Do you guys not know anything about Roy Moore? He’ll continue to grift via charity and be fine

Read up on "dummymander".

That risks catastrophic loss during a "wave" election.

Much better to give up one or two districts than risk losing all of them trying to gerrymander to 100%.

There's always "the middle" or "persuadable" voters. If you are the majority party in a State you don't want to risk a wave election taking all of you down.

I never understood the concept of "conceding" an election. There's nothing to concede, you either win or lose.

The result can be contested, so concession is a public statement that you won't do so.

also good sportsmanship.

Ya know that thing that doesn't exist anymore.

Moore can't concede. He doesn't think women or the uppity negroes should have the right to vote. So, in his mind, he won the election fair and square.

Obv. I am speaking abstractly in simplified terms to demonstrate the point. Iron was arguing that the GOP don't create black districts because they have to but because they want to pack them. But they only want to pack the black vote because of those civil rights rulings preventing them from gerrymandering its power away completely.

Lots of states fall around 60/40 red to blue. Without civil rights laws preventing them from spreading the minority vote around, Republicans could easily rig the map to win every district every time barring a Roy Moore-esque terrible candidate.

Have to imagine there are already computer programs that get fed election data and figure out how to draw lines optimally for the party in power.

It was hugely important when American style democracies were new and peaceful transfer of power had rarely if ever happened in recorded human history.

How the hell is Moore still trading at $0.02-0.03 on PredictIt?

Waiting to hear from god?

I don't think this is an indication that the state is overly gerrymandered. He won the statewide vote pretty narrowly.

Since Dems are more than 1/7 of AL's population I'd say the gerrymandering is plenty aggressive.

While there certainly is gerrymandering, that is only half the answer for the situation nationally. Dems also increasingly self-sort into highly concentrated urban centers, it's not just gerrymandering, it's geography.

LOL The Democrats hardly try to compete. It's not self sorting it's abandonment.

This is the fallacy I was talking about. There could perhaps be some truth to it, but it's not well supported here.

Do Dems self-sort into urban areas more than Republicans self-sort into rural areas? Are the deepest blue cities bluer than the deepest red areas are red? This isn't obvious to me. The degree of raw geographic concentration is meaningless: a million blue voters stuffed into Manhattan is just the same as a million red voters in Montana.

The only reason this would matter is if Democrats disproportionately lived in locations in which they are the political minority. If someone weighted the popular vote by county (winner take all for each county times the population) that would start to address this question.

Since I can't find it online, I'll just look at Georgia to get an idea:

In the 2016 election, 4 congressional districts voted for Trump in Georgia, or about 3 million out of 10 million people. Without adding all the little counties, I'm able to get to 4.2 million people or so that live in demo-voting counties, which is starting to approach the ~4.6 million you'd expect by multiplying the state's population by the popular vote. In other words, in this case, it seems like the geographic spread of the population isn't really inherently to Dem's disadvantage.

If there are 10 million people in a state with ten congressional districts and 4 million live in a large metro area that is 80/20 democratic and 6 million live outside that metro area in communities that are evenly disbursed 70/30 Republican, the overall vote would be 50/50 if everyone voted on party lines, but you would expect Republicans to win more congressional districts even without gerrymandering.

That's just simple math.

But Alabama and many other states are, in fact, gerrymandered as hell.

Right, this is my point exactly. It's both gerrymandering and urban concentrarion. Edit:. Youd have to start drawing some bizarre shaped districts to evenly spread concentrated urban Dems out amongst the large swaths of rural and suburban Republicans.

Predictit always drags its feet , it's very annoying.

It's people who want to close their position early and not have to have their money tied up for a few more weeks. at least that would explain Jones at 98 cents.

I would say that urban concentration is what makes gerrymandering easy and effective. Of course if you randomly picked districts with just population constrainsts dems would be very likely to get more than 1 out of 7 in the Moore vs Jones election. But given you know the voting patterns it’s very very easy to give dems exactly 1 seat even with a-25 candidate like Moore. You’d basically need 75% of the nation to be dem before dems could be expected to win just a second house seat in AL.

In other shocking news Alabama's active/inactive/purged scheme is unnessarily complicated and probably violates federal law

And old school voter suppression did happen

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...er_scheme.html

This is Georgia, in the 40's, but Georgia in the 40's was like alabama now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_...rs_controversy

Look at Alabama's congressional districts.

It has the blue area in the bottom left,

there are three arms that stretch out from the blue district, what they they do?

they grab all the blacks from neighboring districts and put them in the black district.

no one is saying you should have equal dem/rep for each district, but when you start ****ing drawing an octopus on a map to get all the D in one district, that's a problem

I'm not saying Alabama isn't also badly gerrymandered, obviously it is. I'm just saying it's not the only issue. The supreme Court could rule tommorrow against gerrymandering and the gop would still have a geographic advantage over Democrats.

Yeah, IF those are in fact the splits. In Georgia, they clearly are not. Metro Atlanta is closer to 60/40 in favor of Democrats. There's no geographic clustering explanation for 10/14 Georgia Congressional districts being red. Hell, they managed to carve out a red district entirely within blue inner metro counties.

It matters because during post election anger about gerrymandering and inherent electoral unfairness a talking point circulated that "oh well snowflake libs all moved to cities to have their diversity party that ain't our fault" and as far as I can tell the premise is almost entirely BS.