I’d feel sorry for Kansans, but I just can’t muster the tears. They keep voting these ultra-conservative dickweeds in to office. For 6 straight years they kept increasing the far-right presence in the Kansas legislature. In 2016 they started reversing course a bit, pulling back towards the middle. They are stuck on this course for at least another 2 years though.
I thought part of it was similar to North Carolina though, the result of gerrymandered districts?
Gubernatorial election shouldn’t be affected at all by gerrymandering.
Damn straight. Don’t elect a wingnut Governor.
Doubt it, Kansas doesn’t have a very large population or many districts, so gerrymandering doesn’t work too well in those cases.
It’s possible though since the bigger cities seem to be split between districts.
That map is old - Kansas only has 4 districts now. The courts drew the current lines, though only because the gerrymandering fight was between the moderate and the conservative Republicans.
On the governors note, consider how close our statewide elections were this year, despite all the shit our conservative overlords have put us through. Cooper (D, gov) barely edged out his win. Burr (R, US Senate) managed his pretty handily. The highly competent Atkinson (D, state superintendent) gets replaced by a zero-experience-in-education nooblet in a shocker.
Gerrymandering is bad in NC, but there’s also just a lot of fuckin stupid voters here :(
edit: added parties/roles for non-North Carolinians trying to follow along :)
I agree. The governors race was bad enough. It didn’t used to be that way though, we had more competition within the state. We honestly need more democrat candidates running in NC state senate. Last vote we had a rise in opposed runs. From here:
Unopposed.
Sorry, you are correct. Too much typing, too little caffiene.
Of course, hardcore gerrymandering can suppress the desire to run opposition campaigns. The last Republican challenger to my State Representative, Rosa Gill, got just a little over 10% of the vote in 2014. She ran unopposed in 2016. That works both ways, of course, but yeah. . . some districts here are just goofy :-/
I hate errors like that when I make them, so I just figured I’d let you know. It’s obviously not a big deal. :D
So reports are coming in that this has been scrapped and sent back to the design stage.
Original draft did not completely eliminate taxes on the rich, so back it went. We can’t afford another Healthcare Bill fiasco, we have to get it RIGHT this time! ;-)
It’s almost like this is amateur hour and none of these idiots know how government works.
Nobody knew that tax reform on the world’s largest economy could be so hard.
Especially when there’s a gazillion dollar tax advice/preparation industry highly motivated to keep it that way.
I wonder if that’s a thing.
I mean, I don’t doubt that H&R Block and all those others would oppose the fabled “easy tax calculation” of a flat tax, but I don’t think that anyone is actually pushing for anything like that. There will be some calculation of income, there will be credits, deductions, withholdings, deferments, earth, fire, all that sort of thing. None of the complexities are really going to go away, they’re just being rejiggered.
And even if were remarkable simplified at the Federal level for a year or two, it would STILL be complex down at the State level… perhaps more so.
And actually, if they were to revise the tax code and simplify it, it would be a bonanza in the short-term for all the tax-prep firms because everyone would be scrambling to get a professional to look at their numbers the first couple years.
There are a number of articles on it, of course, this is just he first one i found real quick.
I think my phrasing may have been confusing.
What I meant to say was that I don’t think that any of the tax reform plans that Trump or the GOP are considering would be less complex; just different. And hence the tax-prep industry would have little incentive to oppose a new, equally-complex scheme.