2777

They have a freakin’ MANDATE, damn it!

2778

Um, have you seen many schools in any inner city? I think voting is about as well “equalized.”

2779

In terms of funding per pupil, my understanding is that some states equalize state funds per pupil that go to K through 12 education. Probably not all states. And there are probably non state-level or non-public funds that still keep public schools in richer areas in much better shape, in any case.

Still, 2-3 hours to vote vs. 15-20 minutes is bananas, and it’s within the power of states to equalize per capita funds available for running elections among the various counties.

Would it be in Congress’ power to require that elections for federal offices had to be carried out similarly across a whole state?

2780

Keep in mind, equalizing funding per capita might not actually equalize resources as practically applied. If the urban area has higher property costs, the same amount of money gets you less facilities to do the task in. Also, urban areas might have other demands that require EXTRA resources for equal practical results. In terms of schools, if you have a higher ratio of kids with particular needs, or a higher ratio of kids from home with low resources, that typically results in kids who need more resources per kid for an even result. I believe the same may be true for voting: parking costs, costs of living and so on mean that offering the same salary to employees is going to get you less response than in a high cost of living area. Also, in dense areas there is greater possibility for spikes and surges, I believe mathematically speaking.

So it’s not just even funding. In a lot of cases, to get even results in certain areas, MORE funding is needed. Which is the opposite of what we have most of the time.

2781

BTW, in SW Washington’s 3rd District, the Trumpy Republican candidate Joe Kent is insisting on (and his campaign is paying for) a recount, per a story I heard the other day.

2782
2783
2784

So Walker loses and he will hopefully disappear on his way back to Texas.

2785

The myth of the unrepresentative House.

Somewhat lost in the understandable excitement of good news for Democrats is a piece of bad news. Republicans won the House popular vote by a bit more than 3 million votes. Using the Cooke Political Report as of Dec. 8th and eliminating the votes for 3rd party. Republicans got 51.4% of the popular which should translate into 223.7 House seats vs the 221 or 222 they actually got.

The WaPo data columnist explains that greater number of uncontested Republican seats doesn’t materially affect the outcome.

https://wapo.st/3FgRSF5

I think the correct way of looking at the results is our system worked pretty damn well. For all the hand wringing about gerrymandering, voter suppression, drop boxes, ballot stuffing, defective voting machines etc. The overall results are consistent with voters will.

Moreover, with a couple of notable exceptions, no group is dramatically underrepresented at the pools. The two exceptions, despite a big increase in youth turnout, young folks still don’t vote enough, and older Latinos are also underrepresented.

There were record numbers of women and minorities, and the first Gen Z elected to Congress.

I personally think is counterproductive to on one hand complain about the Republicans rigging the system, while properly IMO castigating the election deniers. If the system was truly rigged by the Democrats, Trump wouldn’t have become President. If was rigged by the Republicans Biden wouldn’t have become President in 2020 and the Democrats wouldn’t have retained control of two out of the branches of power.

*Obviously, the Senate is different story, but that goes back to founding of the country.

2786

I’m not sure how people in places like Wisconsin might think about the way you’re framing all of that. :) @JonRowe, how are things going for y’all up that way? Feelin’ represented?

I’m not glad that the Republicans had more votes but I’m glad that the distribution of seats is pretty accurate. That hasn’t been the case for many elections in the past, though, so the “handwringing” and everything else has been justified. Voter suppression is real (and maybe that’s partly why the GOP has 3 million more votes, eh?). Gerrymandering is real. Don’t confuse fighting and overcoming those obstacles with those obstacles being no big deal.

2787

Well, Georgia definitely does show that despite voter suppression, your vote does still matter, and you can still beat them.

It’s harder than it should be, but the good guys can still win.

2788

Well there’s also this (NY Times Gift Link).

2789

I think the House vote did come in at a more or less reasonable “national neutrality” level so that’s good in the big picture. However, I do think there’s still a lot of ugly gerrymandering at the state level and on balance I believe that favors the GOP quite a bit. I’m curious as to the numbers on that. My impression that although some gains were made, there are still some purple states with much redder legislatures than the voters voted for, in aggregate.

2790

Well, even with all of the gerrymandering, the WI State government narrowly (and I mean narrowly) avoided a GOP supermajority (Mind you, in a state that voted nearly 50/50 in every major election since 2008)

They DO have a supermajority in the State Senate, but not the state assembly. They are a handful of votes away from a veto-proof majority… in a state that overwhelmingly voted for a Democractic Governor.

How is that possible? Gerrymandering. A few races swinging the other way, we would have a state legislature able to fully over-ride the governor selected by 51% of the state’s residents.

It is fucking bonkers here in WI

2791

Kind of a minor point, but I don’t think in general you can look at vote totals and say that it disproves the effect of voter suppression. The whole point of voter suppression is that the votes affected by it will not show up in the vote totals.

2792

Nothing is more annoying to me than the weird vacillation liberals (not anyone here, but in the commentariat) have about gerrymandering, in which it’s basically 1:1 correlated with their worries about losing enough control over the legislature, and once the damage has been contained or processed, suddenly decide it’s not a big deal (until near the next election, when everything looks like it’s going to fall apart again). Year to year there are huge swings between “gerrymandering: it’s not that bad” to “gerrymandering: Fall of Rome 2.0”

2793

Now that Georgia is in the books, I’ll just say, “Well done. I want Democrats to win all the races because the GOP is insane, I reserve the right to change my mind if that needle switches but I’m not holding my breath.” The Dems won a political battle this year, a big one, and I’m so glad to see it because usually they seem to be fighting to do the right thing despite everyone against them. Here’s hoping 2024 blows the whole paradigm up, the Dems can slip a bit left, the GOP can slip a shit-ton towards the center, and we can fix some stuff.

2794

I’ll agree that WI is particularly weird.

But as someone who spent 17 year living in the most Democratic state in the union as a Republican, don’t talk to me about poltical powerlessness. Hawaii registration and voting is about 65/35 Democrat. This year Republicans double the number of seats in the senate, yup from 1 to 2 out 26 and House from 3 to 5 out of 51. In the history of the state, there has been one Republican governor, one Senator, and two congressmen. I worked on the one Republican governor’s campaign and one of the first things, she did was change the blatantly partisan law that required, the precinct captain to be of the same party as the Governor. It was morally the right thing to do but politically dumb. Political affiliation does matter. Tulsi Gabbard’s dad, a Christian evangelist, changed from R to D and won several elections, that he lost badly as a Republican, despite no change in policies. The reality is voters care about incumbency first, then political affliation, and policies etc. aren’t all that important.

Hawaii voters aren’t that different than the rest of the US.

2795

Is this caused by gerrymandering? That seems like one difference to me.

2796

I’ve been looking for data to back up this assertion for nearly 20 years, and I haven’t seen it.

In 2020, by raw votes the Democrats should have gotten 224.0 house seats instead of the 222 seats they actually got. If voter suppression was really a big thing you’d expect to see lower percentage of black voters, in reality since 2008 black voters vote at an equal rate to whites and when you adjust for factors like education in some elections they vote at a higher level. Latinos do vote at a lower rate, but there is a pretty simple explanation, a large number of Latinos aren’t citizens.

I’m convinced that there are two lies each party tells their base to generate enthusiasm and for fundraising. For Republicans, it is there is widespread voter fraud, and illegal voting. When I was poll watcher in 2000-4, a couple of Republican lawyers flew all the way from Washington DC to Hawaii to train us. They used lawyerly language like “suspicious, reports” to suggest there was a lot of illegal activity by the Democrats at the polling places. It is easy to see how less scrupulous, knowledgeable folks doing the training would skip the qualifier and just say Democrats flat-out cheated, voted twice, filled out the union workers ballots etc… As we know this 20+ year lie eventually morphed into the great Donald Trump lie of the 2020 election.

For Democrats, the lie, is that things like voter id, suppress black votes. The SCOTUS case on voter ID. Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the most interesting thing was the finding of fact by the lower court. Neither the Republican nor the Democrats were able to find a single example to back up their case. Republican couldn’t show any instance of voter fraud, and the Democrats couldn’t show any example of how getting an id would be a great burden to a voter.

Now that’s not to say that Republicans don’t try to suppress votes, they do it is just that aren’t successful in it making a difference. The George election law was a great example. If you listened to CNN and MSNBC crowd it was Jim Crow 2.0 But if you actually listen to somebody who knew what they were talking in this case Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and CNN host that actually gave him air time talk Anderson Cooper, but not Don Lemon, you found out the truth. The truly awful things, were proposed amendments that never made it into the bill. Ballot access for everyone in Georgia is a lot easier than in places like Delaware and many NE states.

But the ultimate proof is in the results. Georgia is still a red state, but if the Republican-run an awful candidate like Trump, or Walker, and the Democrats run a moderate candidate like Biden, or Walker they can win and blacks will turn out in large numbers to vote for them or against the other guy.