Does anyone have a summary of the total votes that were cast for Democratic vs. Republican house candidates this election? I couldn’t google one up…
Thanks!
48.2% for the GOP, 49.0% for the democrats.
Because the GOP won lots of state elections in 2010 they redistricted to give themselves an advantage. So they still kept the house.
I heard Barney Frank say on Rachel Maddow that if we had the same districts we had in 2010 the dems would’ve taken the house. I don’t know if that is true, but I’m assuming so.
I’m sorry, but speaking as someone that has a completely non-partisan group that sets electoral boundries, that is freaking INSANE, and I don’t know how you could possibly put up with it.
Insane. Agreed. And I hope we can find a way to change it, but redistricting has come to be seen as an earned perk by our politicians–the same politicians who would have to agree to make a change. I don’t see it happening soon.
At least we avoided (for now) an even worse descent into madness.
I think about it a little bit like a bribe. If I were trying to get something from a public official and the official asked for a bribe, I’d be outraged. I’d be like, “What sort of corrupt third-world cronyocracy do you think we’re in?” Whereas if I were in Nigeria and a public official asked for a bribe, I’d probably hand it over as the cost of doing business, since that’s the way things work there.
In Canada, a public official who tried to gerrymander would be greeted with outrage. Here? THat’s just the way things work. And until enough of us get outraged about it, there’s not going to be any changes.
There’s a local election that’s kind of crazy. Our Republican state legislature decided that our county-wide board of commissioners, which skews heavily Democratic, needed to be elected by districts and not county-wide, and then they gerrymandered districts to give themselves an advantage. The result, the day after election, appeared to be that we’d gone from a 7-0 Democratic majority on the board to a 4-3 Republican majority.
But then some provisional ballots were counted, and yesterday the board of elections certified one seat a different direction: by 13 votes, a Democrat won one of the seats, leading to a 4-3 majority for Democrats.
Except! One of the more repugnant gerrymandering moves was to divide a local and highly liberal college campus in half, diluting their impact on their rural districts. In previous years students at this college had been able to register to vote using their college general address, and they weren’t notified that they’d need to change anything, until after early voting had already begun. So the Republican who’s lost the election is trying to have these students’ early votes thrown out as ineligible.
This kind of thing is outrageous. We need to not stand for it.
We finally managed to change the procedure in California over the serious objections of both the Republicans and the Democrats.
I don’t know how the popular vote has looked in other Congressional cycles and both parties have freely taken advantage of this over the years, but yes, in many ways it’s nuts. And this is why it’s so crushing for the Democrats that they got their asses handed to them in 2010. They made big gains in 2006 and '08 and then not only did they lose control of the House, they did so in a year that allowed Republicans to insulate themselves through redistricting. They could take the House back in 2014 but had this played out differently they could have large majorities right now and a good shot at protecting them for years. As it is, it undercuts that whole ‘the country prefers dividend government’ theory, doesn’t it?
It’s probably not true.
Kevin Drum, reporting on the work of Eric McGhee and Sam Wang: But the size of the Republican advantage turns out to be about six seats… The incumbency effect is about double that, for a total built-in Republican advantage of roughly 20 seats. Accounting for uncertainty, the Republican advantage is 10-30 seats, which is right in line with how much they outperformed the popular vote this year. While Gerrymandering is a real issue, it’s also the case that Democrats tend to bunch up together more in urban districts: IMHO it would take some gerrymandering to make the House of Representatives into a truly representative body, absent multi-representative districting. And don’t forget about incumbency.
Gerrymandered Pennsylvania:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/11/07/1159631/americans-voted-for-a-democratic-house-gerrymandering-the-supreme-court-gave-them-speaker-boehner/
I have not read these links:
http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/04/quantifying-the-effect-of-redistricting/
Ohio Issue 2, which would have created a committee of 12 (4 from majority party, 4 from minority party, 4 from neither) to do redistricting instead of the state legislature, was soundly defeated, unfortunately.