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The simplest solution would be California's model for a non-partisan panel.
But yeah, I guess, this is the other way to do it. The problem is that gerrymandering often doesn't even allow enough minority party votes in a district to sway it from ultra conservative to merely extreme conservative. But I suppose it could soften a couple dozen districts.
It's not a solution, it's a bandaid. It doesn't solve the problem, it just attenuates the damage to a degree.
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Problem with the initiative process is that if the government refuses to implement say a third party panel, the citizens have no means of redress other than electing new people. We've seen how well that goes.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: The simplest solution would be California's model for a non-partisan panel.
But yeah, I guess, this is the other way to do it. The problem is that gerrymandering often doesn't even allow enough minority party votes in a district to sway it from ultra conservative to merely extreme conservative. But I suppose it could soften a couple dozen districts.
Conservative gerrymandering decreases the number of highly partisan conservative districts. The preferred partisan make-up seems to be about 55/45, so if one district is 65/35 Republican and another is 45/55 for Democrats, a good Republican gerrymander will create two districts that are 55/45. Such districts will reliably elect Republicans except in wave elections. Overall, this results in a bunch of solidly (but not extreme, ultra, or other superlative) Republican districts and a small minority of super ultra extreme (like 90/10) Democratic districts.
Now, a relatively evenly balanced 55/45 district can and often will elect mega-, ultra-, or super-conservative Representatives, but that's a different issue, due more to the composition of primary voters and decreased tolerance in the national Democratic party for representatives who don't vote the party line.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: The simplest solution would be California's model for a non-partisan panel.
But yeah, I guess, this is the other way to do it. The problem is that gerrymandering often doesn't even allow enough minority party votes in a district to sway it from ultra conservative to merely extreme conservative. But I suppose it could soften a couple dozen districts.
Conservative gerrymandering decreases the number of highly partisan conservative districts. The preferred partisan make-up seems to be about 55/45, so if one district is 65/35 Republican and another is 45/55 for Democrats, a good Republican gerrymander will create two districts that are 55/45. Such districts will reliably elect Republicans except in wave elections. Overall, this results in a bunch of solidly (but not extreme, ultra, or other superlative) Republican districts and a small minority of super ultra extreme (like 90/10) Democratic districts.
Now, a relatively evenly balanced 55/45 district can and often will elect mega-, ultra-, or super-conservative Representatives, but that's a different issue, due more to the composition of primary voters and decreased tolerance in the national Democratic party for representatives who don't vote the party line.
Recent voting results and the current makeup of the House suggest you're wrong.
A 55/45 district is pretty solid. Solid unchallengeable districts tend to get more partisan because the fight moves to the primary, where more ideological voters vote in higher numbers. Only like 20-30 of the more than 200 GOP seats are actually close to being in contest. The only thing conservatives have to fear is a challenger from the right in a primary. Then the general election is a breeze.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: A 55/45 district is pretty solid. Solid unchallengeable districts tend to get more partisan because the fight moves to the primary, where more ideological voters vote in higher numbers. Only like 20-30 of the more than 200 GOP seats are actually close to being in contest. The only thing conservatives have to fear is a challenger from the right in a primary. Then the general election is a breeze.
If that's what you meant, than we're in broadly in agreement. I must have just misunderstood what you meant when you described the district as extreme or ultra-conservative. That said, if you had less gerrymandering, I think you'd have more extremely conservative Republicans coming out of those new 65/35 districts; you'd just have fewer Republicans overall. <edit>Or, said differently, I believe non-partisan redistricting would result in the most extreme Republican representatives becoming more extreme as their districts became more ideologically uniform. But you'd also have more of a spread, and several currently non-competitive districts would become competitive, generating lots more moderate Republicans or Democrats.</edit>
Non-partisan redistricting aside, I believe that if you run the right Democrat a 55-45 district is totally winnable, especially since Republican candidates are being driven right by partisan primaries. Problem is to win you need someone like Jim Matheson who's willing to buck the party even on important votes. There's very little love among the Democratic establishment and even less among the grass roots for members with voting records like that.
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There isn't much love on either side for anyone who breaks party lines these days.
If you spread things out to more evenly distributed districts, you would get a lot more democrats in general, but the overall ideological spread would be more even. Instead of sixty or seventy hard core tea party ultra conservatives, maybe you have twenty. The rest fall into a more moderate category, because more places are up for grabs.
The whole point is this: when a district is competitive, it often forces candidates to be moderate, because swing voters are moderate and they decide elections in those places.
The current system creates literally hundreds of safe districts, where the only way to win a primary is to go to the left of a liberal and right of a conservative to win. The center gets squeezed. More competitive general elections would force centrists back into the fore. You'll still get some red state ultra conservatives, just like always, but far far fewer of them overall.
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Perhaps, though I'd want to read a much more in-depth report than that brief article to convince me of that fact.
But the article totally ignores the difference between flavor and portion size. It's not just about how much Republican you have on your fork when you sit down to eat, it's about how much spice they put in it.
Gerrymandering, regardless of how many safe districts it creates, also creates more intense political divides and pushes out moderates. Even if we have to deal with misrepresentation in Congress, it'd be a lot easier to legislate if the people in Washington were more reasonable.
Plus I wonder at the author. Yes, the California Commission did in fact create new Democratic seats, but most people at the time figured that was because Democrats hadn't controlled the Governor's office and legislature at any point since Republicans had, which gave them no chance to gerrymander in their favor. The Commission didn't rewire things to favor Democrats, they rewired a system that was already skewed to favor Republicans.
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There's so much that is misused and abused about the political system in the U.S. that it's impossible to find a "silver bullet" or catch-all that will address even a majority of it, but I've never understood why some states require citizens to register their party affiliation and only vote in that party's primaries. (Or register as independent and, effectively, be shut out of the inside political workings of parties, though usually still able to vote in either primary.)
Voter registration should be politically neutral, as it already is in many states. Also, I really like the open primary model, with the top two finishers in a primary, regardless of party affiliation, going on to the general election. (According to the Salon article, this is California's system now. Louisiana's system is similar, except there is essentially no primary, just an open election for all parties, and a runoff between the top 2 if no candidate gets 50% of the vote.)
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: Crushing gerrymandering might not be the solution Democrats think it is.
That's bunk for one reason: the current districting affects the voter turnout. It's like the uncertainty principle: you can't just draw fictitious districts and keep the vote totals the same. What districts people are in matters as to how many of them turn out to vote. Do Republicans turn out to vote in San Francisco? And do democrats turn out to vote in north Texas? You wouldn't know those numbers until the districts were already redrawn.
And anyway, I would *love* to see what parameters their simulations could have been run on that justified a 10+ seat majority for Republicans in an election that the democrats win by popular vote. It's of course statistically *possible*, but in a real world scenario, only gerrymandering can produce these kinds of numbers. The California elections showed that closer contests produce more voting, and more moderate candidates as a result.
Either way, I'd take the California system over what the rest of the nation has any day.
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Yeah I was a little curious about that too, but defenders of the Electoral College have been saying for years that the EC doesn't suppress voter turnout despite stats that say people don't vote because there's really no point.
There are some places that are going to be to homogenous that you can't get around that.
I like Louisiana's instant runoff system.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Yeah I was a little curious about that too, but defenders of the Electoral College have been saying for years that the EC doesn't suppress voter turnout despite stats that say people don't vote because there's really no point.
There are some places that are going to be to homogenous that you can't get around that.
I like Louisiana's instant runoff system.
I think the Electoral College argument is rather fallacious in the context of the current discussion, because the Electoral College only affects one race every 4 years. Seats to the House of Representatives, which reapportionment is most often affecting the greatest (at the federal level), come up for re-election every 2 years, and have nothing to do with the Electoral College.
Reapportionment also significantly affects state-level representation (the houses of the state legislature), whose terms vary by state but are usually on the 2-year or 4-year timeline, as well. In fact, the reapportionment process can frequently affect state-level districting even more than federal office districts, especially in states that don't have double-digit numbers of U.S. House seats.
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quote:Originally posted by vineyarddawg: There's so much that is misused and abused about the political system in the U.S. that it's impossible to find a "silver bullet" or catch-all that will address even a majority of it, but I've never understood why some states require citizens to register their party affiliation and only vote in that party's primaries. (Or register as independent and, effectively, be shut out of the inside political workings of parties, though usually still able to vote in either primary.)
Voter registration should be politically neutral, as it already is in many states. Also, I really like the open primary model, with the top two finishers in a primary, regardless of party affiliation, going on to the general election. (According to the Salon article, this is California's system now. Louisiana's system is similar, except there is essentially no primary, just an open election for all parties, and a runoff between the top 2 if no candidate gets 50% of the vote.)
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