I wasn't referring to socailists or anything of that sort. Just that logically gerrymandering should lead to more moderate Republicans as they will have closer margins of victory in their districts and need to appeal to moderates to realize their potential advantage. Democrats on the other hand, as the party suffering the gerrymandering would be able to nominate anyone they want which means the base could decide who to elect to congress without moderates. Therefores Democrates should be more extreme (on an American scale).
The opposite seems to happen however. The only explanation that has been offered is that the base is more motivated in primaries. I understand that, but shouldn't that hurt the Republicans in those gerrymandered districts?
I may have the whole concept of gerrymandering wrong, but I am not sure, so if anyone could enlighten me, I would appreciate that.

Gerrymandering is designed to give your party the best chance to win, not to make it close.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

Hmm, I still don't get it. But I am going to read the article in detail later on.

By the way, I just saw this cartoon on a German website, thought you guys might like it:

(it says "bankruptcy/government" on the bald eagle's belly).

With the gerrymandered republican districts, pretty much only a republican can win. The republican primary decides the election. A moderate republican makes no sense because there are few democratic voters in the district anyways so there is no reason to appeal to them. A more extreme tea-partier/right wing republican can slam any moderate on being too left/too librul/too democratic etc, which moves everyone to the right. Compromising with the Democrats to get stuff done? Well, in the next primary a tea-partier will challenge you and use your record of actually trying to compromise against you and run on a platform destroying obamacare and bam they get elected.

If Republican districts are packed with Rebublicans how can they have an 8 point advantage in house elections? They would necessarily suffer from too many lost/wasted votes. Only packing Democrats in heavily Democratic districts and consequently creating narrower margins for Republican districts can create such an advantage.

There is sophisticated software that tells them exactly how to rig it.

I just realized where I went wrong: If you pack one kind of voter into a minority of districts you make all districts more partisan and less competitive. The Republican districts will be less so than Democratic districts, but still more partisan if you just spread districts out evenly. I guess this is a little hard for me to grasp as we have a system that is mostly proportional representation in Germany.

The main problem is that the Supreme Court has completely blown it on this issue, refusing to do anything to restrict blatant nonsense. The maps of some of these districts are laughable.

GermanGuy,

I think your original thought was correct, there probably is some effect there. It's simply overwhelmed by the Tea Party, AM radio, FOX; forces which rile up a really passionate core group of R's. Dems don't have equivalent rabble rousers.

Single primary solves most of these voting issue, like CA adopted.

Gerrymandering less important than most people realize. Natural gerrymandering, with dems concentrated in high population areas, has a greater effect.

Come on.

This is so easy to debunk when relating it to religion. God made the world in 6 days his time. Your life time is also a second in gods time. Now do the math as to how long it took god to make the world in our time?

God time explained itt.

So God jut forgot to do unit conversion when he wrote the bible?

no people did when they wrote the bible. god didn't write it.

You might be missing GermanGuy's point, and it's a good one.

First of all, there are two kinds of gerrymandering. One is to make more safe seats for both major parties so that Congressional reps don't have to worry about reelection. We're not talking about that kind; we're talking about partisan gerrymandering.


Suppose in a two-party system partisan gerrymandering works to the advantage of one party, A, vis a vis the other, B. If B has more popular votes than A, gerrymandering can only work if A wins its districts by a much smaller average margin than B wins its districts. In a vacuum, winning closer races should require moving closer to the center.

But I have a few related thoughts on why that's not happening:

1. Gerrymandering is built on a core of really staunch voters, so the fact that they're losing swing votes might not immediately undermine the gerrymander. But in the long term, it probably does undermine it.
2. Present-day Republicans just plain don't respond to traditional political incentives.
3. Because relatively few people vote in off year elections (such as 2010), Republicans have to this point been insulated from the electoral consequences of their actions. They don't realize that failing to move to the center will eventually hurt them in close, gerrymandered districts.

But to this point -- as I understand it, if party A is winning more close races because of the gerrymander, then a small swing of public opinion toward party B should produce a greater than normal swing of seats toward party B. No one talks about this, but it seems like this could well happen over the next couple of election cycles, as Republicans get hoist with their own petard. In particular, senior citizens are turning against the GOP, and they're the highly dutiful voters who do go to the polls in off years such as 2010 or 2014.

They blinded me with republican science, but I see again after I got different results when I spun the wheel of creation myth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creation_myths

Good educational post. Gerrymandering is a partisan results-oriented practice, but it doesn't totally rig the game.

Lol raradevils

I'll humor you. If one second to god is a lifetime to us, then 6 days god time is approximately 41.5 million years human time. Looks like you're off by about 13b years.

How Republicans want to screw over their own staff in the fight for Obamacare.

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wo...9/30/?p=63297/

You are close:



Now use the old testament when people lived to be 900 years old....

Lol, throwing aside the ridiculousness of an average age of 900 years old (900 was an outlier, even in the OT) but still, let's assume an average lifespan of 900 years, and this time I'll do the math for you since it still seems to be causing confusion:

GodSecond = 900 years

60 * 60 * 24 = 86,400 seconds in one day


86,400 * 900 = 77,400,000 years = 1 GodDay

77,400,000 * 6 = 464,400,000 human years

So, looks like you're still off by about, oh, 13 billion.

In b4 "wasn't literal 24h days"


THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE IN POWER ACTUALLY BELIEVE

I'd suggest that "GodSecond = 900 years" is a pretty silly literal interpretation of figurative language, though admittedly one stemming from post #5434. I'm actually trying to find the Biblical passage raradevils is referring to and not having much luck. But never mind that....

Even though I'm an evangelical Christian, I actually think it's more interesting to talk about, ahem, "The Tragic Death of the Republican Party." YMMV.

There are Republicans in power that actually believe this.

What kind of time did the old testament people use then? Moses time?