Dumb fucks. Tit for tat, bitches!
The gerrymandering will still be in place for '28. The new Dems have 2 years to use their newfound soapbox to push the party forward.
Not all the races are called yet, but state-wide Texas was +5 or +6 Dem in down ballot races like Lt Gov, railroad commissioner, & AG. Yet it looks like 60-70% of the 38 US house seats will remain Republican. That’s still gerrymandered AF.
The headline and reference to flipped seats make it seem like their gerrymandering didn’t work… It just didn’t work as well as it could have.
A +1 win and a +11 win have the same outcomes (absent court fuckery, which is still possible).
The gerrymandering will still be a problem over the next 2-6 years if the Dems look like they’ve done nothing, and everyone forgets that the problems with the Republicans don’t stop with trump.
Why would it work then and not now?
Because people are pissed off in unity now. Complete r control of every branch of government and the rot was apparent.
But what happens when data centers have a lot of hurdles, lawsuits and roadblocks cause of dem laws (which they should, ftr)? Stocks for the tech giants go down and the entire economy may see a downturn since we are living on the falsities of their current claims and expansions.
And when there is an inevitable record long gov shutdown causing pain?
It will be fresh in minds that a historic blue wave happened and then bad shit happened. People will lose context and motivation since there isn’t a unified party to hate.
Not saying it will definitely happen, but very easy to see a lower turnout with trump not on the ballot and what I mentioned above, then the gerrymander all of a sudden has it’s intended effect
Let’s be honest, a huge number of people voted based on gas prices.
Just because that sentiment overwhelmed the gerrymandering yesterday doesn’t mean it will in the future.
I’d love to see a law that distributes voters among electoral districts on a strict mathematical base, eg. Based on minimum distance algorithms. No input except home address location straight from census data.
You’d potentially end up with some slightly nonsense results, like having districts that are divided by a river. Doesn’t make sense to allocate public services that way - are you going to maintain the roads that aren’t connected to the rest of your district by road?
I think that this is seeking a technical solution to a human problem. Life doesn’t really work that way. Still leaves the potential for shenanigans that could no longer be argued with, because it’s “fair”. Having the election districts be drawn up by a truly independent body would be better, no?
Tell me how to perform the miracle of finding a human neutral party. I think the only solution that is truly neutral can only be a technical one here.
But the technical solution cannot be simple which leaves it open to interpretation and interference.
a truly independent body
Get back to me when you’ve found one.
Distance is not enough: depending where you center those districts, they can still be biased. There have been a bunch of initiatives for algorithmic districting, with all kind of constraints - compact, competitive, … Somewhere along the way, electoral reform and campaign finance just fell off the public radar. Along with Medicare for all. I mean, I get that fascism is kind of a priority at the moment, but elections are fundamentally how you fix that.
It would need to deal with compactness, too, to avoid biased centers, of course. It would need some parametric tuning, but the tunable parameters should be rather restricted to avoid gerrymandering again. Although any working algorithm in that direction would be way better than those rather “artfully designed” ones the Republicans have drawn.
My favorite strategy for reducing the effect of this is large districts with multiple reps per district (ideally with a form of rcv)
Yes it’s still possible to introduce bias, but it would make a big difference on the ability to gerrymander, because you don’t have he degrees of freedom to stack voters in the same way.
If you’re into maths and want to know the theory behind it, it is based on the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension of the shapes used for distracting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapnik–Chervonenkis_dimension . Not a fun read! But accurate
This, combined with some form of ranked choice with a minimum of 3 winning representatives seems to pretty much guarantee equitable representation
Dem Pols: “Nah, We already have a system that works, we just need to make it work in our favor.”
None of them care about “equitable representation” for us, they care about winning, and retaining power.
Never said otherwise.
Shortest straight line districting. It divides the districts according to their population using the shortest straight lines possible. It’s purely a GIS algorithm and can be run in seconds.
