By all rights...

[KeithE]

[Haruo]

I think there was a red wave AND a blue wave, both larger than usual in a midterm.

[KeithE]

[William Thornton]

...but by current election laws, dems won the 34 or so. If they win some governorships and state legislatures, they can redraw the lines in 2020. If the supposedly more conservative SCOTUS makes some rulings that affect districting, we can have elections and see how that impacts things.

Dems love to complain about this stuff. The electoral college is one of their big gripes also.

Personally, I like clean, sensible districts for aesthetic reasons.

No need to note the electoral malpractices of some dem candidates.

[Sandy]

[William Thornton]

Zzzz...fake news. Abrams did well but just didn't get the votes. Too bad she can't count the phantom votes.

I fully expect that Dems in control of states will rig the redistricting after the 2020 census. Have at it. Dems are real big in the rust belt states. We will see which states lose seats after the census.

No way Beto should have lost after all that money and media adoration. He f****** up, if I may bleep a word he uses publicly.

[KeithE]

[Rvaughn]

I have lived in Texas all my life. I lived to see it turn from a "blue state" to a "red state". Before the "reds" the "blues" did the gerrymandering. Afterwards the "reds" did it. It is a fact of political history and life. For the most part they get by with it (either party), though sometimes judges strike down particularly egregious cases. If a party wants to "take power" they have to overcome it by getting the votes rather than just whining about it. (Then they can get back to their own gerrymandering.)

[Sandy]

[Rvaughn]

Judges rules against gerrymandering in Maryland

[KeithE]

[Rvaughn]

[KeithE]

[Dave Roberts]

What I see in VA is the deliberate drawing of districts to protect incumbents. It's evident that the members of the state house and senate are definitely picking their voters.

[Sandy]

Actually, as time has passed since Tuesday night, the size and scope of the Democrat's victory is becoming apparent. It's a bigger shift of seats in the house than the 2010 reversal of the house two years into Obama's first term, and the Democrats kept the senate then, too, mainly because there weren't that many seats they had to defend. A lot of state houses slipped out of their hands, too, but not as many as the Republicans lost on Tuesday.

The lawsuit that caused the Pennsylvania supreme court to switch the district lines prior to this election affects 16 states, and I'd have to look it up to see which those are. I know Wisconsin is one, and Texas. State legislature lines will also change, but the Democrats did well across the board on Tuesday, even in traditionally Republican areas. It was a well rounded sweep of objectives. They won the senate seat in Alabama in a special election, and Tuesday they flipped congressional seats in states like Oklahoma, Utah, South Carolina and Texas.

Personally, I think independent, bi-partisan commissions should draw congressional district lines. Just sit down and use existing county and city boundaries to put congressional disticts together based on geographic units, not the political base of voters. People who think that they are entitled to an advantage because they are the party in power do not understand the principle of Gerrymandering or why that is supposed to be illegal in the United States.

[Neil Heath]

I agree with using impartial means to set up voting districts. There are some computer systems that have done pretty well, I think.

My earliest memory of trying to limit voting power came when I was a Mercer student. A Mercer prof was running for local office. They redrew the voting precincts so that every Mercer dorm was in a different one to prevent the students from voting her in.

[William Thornton]

[KeithE]

[William Thornton]

It's called politics.

[KeithE]

[Sandy]

Politics, dirty politics, that is exactly why laws regarding gerrymandering are as detailed as they are and still there seems to be a problem with defining it and enforcing the law. I would guess that a lot of people who are livid with insistence that immigration law, as pernicious and unamerican as those laws are, be explicitly enforced would not be on board so much with the gerrymandering laws being enforced as long as it benefits their (GOP) party.

One of the specific issues that came up in the Pennsylvania case was drawing the zig zag lines around known blocks of voters in various neighborhoods to isolate high percentages of Democrats in just a few districts. The federal law cited in the court case that forced the new boundary drawing specifically states that lines can't be drawn around densely populated areas for the purpose of "dividing up" the partisan nature of a particular neighborhood. When drawing boundaries, the independent commission looked at population density, political boundaries (city limits, county lines, precincts) and used the average district population to redraw the districts, not including the partisan makeup of the area. The result was that the districts are now geographically sensible, equally populated and "random" as the commission said.

And while a 9-9 split of Congressmen still doesn't get Pennsylvania Democrats to equal representation based on their actual numbers, it would be impossible to do that without some gerrymandering by Democrats. There are still two districts in the state where the Democratic voter registration is more than 85% of the total vote.

[William Thornton]

[KeithE]

To show how effective (from a Republican point of view) gerrymandering has been, look at the differences between overall national vote margins and House seats gained in 2010 and 2018.

Republicans won the popular vote by 7.2% and . In 2018, Democrats won the popular vote by 7.0% and have (depending on finishing the counts and recounts).

Popular vote totals:

[Sandy]

I don't think we will ever achieve complete satisfaction by either party when it comes to drawing lines. Having an independent commission armed with only a map and census data and without information on how people in a given area voted or which, if any, party they belong to would be the fairest way to do it. In spite of the fact that Republicans like to post the maps showing giant red areas compared to teeny tiny blue areas on social media accounts, the fact of the matter is that land doesn't vote, people do and most of them live in cities and suburbs. And the laws against gerrymandering don't allow zigzag and snake shapes through cities and suburbs to isolate all of the members of a single party into a single district.

[KeithE]

FYI from Rachel Maddow’s accounting of the 2018 House elections:

.

It is concerning that the democratic-deflating effects of the nefarious 2000-2018 gerrymandering program by the Repubs are still in effect even after the Blue Wave (7.7% margin) in the popular vote. Hard to overcome this disparity without some federal level demand to level districting naturally in all states.

The mantra that "elections have consequences" DOES NOT mean wining factions can pervert democracy itself. The end does not justify the means.