An interesting set of observations from Charlie Cook:
After Republicans won only 48 percent of all votes cast for the House in 2012 but 54 percent of the seats, it’s no secret that the party enjoys the huge built-in structural advantages in the chamber that Democrats had going for them decades ago. In a January memo, veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff observed, “If you began your career as a Republican trying to win the House in the 1970s and 1980s, you would adopt, as I do, the borrowed adage, ‘There’s no crying in redistricting.’ ” The current unprecedented geographic concentration of Democratic voters was compounded by the 2010 wave election that gave Republicans unprecedented power in state legislatures to redraw political boundaries. Combined, these two demographic developments cast doubt on whether even a 2006-size wave would enable Democrats to win control of the House at any point this decade.
But could the Republicans’ arguably rigged House majority actually be a curse disguised as a blessing? It’s an interesting question. They clearly did everything they could to purge Democratic voters from their districts ahead of 2012, no matter whether those voters were white, black, Hispanic, left-handed, or right-minded—just as Democrats would have done had the roles been reversed. But in the process of quarantining Democrats, Republicans effectively purged millions of minority voters from their own districts, and that should raise a warning flag. By drawing themselves into safe, lily-white strongholds, have Republicans inadvertently boxed themselves into an alternate universe that bears little resemblance to the rest of the country?
It kind of like the whole party has decided to retreat behind the walls of a gated-community. They are retreating everywhere. Home-schooling is exploding. Gun sales are off the charts. And reality and facts are increasingly dispensed with.
There is the Texas precedent of redistricting between censuses. Just remember that.
Yes, it can happen, but requitres two conditions. The first is that Dems take back state houses. The second is that they are then willing to do the redistricting desite all the howling from the right. The first will be difficult enough. History tends to indicate the second is nigh impossible.
Which proves my first sentence, below.
They clearly did everything they could to purge Democratic voters from their districts ahead of 2012, no matter whether those voters were white, black, Hispanic, left-handed, or right-minded–just as Democrats would have done had the roles been reversed.
Charlie Cook is a fucking moron, excuse my French. When, ever, have the Democrats(since FDR) done something like the GOP has done between the 2010 mid-terms and now?
Yeah, that’s a great example of “both sides do it” nonsense. The only state which did a pro-Democratic gerrymander was Illinois, which was only mildly gerrymandered. The Republicans gerrymanders in Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, by contrast, are off-the-charts outrageous (e.g. Obama won Ohio by 2 points but the congressional delegation is 12-4 Republican). Those gerrymanders are all unprecedented in modern political history.
The only state which did a pro-Democratic gerrymander was Illinois, which was only mildly gerrymandered.
How much is CA gerrymandered, and how much of it is just that no one sane wants to be part of the GOP out there?
the state is not gerrymandered at all. An independent commission drew the lines.
Yeah, that’s something I find annoying. I think all districts should be drawn impartially, but if all the red states are going to be gerrymandered, then it’s unilateral disarmament for the blue states not to do it too. The Republican party is basically dead in California, but they still have their strongholds. We could probably purge a few more Republicans from our Congressional delegation if we could redraw the districts in the right way, but no, we had to be above all that.
I agree with you overall, but in California we got a better result than if we let the legislature draw the lines.
Exactly. Dems in many places don’t need to draw the liens to their advantage, to compete they just need to be drawn fairly.
Reality has a well known liberal bias.
The Dems via the Obama campaign and a bunch of smart people in essentially an open source sort of development model were able to drive a “populist” campaign to victory with connected technologies. The Rethugs invested in smart people who built the gerrymandering software. Both were successful. the walled districts of the rethuglicans is pretty awful to be stuck in.
I still say they’re in a state of shock.
Willard won 61 percent of the White vote – and got his ass beat.
they don’t know what happened to ‘ their’ America.
One thing I keep coming back to is the number of Senate seats the Republicans threw away in 2010 and 2012. So they’ve already reached the point where their embrace of complete stupidity is biting them in the ass.
Of course the gerrymandering gives them an advantage in the near term, but time isn’t on their side. There’s no room for them to broaden their pseudomajority, and meanwhile the country’s demographics will keep moving away from them. So I don’t think their fortresses can really be defended in the longer term. The real question is how much damage they’re going to do before we can flush them out of the system.
I don’t know…they still manage to control both houses of Congress despite popular sentiment against them, so the underlying question becomes, Do elections matter under this absolutely broken system?
back the House and fix the filibuster in 2014. Otherwise, Obama might as well go on vacation for the rest of his term as nothing is going to get done.
In regards to gutting Social Security which Obama is consistently willing to do, I’m glad.
In “The Shock Doctrine”, Naomi Klein talks of a world of green zones and red zones, alluding to Baghdad. Comfortable McFortresses surrounded by red zones of strife and poverty. She relates this to Rapture belief: it’s not so much that they expect to be helicoptered out of war by God, it’s that they have the money to wall themselves off from a burning world outside.
Seems related
What we have now is the political equivalent of the Western Front in WWI–permanent trench warfare, and a long term battle of attrition. The Repubs have their unassailable illegitimate Gerrymandered House to pass silly “message” legislation and gain PR. They have total veto power in the senate with their rock solid filibuster block. They have the most rightwing Supreme Court in the past 100 years, and most of the federal judiciary. They also have the corporate media, and a 24/7 nationwide Noise Machine, and a bottomless pit of corporate plutocrat money to rig elections. We have the WH, an (almost useless) senate “majority” (for now) and much of the new non-traditional media.
Clearly the Repubs are not going to agree to permit any sort of even remotely sensible legislation to be passed under Obama, and they are really feeling their oats with their latest filibusters of Obama nominees. Harry’s failure of generalship here is a disaster. So the Repub trench lines are very stable and won’t be moving anytime soon. They don’t fear any assaults, as they now both applaud their austerity and damn the Obama sequester, while lining up solidly against even feeble proposed gun legislation. The NRA is holding firm despite its obvious insanity.
The question is how long will the post-Bush battle of attrition last and what are each side’s plans for victory? Repubs appear to plan on dragging the suburban middle class down ever further via laming the gub’mint and empowering plutocrats and corporations to do whatever they wish, while drowning the nation in lying rightwing propaganda that the economy has been ruined by “lib’rul programs”, “job killin’ regulations” and Our Child’ren’s Debt-slavery!, etc, etc.
They hope that by spreading chaos, paralysis and feebleness in gub’mint that their coordinated message of “freeing” the Holy Free Market/Heroic Job Creators will break down the anti-Repub coalition. They must make economic conditions even worse for their urban enemies and they must completely paralyze gub’mint, while spreading a unified message of hatred of gub’mint and its inevitable incompetence. When gub’mint fails, authoritarian and corporatist rightwing movements usually prevail.
As for the Dems, I can’t really figure out how they plan to prevail in the nationwide trench warfare we’re now in. DC Dems won’t even mention the Repub Gerrymander. They won’t undertake a coordinated campaign detailing Repub refusal to confirm nominees or judges. They quail from criticizing the right wing judiciary.
Instead, Obama is showing up at meetings with Repub to play the fool for phony “questions” from Repub clowns from, say, Oklahoma. That’ll storm the Repub trenches! Over the top, boys! So looks like we’re back to the days of appearing “reasonable” and “willing to compromise”, performing a nice song-n’-dance for the corporate media hairpieces–in other words refusing to acknowledge the barbed wire, artillery batteries and trench lines running all the way to the coast. I guess the plan is to rely on demographics or public opinion or foreign policy or something. In the long run we are all dead, as Keynes said.
It’s not surprising that the party of sociopaths is operating the way it is. The system allows it, nobody’s interested in talk of changing it, they pay no price in the media, the Dems grow more wormlike by the day, so who wouldn’t grab that golden ring?
Playing the fool has become the Dem’s first resort, as they demonstrate today with their latest “compromise” with the lynchmob tying the noose for social security and medicare. I don’t see any path out of here short of revolutionary change. But it’s only the Christo-Fascists that have any taste for that, so the floppy liberals/Dems will just stupify the corner where they are, waitng for the demographic miracle to come.
I guess I am just an outlier here. I look at the gerrymander in the same way I look at the halfhearted attempts by republicans to ‘adjust’ electoral votes by district. It has always seemed to me that when you restrict your opponent you also restrict yourself. And republicans cannot afford to do that, because demographics are against them. If you make districts ‘hard core base’ then what happens when the president is no longer black, and a district ‘flips’. Or a district is itself taken over by demographics? You make it that much harder to get the district back in your camp.
And with all the gerrymandering, it’s still only a ‘flip’ of 18 districts. That is nothing!
Just like the electoral vote issue, it’s an issue I have difficulty putting into words in a way so that others can understand what I mean. It’s just a feeling I have. When you are behind, you don’t restrict yourself.
Now, I am not saying that the House will flip in 2014, although I think the results will probably scare republicans and make them rethink the whole ‘gerrymander is the answer to our problems’ thought process. What I am saying is that if the demographics turn out the way people think, once the House flips it’s going to be for a long time.
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You say ” I think the results will probably scare republicans and make them rethink “.
Don’t we have to get them to think first?
After all, their response so far to the failure of their conservatism is “Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed!”
The simplest way to understand Republicans and conservatives, in general, is that they are ruled by fear & a scarcity mentality. In the conservatives’ view of life there’s never enough good things to go around, whether it’s love, money, jobs, food, pretty girls, etc. Someone’s gain is someone else’s loss Therefore, conservatives have to try to control others and their environment. “Fear” has many cousins such as “greed”, “jealousy”, “anger”, “hate”, “hoarding”.
I often heard the phrase, “God-fearing Christian” when I was growing up. Even as a child, I wondered what kind of puny God gets off on human fear.