Illinois doesn’t look so bad if you look at the whole state (there are a couple of obvious spots where a finger reaches over to include a city – e.g., Democratic voters – offset by a vast area of rural Republican votes):
But what the heck is going on around Chicago? Well, the same sort of thing, ensuring that any ‘urban’ voters are offset by enough suburban and exurban patriots. The link provides all of the details, but here’s a representative example (includes the majority of African-American neighborhoods on the south side, so the boundaries have to go deep and wide into rural areas):
16 and 18 are gerrymandered into meaninglessness. All the biggish cities are cut out of these districts and given to 17 and 13. Rightfully, Peoria and Rockford should not be in the same district, and there’s no reason why Peoria, Tazewell, McLean, and Sangamon Counties should have strategic cutouts, except that those cutouts are where people of color live.
At the point where you can look at any state’s congressional district map and point to the areas that are majority black citizens, you know something has gone terribly wrong.
“For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds—and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert” - Steve King, possibly the only US Representative to be able to beat Louie Gohmert in a dumb-off*
Insurance companies literally lose business (the uninsured) and keep most of the same expenses of the ACA, so their stunts to get a repeal is backfiring horribly.
The “reforms” will lose them business, make their jobs more difficult, and increase their costs. I’ve got friends who work in the insurance industry, and their companies are definitely unhappy with this proposal.
I’m not 100% sure I follow the reasoning here. We shouldn’t participate in these surveys because it’ll inflate the value of the email list, but if they’re aware that the email list is full of fake and/or dummy email addresses (which we also shouldn’t be using, for reasons that aren’t explained) or responses from people hell-bent on undermining the narrative behind the surveys, how valuable is that list really going to be? Even if the list is full of 100% legitimate addresses, what’s the value proposition for a Republican candidate to buy a list with a not-insubstantial percentage of addresses for people who are utterly opposed to them?
I guess I maybe somewhat understand the argument that we shouldn’t be doing the good work of lining 45’s campaign’s pockets for him, but lacking funds didn’t seem to be much of an impediment to his campaign last time. If inflating the value of the email list sucks some of the wind out of the marketing sails of down-ballot Republicans apparently desperate to contact people who hate their guts, that seems like a decent enough trade-off to me.
