President Donald Trump’s push to bolster the GOP’s narrow congressional majority in next year’s elections has prompted a rare nationwide mid-decade redistricting battle that has rapidly taken shape over the past weeks.
Indiana GOP lawmakers’ White House visit this week highlights how the race to redraw congressional districts for partisan advantage may soon expand beyond Texas and California — two states that have reached new stages in their dueling redistricting efforts. Missouri could also be on its way to redrawing its map to favor Republicans.
Indiana is 7-2 Republican. Indiana has a very safe Democratic seat in Indianapolis. They can probably pick up one seat here.
Missouri is 6-2. The state is already gerrymandered as well, with very safe Kansas City and St. Louis seats. They can probably dilute Kansas City enough to pick up one seat as well.
Meanwhile, New York is 19-7 Democrat. Colorado is 4-4.
There are 15 states with complete Democratic state control, 11 of which have Republican seats.
Meanwhile, there are 23 Republican-controlled states, but only 12 of those have Democratic seats. In almost every case, those are just one seat because the rest of the state is already gerrymandered as much as possible. I haven’t looked through them all, but those seats are probably packed already and therefore safe.
It’s theoretically possible for them to pick up some seats from Georgia, Florida, and Ohio, but that would probably leave many of those Republican seats vulnerable with a thin margin.
If Democrats take control of the Minnesota assembly, you could see opportunities there.
Democrats are favored to take control of Virginia, which could have several more opportunities.
I’m saying this is a fight Republicans will likely regret starting.
I hope you’re right
Ah, but you’re forgetting that the democrats will do absolutely fuck all while talking vehemently about how they’re trying sooooo hard.
Man I’d love to see them try and fail, especially in those thin margin areas, although I’m pretty sure they’re going to also make it’s so difficult to vote blue by locating polling stations, adding even more restrictions (but only on Dems), and so on.
Given a non-zero number of reds being pissed off over tarrifs, Epstein, etc., it’s certainly possible that it still backfires even with all the cheating, though. Throw in some underdog democrat not even backed by their own party and you might even end up with a weirdly progressive rep— imagine no boomers (mail in ban), no traditional neolib Dems (no nearby polling station or motivation), and an influx of unemployed, pissed off young people willing to camp out at the polls… anything could happen.
I’ve grown weary of having hope, but I’ll hold out one more time.
Game theory always predicted that the two party system would end up like this. I just didn’t expect it to collapse so suddenly.
Wow, Game Theory called it?
George Washington fucking called it the minute we started electing people.
The fucking civil war happened over something incredibly similar to this.
This is pretty low hanging fruit to give anyone credit for “calling it”.
I mean… Mathematics isn’t “anyone” and I’m not sure abstract modeling has the capability to call anything. But go off 👍
Yet so many people support it because “it is more simple that way”
Do you have a link?
The tendency for FPTP systems to become an ironclad 2 Party System: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law
And causes of polarization in US politics: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/pegroup/files/mccartyshor2015.pdf
Basically 2 parties make it impossible to kill off bad actors in charge of the parties, leading to eventual extremism.
Thanks a bunch!!!
All gerrymandering works on suppression by dilution so it’s a fine line to tread. When they try to scramble a solid blue city into 3 red districts, for example, there’s a good chance that you cut it incorrectly and end up with 1-3 blue seats.
Trying to turn a whole state one color is really playing with fire, especially when you’re churning out deeply unpopular policies the whole time. I’m sure everything will wash out with supplemental election tampering anyway, but this gerrymandering might not be as impactful as it’s made out to be.
