2017: Whither Democrats?

Don’t overset your expectations either way.

On the blue side, the Democrats are gonna get big gains in the House - it happens almost every midterm in modern history, and Trump is making this one especially likely. Talking heads may want you to worry so you’ll watch/click their stuff but it’s just hot air.

On the red side, Republicans will hold the Senate. There’s just too much gerrymandering, voter suppression, and red-base frothing at the hands of our President for it to flip this time around. Again, media everywhere will be talking about low-probability Democratic wins so they can get your eyeballs/clicks, but don’t take it seriously.

Of course I’d love to be wrong about the Senate, but I’ve got my expectations set so I can only be pleasantly surprised there.

Changes almost daily heh. From morose despondency to defiant optimism.

I do find the Hispanic vote patterns in Sunbelt states worrisome. But I can’t tell if it’s fear or a (futile, probably) effort to stay objective.

As far as the Senate, I don’t see Dem’s taking over there either, even if a wave materializes. Nate Silver had a piece the other day where the not-wave party usually defends their seats. Kinda weird. (Gerrymandering by the way shouldn’t impact Senate races, that’s more at the House level.)

You can’t gerrymander the Senate. The entire state votes.

Does gerrymandering affect senate elections? I thought they were statewide votes?

The main issue with the senate, I thought, is that there are many low-population red states and a few high population blue states, and each state gets two senators regardless of population.

Like @MrGrumpy said, gerrymandering doesn’t affect Senate races. It just happens that this is a bad year for Democrats because they’re defending like 3 times as many EDIT: states seats as Republicans.

Whoops, yep, shouldn’t have tossed gerrymandering in the Senate section. The other stuff still holds, though.

Even if Dems don’t get the Senate in 2018, if they hold the line or only lose 1 seat, the 2020 map will be very kind to them.

Well, FOR NOW. I imagine the GOP is working on solutions for this.

AFAIK, it never went anywhere, but for a while ALEC was floating the idea of having Senators appointed by the state legislatures.

Isn’t the election of senators mandated somewhere at the federal level? I know originally it was up to the states to choose them how they saw fit, but I thought that was changed after some shenanigans.

Thanks!

In 1911, the House of Representatives passed House Joint Resolution 39 proposing a constitutional amendment for direct election of senators. However, it included a “race rider” meant to bar Federal intervention in cases of racial discrimination among voters.

I’m so glad we fought a war and poured an insane amount of resources into Reconstruction to keep the South in the country. Totally worth it.

And now, thanks to a wrong-headed decision by the Supreme Court a few years back, the usual suspects are back up to their old voter suppression tricks, slowly eroding a half century of progress.

The Senate is pre-gerrymandered, because it gives a bunch of extra seats to rural, conservative patches of land with a few scattered humans at the expense of, you know, the places people actually live.

Or as Bill Maher likes to say, “Why are there two Dakotas?”

One the plus side, California regulations usually impact the whole nation, which is a relief.

People think of the south as a bunch of racist white folks, but it’s worth remembering that about 50% of African Americans in the U.S. currently live in former Confederate states/territories (which have about 37% of the total U.S. population.)

EDIT: New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Michigan are the only non-Confederate states where the AA population proportion is higher than the national average. Texas is the only Confederate state where it’s lower (not counting New Mexico and Arizona.)

Yes, the same African Americans that the South has fought a desperate fight to disenfranchise since forever.

No shit. But gerrymandering as it was being defined is a completely different thing.

Though that’s something Trump is specifically trying to fight against, at least vis-a-vis clean air policy.

Clean air! So bad! So sad! Breathing is for losers!