. (Though I do think it’s not completely impossible that a besieged populist president could have real coattails in that election if she was able to get out the right message.) Really the best thing for the country is for the GOP to win complete control in 2016 and give them four years to show just how crazy they are. (Though it might be necessary to shoot some Supreme Court Justices after 2021.)
