Quote (Black XistenZ @ Feb 16 2022 10:40am)

Republicans were the "aggressor" in the 2010 redistricing cycle, sure. I'll give you that. Historically and also during the 2020 cycle, Democrats are just as happy to exploit gerrymandering to their advantage as the GOP.

Look again at this beauty of a map which was passed by the Democratic state legislature in NC in 1993:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/United_States_Congressional_Districts_in_North_Carolina,_1993_%E2%80%93_1998.tif/lossless-page1-1367px-United_States_Congressional_Districts_in_North_Carolina,_1993_%E2%80%93_1998.tif.png


Or look at the map Maryland has passed for the 2021-2030 decade:
https://rrhelections.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/MD-Congressional-Map-with-Insets.png

The rest is just your usual drivel.

Quote (thesnipa @ 16 Feb 2022 16:44)

ive always been a bit confused by the "gerrymandering is a GOP tool" narrative. the affected populations are black people and urban pockets in states, GOP tends to split them up, DNC tends to regroup them. but the side pushing the narrative does so because regrouping them is deemed as fair and honest, and splitting them up is deemed as malicious and unfair. neither party is interested in making a fair map, because in most states there's about 50% voters for either party, and neither state wants 50% of it's reps to be perfectly represented in the house, they want over 50% for federal policy votes.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Feb 16 2022 10:56am)

This perception kinda makes sense for someone who mostly paid attention during the 2000s (sleepy cycle, not a ton of egregiously gerrymandered state maps on either side) and then the 2010s (Dems caught flat-footed by super aggressive and efficient GOP gerrymandering).

Quote (thesnipa @ 16 Feb 2022 17:02)

the issue at it's core is that they view it in a binary good vs evil context. when in reality it's just the same core issue politics in the two spheres have nationwide, rural vs urban areas. should the half of the state's population that lives in 10% of the land area be more important than the half of the state's population that lives in 90% of the area, and vice versa. neither side wants 50% of the population to have 50% of the representation, they can't fairly cut a pie up for dessert because they cant stop themselves from making a bigger piece for themselves.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Feb 16 2022 11:20am)

I might be wrong, but to me it feels as if polarization and the perception of political competition as an existential struggle have truly gone up over the past 10-15 years. Things were not as badly polarized and black and white in the early 2000s.
When the other side being in power is no longer a temporary inconvenience and instead perceived as a threat to your livelihood, culture and way of life, losing becomes less and less of an option and qualms about using undemocratic tactics fly out of the window.

The core issue imho is that red and blue America are moving in opposite directions, ideologically, culturally and even in some aspects of their economic interests. After a certain point, meaningful compromise becomes impossible and an all-out "cold civil war" is inevitable. These trends are of course deliberately amplified by the powers that be as a part of their divide and conquer strategy. Like I've said before in various threads: every day that the plebs are busy squabbling about race or culture wars is a day they're not concerned with class or one-percenters.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Feb 16 2022 04:00am)

No offense, but I think your bias is subconsciously showing here. The Dem gerrymander in NY is every bit as "insane" as the one on DeSantis' proposed map, if not even worse. For example, look at the "toilet flush" seat that they came up with to flip the naturally R-leaning Staten Island seat:
https://i.imgur.com/eDKvwm3.jpg

https://rrhelections.com/index.php/2022/02/03/ny-redistrict-new-york-state-legislature-passes-congressional-map/
It's an interesting read, particularly how they jumbled the lines within their own strongholds to protect Carolyn Maloney from a progressive primary challenger (she almost lost renomination in 2020) and to protect AOC from a moderate challenger.





It should be mentioned that the state Supreme Courts in both NC and PA are controlled by Democrats and that both courts have been openly partisan in comparable litigation in the past.



Imho, this redistricting cycle seems to have gone far better for Democrats than many thought. It mostly comes down to their aggressive gerrymanders in NY and IL going through without much resistance while many of the aggressive GOP gerrymanders in population-heavy states got stuck in court, like NC/OH/FL. The GOP also left a lot of easy pickup opportunities on the table, like going for 7-2 in Indiana instead of 8-1, or leaving a D-leaning or tossup seat in Kansas and Nebraska which could have easily been nuked. However, the Texas GOP was very smart imho in going for a map that acknowledges the rising floor for Democrats in the state and tries to enshrine their current advantage rather than getting greedy and producing lots of dummymanders.

This outcome (Dems doing better than expected) is, of course, a product of the GOP gerrymanders after 2010. The GOP had already exhausted more of its gerrymandering potential going into this redistricting cycle than Dems.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ 16 Feb 2022 16:40)

Republicans were the "aggressor" in the 2010 redistricing cycle, sure. I'll give you that. Historically and also during the 2020 cycle, Democrats are just as happy to exploit gerrymandering to their advantage as the GOP.

Look again at this beauty of a map which was passed by the Democratic state legislature in NC in 1993:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/United_States_Congressional_Districts_in_North_Carolina,_1993_%E2%80%93_1998.tif/lossless-page1-1367px-United_States_Congressional_Districts_in_North_Carolina,_1993_%E2%80%93_1998.tif.png


Or look at the map Maryland has passed for the 2021-2030 decade, including good ol' "bridge-contiguity":
https://rrhelections.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/MD-Congressional-Map-with-Insets.png

The rest is just your usual drivel.

Quote (nobrow @ Jan 17 2022 07:27pm)

High quality post, very rare now a days.

Should it be a requirement to live in the district you represent? I don't believe it currently is.

Quote (Black XistenZ @ Jan 17 2022 08:48pm)

Quality thread, much appreciated! :thumbsup:
Three remarks:

1. After seeing this absolute abomination of a map from Illinois, I don't want to hear complaints from Democrats about gerrymandering ever again.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f2c2be8d4d46129d2c862cb/1633543710742-R2RLTNSKMKB88WN6OSME/10.6+wasserman.jpg

2. The governor's office in Florida has released DeSantis' proposal for the new Florida map and it's a clean-looking but extremely efficient, brutal gerrymander:
https://i.imgur.com/mXAfjhV.png
https://twitter.com/redistrictnet/status/1482870530080485390?s=21

3.
This reasoning contradicts itself. Either what we consider a "fair" map has to take the actual political geography of a state into account beyond the topline, statewide vote share each party is getting, or it doesn't.

Based on pure vote share, Republicans would definitely be "entitled" to at least one, possibly even two seats out of MA. But the Demcoratic vote is so efficiently distributed in MA that it would actually take an insane gerrymander to draw even just one R-leaning seat in the state. Republicans just happen to be disadvantaged by political geography in that state. Likewise, political geography in Alabama (and pretty much the entire South) disadvantages Democrats because the black vote suffers from high degrees of "self-packing".

I obviously cannot comment on the legal arguments pertaining to the VRA and these maps, but from a moral/ethical standpoint, it seems impossible to me to argue that a piece of legislation would require states to actively counteract the natural geographic disadvantage of certain groups in some states, but not in other states. And from a practical point of view, I cannot imagine the current SCOTUS to follow any such arguments. Even before we got to the current 6-3 conservative supermajority, the Roberts court has already hollowed out the VRA in 2013 or 2014. Seems extremely unlikely that a significantly more conservative court would be sympathetic to such arguments.

It should also be noted that Democrats have cracked a Hispanic-majority seat in New Mexico to create two likely Dem seats instead of one safe D and one lean R seat. It appears absurd to me that the Democratic party could crack majority-minority seats in one case yet argue in a different case (AL) that the VRA should be interpreted as requiring states to draw as many majority-minority seats as they can possibly fit.

Quote (Goomshill @ Jan 18 2022 08:32am)

There's no way to end gerrymandering and no way to calculate some unbiased and authoritative 'efficiency' score. Cracking and packing are not just methods used intentionally to gerrymander for partisan gain, they are also natural consequences of the greatly skewed demographics and population densities where republicans occupy very large and sparse rural districts and democrats occupy very small and dense urban districts. If districts were set up along geographical coordinates they'd skew wildly in favor of republicans by isolating vastly disproportionate city populations into a single district while a handful of ranchers get their own congressman. If states were carefully sliced and diced to create a 'proportional to the popular vote' set of districts, you'd wind up with the abominable gerrymanders snaking through the map in ridiculous fashion.

Disproportionate representation is just a natural consequence of the urban / rural divide and something that has existed since the start of the country (and democracies before it). Its the basis of the house vs senate in the first place. And that problem doesn't go away at the district level. You can't create some mathematical algorithm to come up with the intended 'fair' results, because the definition of what 'fair' results are is whats at issue, when some skew is going to be natural to such disparate population distributions and the proportionate representation creates wildly unnatural districting.

Quote (thundercock @ 16 Feb 2022 18:25)

We could just get rid of districts entirely! Some states have historically had multi-member districts. You can take a look at the legislative history here: http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=526

In the modern age, proximity to your Congressman is no longer a concern because we have phones, vehicles, the internet, etc. Also, I'm not convinced that compactness is something we should strive for if it results in large groups of people getting screwed. I understand that it's aesthetically pleasing and that gerrymandering has historically been used to benefit the party in power, but I don't think compactness has much value in a vacuum.