the first reply of yours was 100% strawman:



at no point in the post you replied to did i say or even suggest dems weren't gerrymandering as well. you made a whataboutism to address an "argument" i never made in the first place. it's textbook strawmanning. just stop lying.

also, where is my post "contradicting" itself?! you might not like or agree with my choice of words because it doesn't fit your fawning review of desantis' appeal, but that doesn't make it a contradiction, lol. it's like you don't even know the meaning of half the words you're using...

This post was edited by fender on Nov 15 2022 10:21am

Here you go:


"The Florida GOP won the House popular vote in their state by 17%"
"The monster performance in the House is largely "monstrous" due to gerrymandering"


You derided the notion of a strong House performance by putting "monstrous" in quotation marks (twice) and literally claimed that the strength of the performance was "largely due to gerrymandering". Then, one sentence later, you acknowledge that they won the House popular vote by a whoopin' 17% margin, in a tightly balanced state where the margin is almost always between +-5%.

This is a glaring contradiction, even if you did your best to bury it in your post so that facts don't get in the way of your spin. And now you blatantly lie by denying that you ever made this argument in the first place and engage in textbook projection by accusing me of lying and distracting.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Nov 15 2022 11:44am

nice dodge on your strawmanning regarding dems' gerrymandering, suggesting i should "adopt" [sic] my "talking points", even though i made no comment whatsoever regarding the still existing (although admittedly shrinking) overall discrepancy.

even your transparent pivot doesn't work since you simply don't seem to know what "contradiction" means. the GQP's popular vote margin is solid, unquestionable, but my argument that it became "monstrous" (using your words there) due to massive gerrymandering efforts still holds true. now you could argue that 58% is already "monstrous" or "whoopin'", and since there is no objective measure for what any of that means when talking about electoral majorities, it's a bit pointless to really go into this - but what it does NOT mean is that 71% is somehow not bigger, equal, or even smaller than 58%, and that there magically isn't a big difference between those percentages (popular vote vs. house seats) - due to excessive partisan gerrymandering, which is very obviously the point of my post. in order to invent a "contradiction" you have to pretend i said or suggested the gerrymandering somehow influenced the popular vote, which i very clearly did not.

A 20-point margin is enormous in American politics, the Florida result was gargantuan.

Whether the popular vote share matches the eventual legislative split is irrelevant. California's "non-partisan" process allocated 43 democrat-leaning seats versus 7 republican and 2 toss-ups. Biden received 63% of the vote in 2020, the redistricting process allocated 83% of seats to the Democratic party. Biden won 65% of the vote in Massachusetts. Democrats will control 100% of Massachusetts seats. DeSantis took a gerrymandered map and streamlined it, although undoubtably to his partisan advantage. Lawson's seat in particular was egregiously contorted to achieve a desired political result.

call it "gargantuan" / "monstrous" / "whoopin'"... call it whatever you want, i'm not here to determine who of you is the biggest desantis simp on pard. all i'm saying is that his gerrymandering efforts made the house of representatives election outcome significantly MORE "gargantuan" / "monstrous" / "whoopin'". there's a 17% difference in the popular vote, but a 43% difference in house seat distribution, and no amount of insisting how those 17% are already amazing will change the FACT that 43% is much, much more. some people would say "monstrously" more...

yes i know, dems ALSO gerrymander - maps like illinois' for example are about as partisan and bullshit as any republican operative could dream of, and i certainly don't approve of that shit - but overall, republicans did it more, did it more egregiously, and it's still overall in their favour if you combine all states. also, it's republicans who blocked any fair re-districting initiatives, any efforts of making voting objectively fairer and more meaningful (simply because they are well aware that gerrymandering overall STILL benefits them more), so the whole crying about dems doing it as well is some grade a bs. the dems would immediately agree to getting rid of all gerrymandering nationwide, while the GQP would 100% reject it - that's really all you need to know on this, lol.

Republicans will win a proportion of seats roughly in line with their share of the popular vote. There should be zero complaints from any of the critics in 2022, the fact that I have never been politically represented notwithstanding.

No one trusts a bureaucracy to redistrict. Redistricting is a political question, and should be decided by representatives elected by the people.

What in the actual fuck is your point then? If you (correctly) do not want to argue that the gerrymandered map had a big distorting effect on the House popular vote (which I agree with), then how the fuck does gerrymandering affect our interpretation of the popular vote margin in any way, shape or form?

In the post with which you started this whole conversation, you were undoubtedly implying that the GOP's underlying performance in Florida wasn't all that impressive and that the topline numbers paint a misleading picture: gerrymandering in the House races and running against a candidate who wouldn't bring out Democratic votes in the gubernatorial race ("omg, Crist is a former Republican"). I replied by pointing out that the underlying performance is a 17% margin in the House popular vote and that such a margin is very much a monster performance in a state like Florida.

Also note that Rubio won his senate race by a 16% margin against Val Demmings, who is considered a rising star in the Democratic party and was high up on Biden's VP shortlist back in 2020. That's a 3% difference from the margin in the gubernatorial race, so we could consider this to be the magnitude of Crist's underperformance.

Re: "Crist is a former Republican". Yes, one who won a statewide primary against lifelong Democrat Nikki Fried. Democratic voters preferred Crist to Fried, and selected him to run against DeSantis. The fact that Fried was even weaker is more damning, not less, of Democratic prospects in the Sunshine State.

can you not read?! i even highlighted it:



now answer this simple question:



which "talking point" of the post you quoted did you mean when you told me to "adopt" [sic] after making your whataboutism concerning dems' gerrymandering? please quote the "talking point" that does not fit reality.

The talking point that Florida Republicans got an undue amount of seats out of their state, relative to the underlying popular vote. In a FPTP-voting system, winning 70-80% of the seats is actually perfectly normal when you win ~60% of the popular vote. Yes, the GOP would have gotten a similar number of seats even if they had won the popular vote by 10% instead of 17%, and in that case, your REEEing about gerrymandering would have had merit. But they overperformed so much that even their aggressive gerrymander didn't inflate their seat count above the level you would expect from a fair map under FPTP rules.