Yes, and that’s fine. But that’s a situation in which the districts roughly represent the total breakdown of Dems and Republicans. But I see your point.
I think the problem is the presumption that Dems tend to live with each other but Republicans live in more mixed areas. Not sure how that works. If Republicans live with 40% Dems, the Dems aren’t all concentrated in Democratic areas with each other.
I agree that they should just award their electoral votes to the republicans each election and be done with it. There is no law that says that electors have to be chosen based on a popular vote. Why steal just a handful of EV when you can steal the whole lot of them?
I actually kind of wish that a deep-blue state would go ahead and do this, just put it in law that the republican candidate will always be awarded the electoral votes of that state, regardless of results of any and all voting. That would draw some attention to the issue and maybe we’d start building up the impetus to push through an amendment to change voting to a national-level event (instead of 30,000 county-level events).
Then of course, if nothing changes, just change the law back to the way it used to be before the next election 
Well, as to who lives where in partisan terms, see this Red State/Blue State map based on the 2008 presidential election, broken down by county, and shaded from red through purple to blue. See also this population-adjusted cartogram of the same (and note how the solid-red areas shrink to insignificance). The obvious pattern is that Democrats live in the cities, Republicans in the countryside, and the suburbs/exurbs are mixed.
Yes, of course. But that doesn’t mean that Dems should be jammed all in one congressional district while Republicans are spread among more. They all have to have the same number of residents, and the lines can usually be drawn to split both groups evenly - if you want to. The claim that gerrymandering against Dems can’t be avoided because they live in cities is just false. You can draw a congressional district line down one city street or another as easily as using county borders or mountain ranges.
A liberal blogger claims that the plans talked about in this thread are unconstitutional.
Legal eagles, your opinion of the analysis therein?
Bush v. Gore is going to bite them in the ass? OK, maybe there is a God.
Good news from Virginia, that plan went down in flames in committee, eleven to four. (I could have linked to any ordinary news site, but ThinkProgress is good for you, it builds character.)
Hey, would you look at that, something actually did manage to stop them.
Now the Virginia Democratic party needs to pull out all the stops to give those 4 Republicans (who voted for it) a huge challenge next time they’re up. Vote 'em out!
It’s sort of like shining a light on cockroaches and they scurry back into the woodwork. Good job by the media for bringing this sorry spectacle into the national spotlight and calling them out for the pathetic losers that they are, rather than smugly saying “it’s leeeeeeeeeegal” and going on to the next story.
Of course. I’m just saying that’s not an excuse for gerrymandering in favor of Republicans, as someone claimed earlier. You can just as easily gerrymander for Democrats, or not at all. You can draw the lines wherever you want.
Not at all. “Natural” lines are going to be drawn down city blocks in cities, because the districts must be of equal population.
It’s possible that you’d run into trouble avoiding districts that are overwhelmingly Democratic (“packing”) in cities, perhaps.
You can still vote for individuals in a PR system. You simply vote in order of choice, and those choices are awarded seats based on the total votes for that party.
Here’s a page with several different red-vs-blue maps of the U.S. (incl. one posted above). A scary one (“Election results by county”) is halfway down the page. Almost all U.S. land lies in “Red” counties! (Immediately after is the same map scaled by county population; it looks better.
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Looks like a good argument for getting rid of the Electoral College altogether.
I don’t agree with disbanding the Electoral College. Consider a state like Mississippi. You can color it red for all the elections of the 21st century. If Jesus Christ ran as a Democrat against a Republican Hitler, Hitler takes Mississippi. So no matter how Mississippi wants to disenfranchise Democrats, it doesn’t make any difference, so they really don’t have any incentive to do so. Now let’s go to a national popular vote- all of a sudden the solid red states like Mississippi have great incentive to disenfranchise Democratic voters, and disenfranchise them they will. And heaven forbid the national totals are within a few thousand, what you going to do, recount the entire nation? You think that will be done fairly?
I think it’s the opposite. I think Mississippi has every incentive to disenfranchise Dems or blacks now because they also vote in congressional and state elections.
And the state gets a certain number of electors no matter how few people get to vote on them (which is one reason for it - it allowed southern states to get more votes for president based on the 3/5ths rule, just like in Congress, despite not letting blacks vote).
Recounting the nation is no harder than recounting a state. It is people doing the same thing just on a different scale. That scale is beneficial because it means that it takes correspondingly more votes to turn an election. The 2000 election turned on fewer than a thousand votes in Florida. Larger recounts are safer.
The federal government has the authority to prevent states from disenfranchising voters. Congress can pass comprehensive guidelines to protect every potential vote in the nation. This would fix not only the hypothetical shenanigans proposed above but also the very real shenanigans that are actually going on in every federal election. And it would not only prevent deliberate dirty tricks but also eliminate the mistakes that stem from the hodgepodge collection of election laws we have now.
FYI: More on the effects of GOP gerrymandering, from a recent study by the National Journal (bolding mine):
On almost on the verge of tears.
I know its only a couple of cases but I feel like noah when the dove came back with the olive branch. Is there still hope for the Republic?
Pfft, where have you been the last 4 years. I’m surprised they didn’t do it before the 2012 election. The surprise is that some of them said no.
It depends on what Justice Kennedy thinks. The liberal justices generally want to see little to no gerrymandering. the conservative justices generally think states should get to do anything short of reinstating slavery and Justice Kennedy sometimes acts like a supreme court justice and sometimes acts like an 80 year old white dude.
Its certainly a bit of square peg in round hole dynamic but the electoral college was a method of protecting the smaller states. It would take a constitutional amendment and you need the support of those smaller states.
