The law states elections must be called if they occur before the second Tuesday in May in an election year. Walker argued that only covers vacancies that happen after Jan. 1 of the same year as the election, and since these happened on Dec. 29, 2017, he’s under no requirement to act.
Walker’s interpretation is hilariously, obviously, wrong.
Won’t they just appeal it and drag their feet until it won’t matter? Or is there actually a hard deadline on when this absolutely must happen, appeal or not? I saw 3/29 but appeals will just push that back.
Another PA House R retires.
Republican Pa. congressman won’t seek reelection: report - The Hill
Does anybody really have to do anything in this world? (If you’re a Republican.)
Big one for the Dems, if only financially. Costello’s district is Clinton +9 now, so it was already going to be leaning D.
But…now it’s going to be even more favoring the Democrats, and it’s likely the national party won’t have to dig too deeply for the funds to win that district. Which means – hopefully – more money for other races.
The report projects that a 10 percentage point national margin would gain 21 seats for Democrats — still shy of the 23 or 24 needed to claim a House majority. An 11-point margin is projected to gain 28 seats for Democrats, but they haven’t achieved such a large midterm victory since a nearly 14 point margin gained them 49 seats in 1974.
“Even a strong blue wave would crash against a wall of gerrymandered maps,” the Brennan Center report says.
So you’re saying there’s a chance!
If the Democrats can’t take the House back after all the insane bullshit of the past year then I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to stay in a country that’s so fucked up and ruled by such a shitbag party.
With districts so exceptionally gerrymandered it is unlikely. In 2012 the Democrats won the total vote by 1.5 million voters and lost the House 234 v 201. In 2016 they lost the total vote by 1.5 million voters and lost the house 241 v 194. If the same ratio holds in 2018, the Democrats have to win about 55% of the votes - a 10 point margin - to coming close to taking the House.
To me, that is not the essence of Democracy.
Part of it stems from our weird insistence that the seven people who live in Iowa need massively outsized national representation ;-)
The real problem not the ratios, they’re about 530k per rep at minimum (Rhode Island) to 995k per rep maxium, for Montana. California, Illinois, and New York are 705, 715, and 720k per rep respectively.
No, the problem is single seat districts with winner take all elections. Imagine if, for example, Austin Texas was, instead of being broken into 5 separate districts so that only 1 Dem is elected despite majority voting, it was part of two different 3 seat districts. Change nothing of the votes, yet you have two districts that, probably, have two dem representatives and one republican each. Or, for the conservatives, Cook County. No GOP reps are here, though the population is not zero. With multi distrct votes, you probably see a different outcome. Right now, of the 11 districts in the Chicago metro area, with 8 of them all, or in part, in Cook county, Of the 7 non Chicago seats, 6 are GOP. Of the 11, 1 is GOP. Changing them to multi seats probably doesn’t change the makeup of party ratios, but it does some important things here.
It means everyone can have a voice.
Right now if you live in some D or R +20 district (of which Illinois has a bunch of D >+10) then you have effectively no chance. Your vote is pointless. Single seat districts are objectively terrible.
But multi seat districts everyone has a chance to have a voice. No longer are liberals in rural areas irrelevant. Or conservatives in cities ignored. Changing things that way would go a very long way to fixing many of our problems. It would encourage less extremism, it would increase participation (in theory) by not making so many peoples votes pointless, it would also make gerrymandering much more difficult. Even the kind not done for partisan means, like the Illinois 4th. Which is done for a genuinely good reason! It is a ridiculous district drawn to give the hispanic community representation. Because, right now, with FPTP minority communities tend to get drowned out. Or get ridiculous strings connected by fields and highway shoulders simply to maintain contiguity. Drop that and have multi seat districts, and now that 30% hispanic population, or asian, or black, or whatever can get a voice by congealing around the candidate that represents them within a broader district.
It would be so much better, in so many ways. Our voting system is about the worst possible one, and is in large part responsible for the shitshow politics has become.
The other real problem is, that article is probably wrong, and its methodology is flawed.
Also worth noting:
I don’t ever recall the popular vote total in an off year election ever being mentioned before. It is one of those stats that means absolutely nothing.
I thought the danger of gerrymandering is that you create a lot of districts in your favor, but the margins for those districts aren’t that big as they would be in a traditional safe district?
Basically, yeah. There’s a handy rhyme for it, which escapes me at the moment. Is it “cracking and stacking”? Stuff as many of the likely voters for the party you want to screw into as few districts as possible, so they win those by comically huge margins, and make a bunch of districts where the favored party wins by a reliably comfortable margin.
“cracking and packing”
Crack your opponent’s support into small chunks across many districts, and pack their support into a small number of super-safe districts.
That’s the theory, but the reality is it doesn’t work like that. Instead you tend to have more safer districts, where margins are in excess of what the state ratios are. You just do something like make an 80% Dem districts, and then you can have half a dozen GOP +10 districts. Now, sure, if you have an event which exceeds your nominal safe range, say a 12 point swing, you are going to lose hard, more than you would in a normal districting scheme. It is, however, unlikely.
That we are talking about it shows how bad things are for Trump, it is almost bad enough to overwhelm the gerrymander. A uniform 10 point wave could have massive consequences in states like Pennsylvania, basically inverting their representation.
I think that the most important thing here, anyway, is the recapture of STATE houses, rather than the federal House. The Democrats need to grab a bunch of state houses and governorships so they can begin to undo the gerrymandering.
Bingo.