You’re correct in that population changes. But since the total number of Reps is fixed at 435, it takes a big change in population to add/remove a seat. And that only happens every 10 years, and it’s not a political process. It’s just math.
The point is that it can and does happen. And reapportionment every 10 years allows for particular populations to be diluted or marginalized within each state’s delegation.
And redistricting IS a political process. That’s the crux of the matter here, that every 10 years, there is a POLITICAL opportunity to change the districts to allow one party or the other to have a greater control over who gets elected to congress. And the GOP has overwhelmingly been adept in the past few decades at using that to ensure their party has a larger share of congressional seats via gerrymandering.
YES redistricting is a political process. REAPPORTIONMENT is not.
Electoral College elects the President. State numbers of EVs are set by math, not politics. Ergo, gerrymandering did NOT give us Trump.
I don’t know how to explain this any better.
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Yes, I do know that. That’s basically what I said. But what you seemed to be asserting earlier, and I apologize if I misunderstood, was that somehow gerrymandering affected the number of electoral votes. I think we’re in basic agreement here, just a misunderstanding of what you were trying to get across.
If you think that it’s not related to the overall process of redistricting, then you’re thinking in a pretty naive way. It’s politics all the way down.
EV are not static! They are related to the number of representatives. And the TOPIC AT HAND is redistricting, not reapportionment. Gerrymandering is the issue, not the number of EVs.
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If I was unclear, I apologize, but no. Repportionment and redistricting are different things, but they are related through the census.
Or maybe it’s because I’m too dumb to listen to @Loudoun_Hillbilly who is clearly a civics teacher par excellence. Because after all, there is no politics in gerrymandering!
But seriously… gerrymandering is the issue at hand anyway. Reapportionment isn’t. I mean, there are court cases being hashed out right now over this political gerrymandering issue.
Yes, it did, because it gave us safe districts for both parties, and the last couple of rounds have been dominated by GOP legislatures, drawing up districts that benefit them. Who has control of state legislatures matters in redistricting. Yes, the EV might have been the same for a while, but control of congress tells us a great deal about the make up of each state, politically, and how has political sway over local, state, and national politics. As someone who lives in a red state, in a blue area of that state - the political views of the STATE, which might not be the majority of the population even, dictates how the state will go - the more rural areas of the population will dominate the entire state, no matter if blue areas are more highly populated. It’s not one man/one vote, it’s more rural districts dominating state politics with urban districts gerrymandered in such as a way as to dilute the voting power of urban, and often more liberal votes in red states. My vote become irrelevant in that case, because it doesn’t matter what they vote for.
Sorry we’re too ignorant for you. Sorry that we actually look at how politics are operating across the country, instead of assuming that everything is fair and equitable because maths. It’s just not the case. Sorry.
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"A pair of leaked powerpoints reveal the earliest-known evidence of the Republican gerrymandering plan that gave us Trump
Gerrymandering did not give us Trump. Trump getting more EV’s than Hillary did. You can’t gerrymander the electoral college.
And with that, I give up, hang my head in despair, and curse the piss poor standards for civics education in the U.S.
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One more time, because I apparently hate myself.
Votes for President have nothing to do with Congress. Every state except Maine and Nebraska award their EV’s on a “winner take all” basis.
Your vote very much counted if you live in a red state. But other guys got more. So Trump got however many EV’s.
Gerrymandering has ZERO to do with this. Who your members of Congress are have NOTHING to do with how EV’s are awarded.
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The number of votes each state gets in the EC is not vulnerable to gerrymandering. It is strictly based on census data. Natural migrations of populations can impact the distribution of the votes in the EC, but politicians cannot. The EC is not affected by state-level or Federal House-level gerrymandering issues. I hate the fanta menace as much as the next person, but his electoral college win is not a direct result of gerrymandering. With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, every state grants its entire EC vote count to the overall top vote-getter. Outside of those two states, which apportion their EC votes by who won each district, there is no way for gerrymandering to directly impact the electoral college vote.
Now, indirectly, Republican control of many state legislatures after the 2010 redistricting process gave rise to a number of voter suppression efforts which, on top of their overt gerrymandering activities, may easily have tilted the playing field even further toward Republicans’ advantage on a national level by depressing turnout among Democratic constituencies in critical swing states. That still doesn’t mean Republicans rigged the EC.
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Yes, this, 1000x this! Thank you!
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No one man, one vote. People in rural areas get a larger say in my state than people in urban areas, regardless of the number of people there. Gerrymandering has EVERYTHING to do with that.
Can you go back and re-read what I said please.
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I’m pretty sure he’s one of those people who does it on purpose? It’s use has been picking up amongst our rose-emoji betters.
“Hey, I love democracy…as long as everyone votes for me!”
You seem to forget about Gerrymandering’s evil twin: voter suppression.
Sure you can’t Gerrymander presidential and Senate elections, but States control the election process in their own regions (barring a few Constitutional rules which the unscrupulous find easy to circumvent), and no sooner than the Supreme Court decided we were “post racial” than the southern states were kicking undesirables off the rolls, shutting down polling stations, and adding poll taxes without calling them poll taxes. And since these States are Gerrymandered, it’s pretty hard for the populace to circumvent these foul practices in their own State.
Therefore, Gerrymandering is very much responsible for skewing federal elections.
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There seems to be some miscommunication here. In winner-takes-all states (48 of them), gerrymandering has no effect on the EV outcome, all the state’s electors goes to whoever won the popular vote summed up over all the districts in the state, and different district shapes don’t affect that. This isn’t a matter of political science, it is a matter of mathematics (commutative and associative laws for addition).
In Maine and Nebraska gerrymandering can have an impact because they allocate electors by district, but the number there is very small.
Apportionment can be gamed by gaming the census – something the GOP is very much trying to do, both by opposing modern sampling methods and most recently by trying to add questions that will scare minorities away from participating – and that affects the EV, but it is a completely different problem than gerrymandering.
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Nobody is arguing with you that elections based on state or federal congressional district lines are seriously out of whack with actual voter sentiment in many states as a result of gerrymandering. However, the article headline states that gerrymandering got us Donald Trump, while the text being quoted says gerrymandering gave us a Republican-tilted Congress. Those are not the same thing, and one of them is inaccurate. Insofar as Republicans took advantage of their 2010 wave election to institute new voter suppression laws and then gerrymandered their states’ districts to sustain unearned majorities (and thus their suppression efforts) through 2016, gerrymandering has indirectly impacted state-wide elections for offices like governor, senate and president, but your assertion that gerrymandering itself somehow skews state-wide races away from one-person-one-vote is unfounded.
That’s not to say Republicans aren’t trying… they’ve started floating the idea of tying EC votes to congressional districts nation-wide, which would absolutely politicize the presidential election in a way that favors them.
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Both conservatism and liberalism are ideologies that have traditionally been strongly opposed to genuine democracy.
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Hmm. Remember that the 2020 census will be counted by Trump’s people and may be overseen by a Congress with a Republican majority, and have any complaints heard by Trump-appointed judges.
Expect that the Blue states will turn out to be not nearly as populous as we thought.
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