Illinois Democrats do that, too. I'm sure it's tougher to pull off in a state that's more evenly divided.
As solace, I like to imagine that they'll spread themselves so thin that in some election, in the near future, the demographics will have shifted just enough to make all the Republican office holders vanish overnight.
I thought this was a tradition going back to the founding of our glorious republic.
Iowa (maybe a few other states?) has a process that attempts to be non-partisan. However, if the legislature and Governor are from the same party, they can still do whatever they want (although it has not happened heretofore).
If the legislature does not approve the first three plans by the bureau, it must itself approve a plan by September 1st, or the state supreme court will take responsibility for the state districts. The Governor has veto power over both plans.
Hobbyhorse alert.
Two big fixes to the American electoral system that would make it more democratic: a) make all redistricting non-partisan and b) increase the number of Representatives to ~600.
The Washington State Redistricting Commission includes two Democrats and two Republicans as voting members and a non-voting, nonpartisan chair. It seems to actually work pretty well.
Pwned by 6, but still that's not nonpartisan so much as bipartisan.
Have superintelligent sharks do the redistricting.
2: Yes this happens. In part how a Democrat came to hold Tom Delay's district from 2007-08 (also Repub was a write-in) and only lost 52-46 in 2008. Delay was comfortable enough with his own personal popularity that he let them cut it somewhat close to take pressure off of surrounding districts.
I have the vague impression that Virginia's Republican governor did his best to make the process non-partisan this time around, much to the chagrin of the Republicans in the state legislature (which is split—Dems control the Senate, GOP controls the House of Delegates).
5: You forgot abolishing the states.
California has a Citizens Redistricting Commission with some complicated rules for trying to ensure non-partisanship.
9: That seems a waste. How about just intelligent sharks so the superintelligent ones can eat Samuel Jackson.
North Carolina passed a redistricting bill that is similar to Iowa's.
California's system is new, so it's not yet clear if it will change anything. Most of the state lives in a partisanal distribution and you can only shift the lines so far.
16
The first draft looks far less gerrymandered, but you're right that it's not clear that anything will change.
15: North Carolina is the home of the notorious 12th Congressional district--the skinny freeway district. At the time, the purpose was expressly political, but their is an argument for non-contiguous districts or weirdly-shaped districts as being a legitimate way to provide a voice in the political system to minority groups with similar political interests (not necessarily ethnic minority groups). The agrarian "straight-shooters" who esteem compactness and contiguity also tend to love the Senate and our prone to showing maps which demonstrate the area that the Republicoterrorist party controls rather than the population.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! I HAVE HAD IT WITH THESE MOTHERFUCKING REPUBLICANS ON THIS MOTHERFUCKING REDISTRICTING COMMISSION!
1) This is one of the reasons I have been mad at Obama for two years (and Senate Dems, I guess, House Dems seem ok if they would just ignore the asshole in the WH). We needed a massive turnout and fired up base in summer-fall 2010. It was fucking important. Tired as hell of losing every redistricting mid-term. And Dems do.
2) Sorry, I oppose majority-minoriity districts, with nothing against the Congresspersons. They have been a disaster for the Democratic party. Texas Republicans have been brilliant at using the SCOTUS rules to carve up and concentrate safe Democratic constituencies to limit Democratic possibilities.
2.1) Democrats have to figure out a better way to compete in Red states because they apparently can't keep their voters from moving here. "Fuck Texas" ain't gonna fly. Another 20 years like the last twenty and we will own the rest of the country.
The agrarian "straight-shooters" who esteem compactness and contiguity also tend to love the Senate and our prone to showing maps which demonstrate the area that the Republicoterrorist party controls rather than the population.
This doesn't really follow -- you're equating compactness and contiguity here with failures to adhere to one-man-one-vote. I'm a pretty big compactness and contiguity fan myself.
18: "their" and "our"
It's just too much; I can't help nitpicking.
16
This is just shameful: "only one House seat [in CA] has flipped between the parties since 2002"
And this is cause for encouragement: "You're going to have something like up to a quarter of the [California] seats being possibly competitive"
Oh. And I definitely seem to remember Democrats saying that the 2000 (2003?) redistricting was going to be the Republican's last hurrah due to demographics. We will see how that works.
My own district is I think majority-minority yet designed to be a very safe Republican seat, mainly based on a lot of poor Hispanics who never turn out and a plurality of white wingnut Neanderthals.
Repubs are fucking smart, and the computer programs are approaching perfection.
Further to 18, drawing the boundaries is always fraught for any political division. For instance, Texas's generous annexation law (for the central cities) is either a great idea that has kept its cities more vital by not letting them be as easily choked by layers of inner- and outer-ring suburbs or its a tool to reduce the power of minorities in urban governments. Probably both. Similarly, county/city merger types of deals like Jacksonville and Indianapolis*.
*Very different than the older coterminous city/county arrangements like Philadelphia, St. Louis and Baltimore which have tended to really constrain the central city. (And not to mention the Virginia independent city setup.
...the computer programs are approaching perfection.
Let me use them. I can fuck-up any computer program.
26: Better yet, give them to Tweety.
21: I am *not* equating it with one man one vote; I am pointing out that motives of one of the primary blocs who promote are not necessarily pure and that they play on most folks' default, non-thinking acquiescence. It is appealing but not necessarily good politics or good governance in current times. Nations potentially suffer from the same problem and I predict their current form will dissolve over the next 150 years.
</snow crash>
22: Yes, if there is a choice to be made when I am writing in a hurry I invariably make the wrong one. I don't read what I write as I write, I listen to an internal voice. It is a problem. I suspect Yggles has some similar cognitive processing issue.
Hey, has anyone ever suggested appointing office holders by random lot?
My primary association with gerrymandered districts is, as the name suggests, incumbency protection rather than anything more virtuous, and I think that's a major negative -- I'm on the compactness/contiguity bandwagon for that reason above all others.
I went looking but couldn't find an article that I read, I think last week from Thoma's infinite sidebar, about a newish trend in American demographics. America is re-segregating, not just according to race or politics, but at an even finer level. Academics are living near other academics, Catholics are moving to be with Catholics, gov't-working blacks and construction Hispanics are creating specialty neighborhoods. The point of the article was the incredible increase in cognitive bias and loss of exposure to variety.
I'm on the compactness/contiguity bandwagon
It's like picking an economy car.
31: Yes, and there are certainly better ways to achieve a minority voice such as various proportional representation voting schemes but those are not going to happen in the US.
32: My neighborhood is still very mixed, at least as far as religion goes.
In other non-democratic news, California has fewer state Senators than US Representatives.
Isn't Random Lot Nick Cage's youngest?
6
The Washington State Redistricting Commission includes two Democrats and two Republicans as voting members and a non-voting, nonpartisan chair. It seems to actually work pretty well.
I expect such a system would generally end up drawing districts that protect incumbents.
38: Murtha's old district shows that's what happened in western PA.
38
Reasonable expectation, but have you looked at the WA congressional map, James?
Hey, has anyone ever suggested appointing office holders by random lot?
When I interviewed for a job at the California Legislative Analyst's Office, the head analyst made the surprising comment that the legislators were the same as what you'd get if you chose by lot. I think she meant demographically, not smarts or merit. But maybe she meant it literally.
32: a newish trend in American demographics
Surely not. What about the hundreds of ethnic enclaves in Chicago, filtered by class, religion, race and national origin, some of which persist to this day, but which were a much bigger deal in the past? IANAD, but the big demographic trend around here seems to be much more about previously monocultural working-class neighborhoods opening up significantly (cf. the Somali kids I saw hanging out at a community center in a historically-Hispanic neighborhood in St. Paul last weekend); while middle class people jumble up in the deep suburbs and exurbs with little regard for who lives in the next townhouse.
while middle class people jumble up in the deep suburbs and exurbs with little regard for who lives in the next townhouse.
Sometimes we steal each others' propane tanks.
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Life Expectancies for White Women Declining in America ...LA Times via the Agonist. Maps and numbers, pretty geographically specific, partly due to wealth inequality, but poor counties with high Hispanic or Black populations are ok. Smoking, obesity, economic stress, and lousy health services?
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North Carolina passed a redistricting bill that is similar to Iowa's.
Just days from the end of session, House Republican leaders have unveiled a massive rewrite of the state's election laws.
Senate Bill 47, introduced with little notice in House Elections this afternoon, would repeal same-day registration in North Carolina, ban straight-ticket voting, shorten the early-voting period by a week, and ban early voting on Sundays (popular with churches for "Souls to the Polls" voting drives).
It would also repeal publicly-financed elections for the Superintendent of Public Instruction, Insurance Commissioner and Treasurer.
The measure also makes changes to campaign finance, creating a new type of account at political parties - a "headquarters" account - that could accept corporate money for operational support, though not for electioneering purposes.
I felt that the California redistricting in federal elections was a pointless unilateral surrender since Texas wasn't doing the same thing, but now it seems like it won't make that much of a difference anyway. At the state level, I'm in favor of absolutely anything and everything that shakes up the lock the slightly more than 1/3 of crazy Republicans hold on policy.
47 to 45, but it could go to 46, I guess.
The California plan really did seem to be a "we can't change the 2/3 requirements, so let's try something bland and inoffensive that just might change something somehow" sort of reform.
Hey, has anyone ever suggested appointing office holders by random lot?
I AM OBLIGED TO CONFESS I SHOULD SOONER LIVE IN A SOCIETY GOVERNED BY THE FIRST TWO THOUSAND NAMES IN THE BOSTON TELEPHONE DIRECTORY THAN IN A SOCIETY GOVERNED BY THE TWO THOUSAND FACULTY MEMBERS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
46
I felt that the California redistricting in federal elections was a pointless unilateral surrender ...
How so? Rumor has it the new districts are more favorable for the Democrats in general although less protective of incumbents.
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It was difficult to take the other candidates seriously.... Bachmann likes to play up her role as a rightwing gadfly in the Republican congress, but she lacks Palin's charm and sexual charisma.- John Judis
How many reasons not to take Bachmann seriously would you have to list before you got to her lack of sexual charisma?
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All of them.
Hey, has anyone ever suggested appointing office holders by random lot?
You're a funny man, Stanley. A very funny man.
Also, here's the intro to a recent book on how the "one man, one vote" redistricting revolution changed partisan balance & incumbent/challenger coordination:
The Supreme Court's reapportionment decisions, beginning with Baker v. Carr in 1962, had far more than jurisprudential consequences. They sparked a massive wave of extraordinary redistricting in the mid-1960s. Both state legislative and congressional districts were redrawn more comprehensively - by far - than at any previous time in America's history. Moreover, they changed what would happen at law should a state government fail to enact a new districting plan when one was legally required. We provide the first detailed analysis of how judicial partisanship affected redistricting outcomes in the 1960s, arguing that the reapportionment revolution led indirectly to three fundamental changes in the nature of congressional elections: the abrupt eradication of a 6% pro-Republican bias in the translation of congressional votes into seats outside the south; the abrupt increase in the apparent advantage of incumbents; and the abrupt alteration of the two parties' success in congressional recruitment and elections.
An important thing to keep in mind, as alluded to in 2 and others, is that would-be evil redistrictors must balance two competing desiderata: maximizing expected seats, and protecting incumbents. So it's not as simple as just maximizing evil.
"31: Yes, and there are certainly better ways to achieve a minority voice such as various proportional representation voting schemes but those are not going to happen in the US. "
yes lets rule out the only good solution. we're better off looking reasonable.
46 - That's because the previous California redistricting was a bipartisan incumbent protection gerrymander, not because the lines the new commission is drawing up are going for particular partisan gains.
LB, I've read a political science paper that I'm having trouble finding saying that compactness and contiguity are harmful to Democrats (barring other constraints) because the fact that their voters tend to cluster in in cities and inner-ring suburbs make for natural vote concentration -- that is, c and c makes for lots of 60% Republican districts and fewer 90% Democratic districts in a 50-50 state. But since I can't find a citation, you're free to disbelieve this!
56: of course proportional representation or any other principled attempt to change America's voting systems isn't going to happen, because while they get outplayed by the Republicans time and again, the Democrats like their "we're No. 2, why try harder" attitute.