We can talk about it in the Book Review thread. I'm not quite finished chapter 1 so you might have to wait a bit for me.

You seem confused. California has had no shortage of gerrymandering.

Edit: Oh, I see you're just probably talking about the commission that's not even a decade old.

I'm not confused at all. California is not gerrymandered right now and the reason for that is nothing to do with being butthurt that the other side took power (because lol they haven't and won't anytime soon), it's because we chose not to be.

Right, and now what California has is districts which essentially set the legislative balance of power in stone.

Less than 1% party turnover in elections over the past decade.

But there was plenty of gerrymandering going on before 2010, so don't pretend like you're part of some enlightened few who are somehow above all this nonsense. CA elections are little more than a dog and pony show with pre-determined winners now. Does anyone win with less than 55% of the vote?

lol?

Sorry, but we are! Maybe someday Wisconsin will catch up.

Yes, thanks for asking! 6 of California's districts had a winner that got less than 55% of the vote. In fact, those 6 districts represent 26% of the most competitive 21 districts in the country (by margin of victory), despite California only having 12% of the House seats in the country. Thank you for, as always and as dependably as ever, showing your utter ignorance on the subject being discussed.

The fact that California changed the process is the entire point.

I knew what gerrymandering was. What I didn't know was the process in how which you can get it to benefit one side. If it's legal, both sides can do it. This post articulated the part that I didn't understand.

Republicans control more state legislatures and thus control the process in more states.

Also, Republicans are more willing to "play the game" while Democrats are more concerned about fairness. So you end up getting aggressively gerrymandered districts in red states while blue states like California are drawn by independent commissions.

Three things.

One, it is entirely laughable that you are mocking me trying educate myself. But I shouldn't be surprised. That's the GOP tried mantra through thick and thin. Mock and put down those that are trying to learn.

Two, I noticed you never actually answered the question. Do you support gerrymandering? I mean, you are so angry about liberals doing it, so why wouldn't you want it made unconstitutional?

Three, enemy gang? WTF are you talking about? I asked you a simple question (which you didn't even answer) and you are attacking me. I am an American. Our country is under attack and people like you follow Daddy Orange around like he's got a carrot up his ass crack. Your projection would be so laughable if it wasn't so predictable.

Instead of playing this whataboutism game and whining all the time, why not open your eyes and educate yourself. Oh, I know why you won't do that. If you did that, you'd have to come to terms with the fact that you got conned by a carnival barker. You got conned by a guy that brags about sexual assault. You got conned by a guy that makes fun of people with disabilities.

But hey, congrats on that extra $100 on your tax return. That's all you really care about anyway.

Inso and people like him count on the fact that people don't understand these things. This is active pushing of misinformation.

As an aside, are you choosing the most competitive 21 districts instead of the most competitive 10 districts or the most competitive 30 districts because it supports your point most dramatically while using other sample sizes may not support your point at all?

I haven't looked at any of the data.

That's one of the more bizarre explanations I've heard for stealing a Supreme Court seat. You know it may be random when he died, but that's how the system has worked for forever--when a justice dies, the sitting President gets to replace him. Now that is changed forever, and it is because of traitors like Mitch McConnell who don't care about our democracy one bit.

That's a noble goal, but right now most reps aren't really accountable to anyone except their donors and maybe their primary voters. Better to give up the dream of local accountability and settle for fairness and responsiveness to changes in the state-wide electorate.

It's the size of the data that fit the 6 districts fulfilling Inso0's "winner under 55%" criteria. If you like, Ballotpedia has this chart with 5% MoV as an arbitrary cutoff where California still has outsized representation in the sample (4 of the 17 most competitive, for 24%). I'm of course happy to look at Inso0's laughable criteria that he offered up with no idea what the data was actually going to say, but you can pick whatever you like.

I'm sorry, I thought you chose the 21 sample size to suit your claim but you're saying that that is the total number nation wide fulfilling the 55% criteria. Thanks

The way conservatives are responding ITT is exactly why Democrats should be gerrymandering the **** out of blue states.

We are never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to convince conservatives to go along with what's fair. The only options are to win in court or to fight fire with fire.

"Winning in court" is pretty impossible since they've just STOLEN the Supreme Court for forty years or more.

The problem with the "dems do it too" argument is that they DON'T do it too. ANd then you get these ****ing pussy libruls who TAKE PRIDE in that fact. The real question should be "why AREN'T the dems doing it too?" I mean, ****, you don't get points for being nice. We're talking about the ****ing future of our society here and democrats don't even give a ****, they're more concerned about being polite?

Dems should constantly propose a law to end gerrymandering - whether that's a fair district law for computer drawn districts, statewide proportional representation, whatever... But in the mean time, they should make it clear that they're going to gerrymander their states like crazy until it's done. I wonder how badly they could screw over Republicans in California, New York, etc? Gotta be able to strip them of around 10 seats in those two states and level the playing field a bit, right? They could get really creative with Brooklyn/Staten Island and Queens/Long Island...

I don't know how, NY is one R district in Staten Island, one or two in exurban LI and everything else is D.

New York has 18 Democratic districts and nine Republican districts. There are two Republican districts on Long Island (CPVI R+3 and R+5 I believe), and Staten Island is R+3. The Staten Island one is easy, it already includes some of Western/Southern Brooklyn (neighborhoods that are predominantly white upper/middle class I believe). Expand it a little farther in and that turns blue.

Long Island is chopped up in the most sensible way - the Eastern half is one district, then as it gets more populated they split the middle into North/South. If all the lines were drawn horizontally to split it into slivers, each could extend into Queens and the whole island would be blue as the Republican voters on Long Island would have all of their votes diluted.

North of NYC, you have 18 (held by a Democrat but slightly right leaning) and NY-19 (held by Faso, the ******* who lied to the woman with the brain tumor on camera). You can carve those so that they extend down toward Yonkers or the Bronx until you get enough blue votes there.

Good news is you still didn't have to dig into Albany, and can probably afford to swing a few blue votes from that district to NY-21, north of there. Throw in some of Utica and you have probably turned 21 blue. Finally, let NY-23 extend a little up to Buffalo and you can probably flip that.

So without even looking at county level data, or street level data, just looking at the map and the CPVI's, I bet I could flip NY from 18-9 Democrat to 24-3.

Edited to Add: I could do this without even making the districts look that goofy/gerrymandered. They'd all be pretty naturally connected geographically, it's just making some districts longer and narrower.

Apparently there is a PR bill in Congress that addresses the regionalism issue by dividing big states up into districts with ~5 members:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/o...ipartisan.html

I can't be the only one who would've used Jerry Mandering as a porn name

Solid Vox piece on proportional representation, with this amazing quote:

The Dems "did" it also. This is now in the history books.Going forward.............

The political middle is gone in Congress. Its still there in the rest of America. Gerrymandering is the cause. It needs to be fixed. Its the micro targeting and advances in tech that have made this issue a crisis to our democracy.

Its my understanding that the SCOTUS is basically deciding if this mathematical formula is a "fair" way to decide how to draw the boundary. Thats not far enough in my opinion.

We need to let a computer divide up the map based soley on population. Take politics out of totally. Let math decide the boundaries. Thats the only way we are going to meet the bar of the public picking its representatives not the political parties.

If republicans did that it would mean they lose power so they wont and will keep cheating Americans out of their most important fundamental right.

Gerrymandering inherently favors GOP:

Note that this same dynamics mean that any districting plan that keeps geographic communities intact is going to have similar biases. State-level PR 4ever!