It’s not feasible, of course, but I wish we could see polling numbers on issues distributed by congressional district. While it may be true that the American people look more favorably on gay people than they do on evangelical Christians, how is that opinion reflected in the constituencies of our congresspeople?
This is a question I’d like to see answered on a whole variety of issues, from immigration reform to reproductive choice to gun control to raising the federal minimum wage.
Just because the majority of the American people desire something or look favorably upon it, doesn’t mean that they get a Congress that is representative of that opinion. I mean, set aside the always strong possibility that a member of Congress might not vote the way his or her constituents would like; I think part of the problem is simply that Congress is made up of distorted constituencies that don’t collectively reflect the will of the people as a whole.
Example one is obviously that 1.37 million more people voted for Democratic House members than Republican ones in the 2012 election, and yet the Democrats didn’t even come close to winning control of the lower chamber.
A December 2012 analysis by the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan D.C. publication, said House Democrats out-drew their Republican counterparts by more than 1 million votes–1.37 million votes to be precise, Cook’s House editor, David Wasserman, later calculated.
Between the two parties, Democrats won 50.59 percent of the vote while winning 46 percent of seats, leaving the Republicans with 234 seats and Democrats with 201. The Republican advantage was a decrease from the party’s 49-seat majority in 2011-12; Democrats held House majorities from 2007 through 2010.
If we think about the country geographically, in what percentage of the territory do you think it is true that people look more favorably upon gays than evangelical Christians?
Compare that number to the raw national opinion numbers and you can get an insight into the disparity between what the people want and what they actually get in Congress.
The problem is money and power, and has been since day 1.
Any political system that aims to protect money and power over everything else is going to look and function a lot like our current government.
That said, it doesn’t really matter about percentages of the country, evangelicals, gays, etc.
It’s about getting people to vote, and Democrats’ reliance on young people bites them on their ass almost every mid-term election, barring a total fuckup being in the White House.
It’s about getting people to vote, and Democrats’ reliance on young people bites them on their ass almost every mid-term election, barring a total fuckup being in the White House.
What do DC Democrats do for young people? I’ll just say that the ACA is far from enough. Can young people afford college with out going deep into debt? Can someone in their mid to late 20’s afford to buy a house/condo? Do they have good paying jobs where they can afford a house?
Ultimately, Democrats are just a buffer between the shit we have now, and full-fledged fascism (American style – inverted totalitarianism…corporate aristocracy, etc).
Midterm elections are a lot more boring than voting for a single personality, so this bites Democrats in the ass, in terms of how many voters are going to come out and support them just because they’re Democrats and not totally fucking insane on social issues.
That is my point.
Trust me, the Democratic party is better than the Republican party, but both parties have been captured by money. I can work with the Democrats, which is why I’ll vote for them. But if there isn’t a huge personality/event (presidential election) young people aren’t going to turn out.
Also: this is why Democrats should be out talking blue-collar issues ALL. THE. TIME.
Relying on kids to vote for you is a great way to lose elections you should win. This isn’t the fault of the youth. It’s the fault of the Democratic party in general, and whomever the fuck is ostensibly running it, in particular.
Urban vs Rural. It’s been the story since the founding of the Republic.
Cows get more representation than city dwellers.
The trouble is human nature- True power, corrupts truly.
Kind of hard to know exactly what it means (or is meant) by having a more favorable attitude/impression of gays than fundamentalist Christians. One group basically thinks the other should be oppressed and discriminated against because, um, Bible. And perhaps “most people” aren’t on board with that (anymore).
As for the “percentage of territory” that contains the citizens that feel this way, I wouldn’t go there, as it is likely made up of, say, the 15-20 largest urban areas of America, which isn’t going to convert into too much “territory”. Remember the 2000 GOoPster maps of the US showing what a massive (territorial) landslide Junior’s (non-popular vote) “victory” was?
In any event, under any coherent democratic system, the current make-up of the House is illegitimate based on the numbers you cite. It would be illegitimate if we had even greater concentrations of Dems in urban districts. What should matter is actual votes by citizens, not where they live or how their arbitrary “districts” have been created.
Our district system is simply a convenient means for abuse, and currently Repubs have cornered the market on abusing it. To actually represent the people’s views nationally you’d have to scrap the Congressional district.
Having said that and knowing that electoral reform is not possible in closed-minded deeply conservative America, the Great Repub Gerrymander of 2010 is the main cause of the current scandal of the make-up of the House. Boner’s Boneheads are not a legitimate majority body, period. They are the result of a nationwide organized rigging of the election system by “conservatives”, who may very well not be able to form a House majority under reasonably democratic procedures and systems.
We have known that Boners Boneheads are the product of a massive gerrymander for some time, yet there has been no organized Dem rhetoric or campaign to spread this knowledge and call Boner’s phony majority into question, or even to explain what “conservatives” are pulling. Certainly this is not something the useless corporate media will ever explain to voters on its own.
If we are afraid to call the Repub House illegitimate in the face of the most extensively organized gerrymander in a hundred years, I’d say there’s not too much chance that Congress will “represent the people” anytime soon, if ever again.
Here in Ohio in 2012, we had a ballot measure for a constitutional amendment to essentially end the gerrymandering practice here in Ohio. In a Presidential election year, one would have thought that it might stand a chance, simply because Democrats generally turn out pretty well in Presidential years. It fail miserably. And in the months leading up to the election, I was hard pressed to find anyone who even cared to hear what this ballot measure was about. And that included Democrats. Things like this are simply off people’s radar screens almost all the time. Even when the status quo has a significant negative impact on them, they are still reluctant to change the way things are done. It is maddeningly frustrating. But the GOP here in Ohio takes it to the bank that the ignorance and the apathy of the median voter will win out for them in almost every case. Sadly, they are usually correct.
How was gerrymandering to be ended? By a “nonpartisan” commission? There is no such thing. Such commissions are appointed by (obviously partisan) politicians. By a commission 50-50 Republican-Democrat? A little better but again, who names who? And why aren’t Greens, and Libertarians represented? Is the state 50-50?
Here in Illinois there are a large number of complaints that Democrats gerrymandered the state after the 2010 census (they dis). However, these large outcrys for a “non-partisan” commission are mostly coming from Republicans and ignore the fact that republicans also gerrymandered the state after the 2000 census.
IMHO the only way to hold gerrymandering down (it can never be eliminated) is by strict laws governing the size and composition of districts. This is not easy to do. Not easy even to define and not easy to get passed.
The gist of it was a 12 member redistricting commission made up of 4 Democrats, 4 Republicans and 4 not affiliated with either party. State & Federal officials, their immediate families, lobbyists and high roller donors would have been ineligible for the commission. It was supposed to represent a “citizen’s committee”. Admittedly, the selection process in the proposal was pretty convoluted. There would have been a 10 year term for the commission. It was pitched as “returning the responsibility back to the citizens of the state”. It failed pretty miserably at the ballot box.
Closet Republicans.
So 435 opinion polls one time a year plus monthly polls three-to-four months out from general election day is not feasible. That’s talking about 500K-600K calls a sample (over all CDs) multiplied by the ratio of additional calls to get a valid sample. Plus somehow a way of maintaining a list of phone numbers by CD.
With a couple billion dollars involved in the electoral process, what would that take for a good news organization to do? What would it actually cost to run a single poll of all CDs by CD.
It seems to me that it is more feasible than repeatedly running an algorithm on a national generic poll–essentially repetitively paying for garbage data.
GIGO
If you look at the country geographically, most of the territory is empty.
Even in Utah, Wyoming, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, and Alabama there is substantial tolerance of gays and Muslims in the major cities.
It’s people, not territories that vote. On those issues the most conservative red states look like swing states and some actually come out more tolerant than the national midpoint.
What they get is 50% plus one vote of the group of people who show up on one day every two years and vote for one of the two Congressional offices (House or Senate) that are on the ballot on that one day–and then have that vote recognized accurately in the tabulation for the entire Congressional district or the entire state. That tells you the hoops outside of opinion that folks have to jump through. And those other hoops are often as significant.
Given the stigma attached to gays in some communities, I suspect that national figure errs in the direction of evangelical Christians.
National polls reflect heavy concentrations in cities. City districts are usually ~90% Democratic. Suburban and rural districts are maybe 55-70% Republican. The imbalance is because districts are not balanced. I’m not explaining this well, but it it’s not gerrymandering, it’s mathematics. It’s because demographics are not homogenous. I hope you all get my meaning.