This one reason why republicans are opposing HR1... and why DC and Puerto Rico statehood should happen.
We are going to have to end the filibuster to pass HR1, it's a dangerous tactic but I don't see any other way to end the hegemony of the minority party. That seems to be an oxymoron, and that's why we need to change the laws.
There's definitely a vote efficiency problem, and SCOTUS, with Roberts's thinking, sees this as a political issue not for them to deal with. So let politics be politics. Redmap was uber successful at rigging the game, and kudos to the Republicans who kick-started that next phase gerrymandering where state control -> map controls. Let's see if the Dems grow some balls and fight back. Yes, there's a chance of getting smacked back in the future, but they're getting chopped at the knees if they do nothing. If they continue to pussyfoot around, then they'll lose every future fight.
The Non-Competitive House A recent report shows 78 of 435 seats in the US House are truly competitive. https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-non-competitive-house/ excerpt: We see here first that the number of House seats that are truly competitive is quite small (even if there was a slight rebound in the 2021 report of +5). Most of the seats in the US House of Representatives are settled in the primaries, not during the general election. This illustrated how little things like national popular opinion matter for political outcomes. To get re-elected to the House in most districts means appealing to the primary electorate, which is but a small slice of the citizenry. This is not a good way to generate representative Representatives (not that single-seat districts can ever do that anyway). A second theme is that the Republicans have a built-in advantage of 27 seats (down slightly over the last two cycles). And it should be noted that gerrymandering is not the main problem, and HR1 is not going to fix this. The main culprit is geographical sorting. more at the link
How is Gerrymandering not the problem when most seats are settled in the primary? That makes zero sense since the gerrymandered district is made up to cater to a particular demographic,hence the district being settled in the primary.
Taylor is commenting on this report: https://cookpolitical.com/analysis/...21-cook-political-report-partisan-voter-index excerpt: The impact of redistricting vs. self-sorting of the electorate It's become fashionable to blame gerrymandering for polarization and Congress's ills. In truth, redistricting is only responsible for a fraction of the decimation of swing seats over the past few decades. The bigger factor? Voters' self-sorting. In many minimally altered districts, the electorate has simply become much more homogeneous. For example, the boundaries of West Virginia’s 2nd CD have barely changed since 1997, but its PVI score has shifted from EVEN to R+20 as its voters have moved away from national Democrats. Likewise, Albuquerque’s migration to the left has bumped the PVI score of New Mexico’s 1st CD from R+1 to D+9. The Cook PVI illustrates how voters’ natural geographical sorting from election to election, much more than redistricting and gerrymandering, has driven the polarization of districts over the last two decades. Our 12 unique sets of PVI scores over the past 25 years give us a powerful tool to isolate and quantify the impacts of sorting and redistricting on the makeup of House districts. We've released new PVI scores in seven odd-numbered years following presidential elections: 1997, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2013, 2017 and 2021. We've also recalculated scores in five even-numbered years following redistricting: 2002 (after the 2000 census), 2004 (after mid-decade redistricting in Texas), 2012 (after the 2010 census), 2016 (after new court-ordered maps in Florida, North Carolina and Virginia) and 2020 (after new court-ordered maps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania). On balance, redistricting wasn’t as much of a factor in the House’s polarization as the most vocal opponents of gerrymandering might think. Of the net 86 “swing seats” that have vanished since 1997, 81 percent of the decline has resulted from areas trending redder or bluer from election to election, while only 19 percent of the decline has resulted from changes to district boundaries. A big driver of the House's growing "play-to-the-base" psychology: over time, the two parties’ constituencies have drifted even farther apart: today's median Democratic-held seat has a PVI score of D+12, up from D+7 in 1997. The median Republican-held seat has a PVI score of R+12, up from R+7 in 1997. In other words, the gap between the two parties’ median districts has grown from 14 to 24 points. This is not to say redistricting hasn’t had a big impact. Sorting has enhanced partisan mapmakers’ ability to partition states into safe seats. And on a net basis, redistricting has helped bolster Republicans: the number of Republican (R+5 or greater) seats has grown by 12 as the result of changes to district lines, while the number of Democratic (D+5 or greater) seats has increased by just four. Democrats also suffer because their voters are disproportionately clustered on the map. The most Republican district in the country is Rep. Robert Aderholt's AL-04, with a score of R+34. But Democrats hold 15 districts with a PVI score of D+34 or greater. Overall, 230 of 435 House seats are more Republican than the national average, forcing Democrats to win some GOP-leaning seats to win a majority.
Couldn't find its own thread. Seems like both parties are running it They made the map hoverable if you click in the link 1 in 2 states at risk of "rigged maps" after congressional redistricting, group warns More than half of the states in the U.S. are at "extreme risk" of congressional districts being drawn to unfairly favor one party, according to a new analysis of state redistricting processes by RepresentUs, a non-partisan advocacy group focused on election reform. Why it matters: The states at risk of gerrymandering — a process the group says can produce "rigged maps" — include battlegrounds like Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin and North Carolina. The big picture: This year's redistricting process is already more chaotic than usual. And the outcomes could boost one party's political candidates for a decade. "It's really just open season in a way that it never has been," RepresentUs CEO Josh Silver told Axios. That's due in large part to Supreme Court rulings since the last census that block partisan gerrymandering lawsuits from federal courts and ended requirements for some states to get their maps pre-cleared by the Justice Department. What to watch: The U.S. is in a period of rapid demographic change, moving toward becoming a majority-minority population. "At the end of a 10-year [redistricting] cycle, the state can look very different than it did before," the lead researcher on the project, Jack Noland, told Axios. "That is all the more reason that we need fairer lines from the beginning, to sort of withstand those changes." How it works: RepresentUs researchers looked at five key questions when determining each state's gerrymandering risk. Are elected officials or nonpartisan commissions are in charge of drawing maps? Can map-drawing can be done in secret? Does one party control the process? What are state criteria around how districts must be drawn? How hard it is to challenge gerrymandered maps in court? "I think we have a good sense of where there is a prior history of gerrymandering in this country," Noland said. "But what we hadn't seen is an analysis of the laws on the books in these places." By the numbers: 11 states saw high risk of gerrymandering across all five categories. Just seven states received a "minimal risk" rating: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Michigan, Arizona, Washington and Idaho. Democrat-run and Republican-run states alike fell into the highest-risk and lower-risk categories. What they're saying: The report highlights the need for changes to the redistricting process in many states and advocates for a sweeping election overhaul bill Democrats passed in the House last month. Republicans have sharply criticized the bill, but Silver said given what’s at stake, it shouldn't be a partisan issue.
Gerrymandering is a terrible problem, totally anti democratic. I'm just not sure why you call it Republican democratic, these type of point the fingers tribalism doesn't show that they almost all partake, more so on both sides we have out of touch private jet politicians pandering not just to lobbyist, but literally allowing them access and amendments to bills, and what always works is a common enemey and saying its the other side who did it first. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02/us/politics/02fec.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/21/barackobama.uselections2008 Even in 2008, Mccain and Obama had a public election pledge, obama backed out. This isn't some hit that people need to come defend and say what about. Everyone should be callign out the rampant corruption and pandering through the entire political system that sees to draw down democracy for sustained power structure. Dems do it to themselves as they group and belittle their own progressive facet, republicans are now doing it to the neoliberal old guard or anyone who stands up to their dear leader trump. All in all, they are making a clown show and to anyone who actually read the constitituion, I'm wondering where it says anything about america being a binary two party system, if anything our founders were weary because nothing is easier but to divide and conquer.
When your team is up for the draft lotto, do you look the other way when they tank? I didn't really like Barkley until he joined the rockets.... We're at a point where people rip their own team for not even trying to game the odds. Bit of a successful divide and conquer play between those in power since all forms of germandering remove power from the majority and heaps it upon minority interests
Self-sorting (accompanied with the theory that urban areas make you lean Democratic and suburban areas make you lean Republican) allows for gerrymandering to be more easily accomplished. If we were all mixed up like a checker board, rigging would be much harder.
With all due respect, nonsense! Of course gerrymandering is (edit) an enormous problem. A problem today for Democrats, slow several years back to adopt high tech drawing of districts (a mistake), which gave the GOP an early gerrymander advantage, is the partisan Roberts court, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. The result? Gaze around you, Os. If you can't see the result, I don't know what to tell you.
Makes Files Public That Republicans Wanted Sealed January 5, 20201:51 PM ET Hansi Lo Wang Stephanie Hofeller stands with her father, Thomas, for a family photo in California during the 1970s. Republicans fought to stop computer files found on the redistricting expert's hard drives from going public — now Stephanie is sharing them online. Courtesy of Stephanie Hofeller More than a year after his death, a cache of computer files saved on the hard drives of Thomas Hofeller, a prominent Republican redistricting strategist, is becoming public. Republican state lawmakers in North Carolina fought in court to keep copies of these maps, spreadsheets and other documents from entering the public record. But some files have already come to light in recent months through court filings and news reports. They have been cited as evidence of gerrymandering that got political maps thrown out in North Carolina, and they have raised questions about Hofeller's role in the Trump administration's failed push for a census citizenship question. Now more of the files are available online through a website called The Hofeller Files, where Hofeller's daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, published a link to her copy of the files on Sunday after first announcing her plans in a tweet last month. "These are matters that concern the people and their franchise and their access to resources. This is, therefore, the property of the people," Hofeller told NPR. "I won't be satisfied that we the people have found everything until we the people have had a look at it in its entirety." Article continues after sponsor message "A hunch that maybe something was wrong" Her decision to put the files online herself is just the latest twist in a series of one astonishing event after another. It had been more than four years since Stephanie had spoken to her father after a family dispute involving the custody of her children landed in court. But on the last day of September in 2018, she "had a hunch that maybe something was wrong," according to her testimony for a lawsuit deposition. After his death in 2018, Thomas Hofeller's daughter found hard drives filled with the GOP redistricting strategist's files. Among them was a study in which he concluded that adding a citizenship question to census forms would be "advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites." Sitting in her car parked outside a convenience store in Kentucky, she used her phone to search online for her father's name and found an obituary for Thomas Hofeller, confirming that he had died at the age of 75 more than a month earlier in August. Stephanie then reconnected with her mother, Kathleen, and visited her parents' apartment in North Carolina, where she found four external hard drives and a clear plastic bag containing 18 USB thumb drives in her father's room. Stephanie says her mother encouraged her to take the devices. A treasure trove that led to bombshells It turned out they were filled with photos of Stephanie with her children and other personal items — as well as files from her father's work as a redistricting consultant for Republicans. While looking for an attorney to represent her mother in 2018, Stephanie says she connected with the North Carolina chapter of Common Cause, an advocacy group that had brought a lawsuit against Republican state officials to overturn political maps Thomas Hofeller helped draw. After mentioning the hard drives to Common Cause, Stephanie received a court order to turn them over as potential evidence for the lawsuit. She did so in March after making a copy of some of the files for herself. Since then, the Hofeller files have led to bombshell developments in two major legal battles in the political world. In September, Common Cause won its legal challenge to political maps in North Carolina, where a state court cited some of the files as evidence of gerrymandering designed to unfairly give Republicans an advantage in winning elections and maintaining control of the state legislature. "The Court finds that in many election environments, it is the carefully crafted maps, and not the will of the voters, that dictate the election outcomes in a significant number of legislative districts and, ultimately, the majority control of the General Assembly," a three-judge panel of the Wake County Superior Court wrote in their ruling. Other files have become intertwined in the federal lawsuits over the Trump administration's push to add the now-blocked citizenship question to the 2020 census, raising questions about Thomas Hofeller's role and the administration's true motives. Lawyers with the law firm Arnold & Porter — which represented both Common Cause and some of the citizenship question's challengers — uncovered an unpublished study in which Thomas Hofeller concluded using responses from such a question would be "advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites" when voting districts are redrawn. The revelation came weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in June, affirming a lower court's decision against the question, which has been permanently blocked from forms for the upcoming national head count. Saving "trade secrets" from being "destroyed" Stephanie says she decided to turn the hard drives over for the North Carolina lawsuit in March and to upload her copy of the files online this week in part to preserve a historical record about her father. "His work is really having a profound effect and has had long before anybody really noticed on a broader level," Stephanie says. "I think from the historical standpoint, this slice of life, this little snapshot is going to prove very valuable." Attorneys for Thomas Hofeller's former company, Geographic Strategies, have been trying to keep sealed copies of certain files that were turned over for the North Carolina case, citing them as "trade secrets," and other proprietary information about the company's work. While that dispute has played out in a state court in recent months, news organizations including The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Intercept have published reports based on copies they obtained of Hofeller's files. "I originally started sharing them with journalists as a direct response to the assertion by the legislative defendants through counsel that they should be destroyed," Stephanie tells NPR, which previously received a copy of the files from her. The files document the wide reach of Thomas Hofeller's work on political maps across the country — including in Arizona, Florida, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia, as well as New York's Nassau County and Texas' Galveston and Nueces counties. In a Microsoft Word document last saved in 2015, Thomas Hofeller warned against changing the Census Bureau's policy of including prisoners in the population counts of the areas where they're incarcerated, expressing concern that "the actual effect on reapportionment and redistricting is not clearly known for individual states." As a longtime strategist for the Republican National Committee, Thomas Hofeller was known for his warnings to keep redistricting work under wraps. "Treat every statement and document as if it was going to appear on the FRONT PAGE of your local newspaper," one of his slides for a 2011 training session for redistricting officials says. "Emails are the tool of the devil." Stephanie says the irony that some of his work files are now out in public is not lost on her. "I don't think he cared all that much to protect these people after he was gone," she adds. While he was alive, politics governed family life for the Hofellers, Stephanie says. Growing up, she remembers her father correcting how she and others would pronounce gerrymandering with a soft G sound. Her father preferred the hard G (as in Gary) in honor of the term's namesake — former U.S. Vice President Elbridge Gerry, who as governor of Massachusetts in 1812 signed into law a political map with a salamander-shaped district that gave the Democratic-Republican party an advantage over the Federalists. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/05/7856...akes-files-public-that-republicans-wanted-sea
[part two of the previous article] Stephanie says her father's stated goal was to use gerrymandering to "create a system wherein the Republican nominee would win." "State legislature, it doesn't matter who votes for what. Congress, it doesn't matter who votes for what. And president, it doesn't matter," she says. Contrary to some people's assumptions given her role in revealing her father's work to perpetuate Republican power, Stephanie says she does not identify as a Democrat, although she has voted for Democratic candidates in the past. "The reason I don't identify as a Democrat is because I'm an anarchist," she says. "I don't believe that we're going to really find solutions to the deeper problems of inequality in a system that demands a hierarchy, which is, by definition, unequal." "All the good stuff" During her deposition in May, she testified there may be more files from her father's work to uncover. Before Stephanie arrived at her parents' apartment, her father's business partner, Dale Oldham, had removed a laptop and a desktop computer with Hofeller's work files, Stephanie said her mother told her. "Dale got all the good stuff," Stephanie told attorneys. Oldham has not responded to NPR's requests for comment. As part of proceedings for the North Carolina case, Oldham has argued in court filings that when Thomas Hofeller died, "Geographic Strategies' computer, various files, and numerous backups in Dr. Hofeller's possession" belonged to the company — of whom Oldham is the sole surviving member — and its clients. In November, one of those clients, the Republican National Committee, paid Oldham more than $420,000 for "legal and compliance services" — part of a total of more than $658,000 Oldham has collected from the RNC since May, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Common Cause's attorneys have been unable to get Oldham to share any additional documents. But as part of sanctions proceedings related to the citizenship question lawsuits in New York, plaintiffs' attorneys have asked U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman to allow them to subpoena Oldham, who in 2017 consulted through Hofeller with a then-adviser to the Trump administration on the question, according to an email obtained by the House Oversight and Reform Committee. For her part, Stephanie says she's committed to transparency with the public in case she gets access to any more of her father's files. "If I were to find something," she says, "I would most certainly share it. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/05/7856...akes-files-public-that-republicans-wanted-sea
Dangerous? Only if you oppose democracy. A good by product is that it will keep the politicians in both parties from claiming that they are powerless to accomplish their stated goals. If laws are passed they can be undone. Most of the more democratic countries are doing at least as well as we are.
Opinion: Dislike gerrymandering? Then the proposed map from Illinois Democrats should be appalling https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...d-map-illinois-democrats-should-be-appalling/ excerpt Illinois Democrats on Monday released their proposed new legislative district maps. They are a textbook-perfect example of why partisan gerrymandering is a cancer eating away at our democracy. Every gerrymander employs the same two tactics: dividing opposing party voters into digestible districts, and packing them together to create supermajority enclaves so that they waste votes on a seat they would never lose. The new Illinois maps use these techniques so masterfully that they would make any practitioner of the dark redistricting arts proud. Consider state House maps in the Chicago area. Democratic map wizards take thin slices of heavily Democratic precincts in the city and string them out, one on top of the other, to drown marginally Republican territory in the suburbs. This slicing is so obscene that election guru Sean Trende dubbed it “the baconmander.” That’s not a tasty dish for disenfranchised GOP voters. Democrats also eagerly packed partisans of both parties into safe seats. House seat 96, for example, takes Democratic parts of Springfield and strings them together with similar regions of Decatur to create a safe blue seat where none should exist. Republicans in neighboring rural areas are meanwhile packed into GOP vote sinks such as House District 116. The new map is so brazen that progressive elections analyst Drew Savicki found it would create up to 85 districts expected to be Democratic in the 118-seat state House, even though only 69 Democrats would be elected in a map that fairly reflected the proportional strength of each party. So while Democrats would naturally win a majority because they dominate the state, the Democratic plan would net them nearly 80 percent of the seats from less than 60 percent of the votes. It’s true that Republicans also pass egregious gerrymanders that use all the same techniques. I focus on the Illinois Democratic plan because it is the first plan to be finished after data from the 2020 Census was fully released in August, and because it demonstrates that no party has a lock on political virtue. Conservative election analyst Dan McLaughlin has found that Democrats have received a larger share of U.S. House seats than their share of votes cast in every one of their majorities going back to 1938. Some of that is because of voting patterns in the Deep South, or the tendency for majorities to win more than a proportional number of seats in the winner-takes-all, single-member district system used in the United States. Some, however, is because Democrats have amplified their power through gerrymandering for so long that it became mere background noise. Widespread Republican abuse of the system is a relatively recent occurrence. more at the link
