Gerrymandering in 2024: How "deeply steered" districts benefit Republicans
Gerrymandering in 2024: How "deeply steered" districts benefit Republicans
Independent redistricting processes in New York and California have given Republicans an advantage in the House.
In both New York and California, redistricting is handled by an independent redistricting commission. Although lawmakers in New York attempted to circumnavigate the commission to push through a map that benefited Democrats, courts ultimately struck down the gerrymander and the state adopted maps very similar to those drawn by Cervas himself, who was appointed to draw neutral maps for the state.
This is how the parties ended up with the current situation: few competitive districts with many of them concentrated in just two states, New York and California. While most good government advocates would say that eliminating gerrymandering is a positive development in these states, it could disadvantage Democrats because Republican-led states did not eliminate gerrymandering.
So basically: Cheating gives Republicans an advantage.
Cheating gives The cheater an advantage. That’s a whole point of cheating. The point being made here is that the GOP cannot win unless they cheat, and they’ve become extremely good at getting away with it.
Sigh, just get rid of FPTP and Gerrymandering will immediately stop being a thing, and as an added benefit, third parties will finally be able to establish themselves in the US again.
The entire issue is that half the country wants to gerrymander and the other half wants to take the high ground, kneecapping their own progress
That is part of it, but I believe it is simpler than that.
The Republicans love FPTP/Gerrymandering, it is how they stay in power. So keeping FPTP/Gerrymandering is treated as a question of survival for them.
The Democrats would win big on getting rid of FPTP/Gerrymandering, but in the long term getting rid of FPTP would mean new parties popping up and actually getting in power.
So both parties would see reduced influence if FPTP got dropped in the US, so outside of idealistic reasons neither party has any reasons to kill it off.
The only way I can see it possibly working requires a highly idealistic supreme court snd boils down to:
A public information campaign about the problems with FPTP which triggers a big movement in the public demanding change, after decades of the campaign running it somehow gets acted on and signed into law that FPTP may not be used, Republican states take the matter to the SCOTUS, which in this scenario actually approves the law getting rid of FPTP. This is highly unlikely.
Note that I am not an American, this is just my perception about how the issue might be solved.
As a Canadian, I don't even understand how that works. How do they even go at checking the district limits? Don't they follow county lines?
Counties are very static in shape and number. Districts can change every ten years, because the number of districts (and therefore representatives) is determined by the population of the state relative to the national population. When states gain or lose seats, they have to redraw the districts. And even if they stay the same, population numbers within each district can shift and you would need to adjust the map to make it "fair" again.
And the GOP takes advantage of this to redraw district lines in neighborhoods which benefit them, resulting in all sorts of wacky and bizarre district maps that make no sense, and are clearly engineered to favor Republicans.
The only way Republicans can win is by cheating, and they are very, very good at cheating and getting away with it.
Ah ok so it's based on the amount of population?
It’s complicated. In my state (Louisiana), there has to be 2 of the 6 congressional districts that are majority black. Republicans tried to make it one but got rebuffed by courts since the state is ~33% black. They don’t draw the districts to be rectangular or follow parishes (our equivalent to counties). They’re drawn to allow oppressed groups to be represented.
And since the two of the most powerful House Republicans are from Louisiana, they made sure they had safe seats. So, the elections are basically predetermined.
And Democrats.
spoiler
Michigan County Commission districts:
In Genesee County, Democrats won eight of nine seats in November — even though Democrats only received 50 percent of all votes for county commissioners.
In Macomb County, Republicans won eight of 13 seats with 52 percent of the total votes, excluding the one district in which the Republican had no Democratic challenger.
In Kent County, Republicans won 12 of 21 seats with just 50 percent of all commissioner votes.
Randomly selected from over 9,000 applicants, the MICRC is comprised of 13 citizens from across the state of Michigan. They include four people who affiliate with the Democratic party, five Independents who do not affiliate with either major party, and four who affiliate with the Republican party.
I actually voted for this measure and remember people collecting signatures because they were fed up with each party taking turns nuking the district allocation each time they were the majority and happened to catch the decade census.
At the risk of potentially doxxing myself, here is one such before and after of a voting district:
(before)
(after)
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https://www.salon.com/2024/10/19/gerrymandering-in-2024-how-deeply-steered-districts-benefit/