Gerrymandering, such a simple concept. Draw a bunch of circles, squares, triangles and squiggles on a map so that more of them come out red than blue. Sounds so simple, but as with so many other things in life, the simplicity is utter bullshit. It’s actuality both a science as well as an art, at its finest.

Gerrymandering is actually just a technique of a larger procedure called redistricting. It takes place every 10 years, in the year after the census. And actually, there are some basic ground rules. The census tells you how many seats you get in the US House, so that’s how many districts you draw. If I remember correctly, a district consists of about 225,000 voters, so the districts should have roughly that number in each district. A moron should be able to draw an 11-9 red map in about an hour, but an artiste can end up with 15-5.

When you’re dealing with redistricting, you’re dealing with three separate and distinct terrains. You have rural, suburban/exurban, and urban. Two of those three terrains are no brainers. Urban voters are almost universally Democratic, and rural voters are solidly conservative. If most states were nothing but urban and rural, most states would be blue, since the urban population would overpower the scattered GOP rural populations. It is the long time traditional, loyal GOP suburban and exurban voters that have provided the GOP with the secret sauce of gerrymandering.

Here’s how it works in simple form. Draw a good sized circle with a certain number of rural GOP voters. Then draw another circle in a nearby urban Democratic area with more voters. Then draw a corridor between the two containing just enough staunch GOP suburban voters to provide a safe 3-4% margin of victory. Done properly, the GOP can literally steal 2-4 what should be safe Democratic seats by using GOP suburban voters in conjunction with a large swath of sparse rural voters to siphon off their strength.

And that’s what Trump fucked up. A literal pig on two feet, Trump infuriated and alienated staunch suburban women  And I’m betting that at least some of those women have at least some sway over their husband’s votes. 2018 turned out to be a bloodbath for the GOP, with white suburban women punishing the party, since they couldn’t punish Trump directly. And in 2020, while white suburban white women came home for some down ballot, traditional GOP voters, they punished Trump by either voting for Biden, or leaving the top of the ticket blank.

What have I said over and over again? In order to keep your faith intact, make sure it remains unsullied by fact. Trump dropped the scales from these voters eyes, and they’ll never go back on again. Having voted for Democrats as recently as three years ago, Biden is doing things that people, even Republicans, like. And white suburban women, especially college educated working women will vote their pocketbooks, and Biden is getting them monthly credits for their kids, and wants preschool rather than daycare for pre-k schooling. And the GOP? Critical race theory and white grievance. Which way would you vote?

And that’s what Trump fucked up. The secret of successful gerrymandering is a large, stable pool of voters that you can use to dilute the power of the Democratic strongholds. Over the last few years, especially in the New South,  both gentrification, which forced lower income Democrats farther and farther out into the suburbs and exurbs, as well as racial migration had deteriorated the GOP’s advantage. That’s why Trump kept trying to scare white suburban women with the impending influx of lowlifes into their neighborhoods, because they would vote Democratic. But it was Trump, and Trump alone who tore the suburbs apart, by driving suburban white women away from him and the party. So, if you’re a GOP state representative, responsible for helping to redraw the legislative map for the next 10 years, ask yourself one simple question. How do you redraw the map to maintain control of the House, when you can’t count on what was your largest, most stable voting block? As far as I’m concerned, the 2022 House is wide open, simply because the bumpkins in the state legislatures just don’t know who to trust anymore. Don’t touch that dial.

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5 COMMENTS

  1. The average district has way too many people – roughly 575k if memory serves and some are quite a bit larger. I think MT has around a million for it’s one Representative. Things will change once the final Census numbers are out but overall the average district size is likely to remain way the fuck larger than it was ever envisioned/intended to be. There was a time when the Constitutional provision for adding to the number of Representatives was sort of upheld but about a century ago Congress adopted an Act limiting the number of Representatives to 435. The problem of district size has as we know gotten worse.

    With so many people in each district and the large geography (and sometimes terrain too – I lived in WV for over ten years!) has meant “The People’s” House hasn’t been so for way too many decades. The baby boom after WWII altered the concept for good.

    As for changing the law to allow for more Representatives (I think six hundred at least and maybe closer to seven hundred are needed) don’t get me started. There was stuff built into that Congressional Apportionment Act that made changing it problematic to say the least. And since more Representatives would favor Democrats the GOP would of course fight like hell to keep that from happening!

    It’s just one more way in which things have gotten fucked up over time.

    • 435 is, AIUI, all that the chamber will hold. Those who want to increase the House count need to figure out how to fund the new building and where they’re going to put it.

      • You wouldn’t need to build a new Capitol building, but there would have to be some redesign and reconstruction of the House side. Yes, it would be expensive, but it could be done albeit with some difficult choices that would have to be made. For starters, the size of the gallery would be affected, as you’d probably have to reduce it by taking out a couple of rows and maybe more. That, in addition to space that already exists behind the current seating for Members would allow a fairly substantial number of new seats and I mean that both in the literal sense and in the number of Members. I did a search for schematics and didn’t find much and then had an awful thought that I might have triggered someone to start keeping tabs on me as a possible insurrectionist. Maybe I’m paranoid but if that happens and they do even a bit of research on me they’ll realize I’m the type who would be squaring off against the seditionists! Anyway, space it available to expand the size of the House Chamber so that we can have more Representatives, but it will mean taking space away from things just outside it and will be expensive. But it can be done. It’s a matter of whether there’s a will to do what is necessary to reduce the number of people each Representative serves to more closely align with the original vision of a “People’s House.”

        I for one say we must summon that will.

    • Ironically, it was Republicans who caused the current problem because the population had grown too much between 1910 and 1920 but NOT in areas that Republicans (who were far more rational than their current counterparts) saw as their natural turf. From 1790 to 1910, the size of the House of Representatives generally increased as the population did; there were a few censuses that led to a drop in the number of House members even with an increase in the population but, on the whole, the size of the House increased–quite dramatically in just 120 years (the Constitution initially set the size at 65 members–Article I, Sect 2, clause 3; following the 1910 Census, the size had increased to the current 435 in 1913). But, the results of the 1920 Census showed the likelihood of urban (presumably Democratic-leaning) areas would gain far more seats than rural (likely Republican-leaning) areas would (just to note, both New Mexico and Arizona had been admitted after the 1910 Census but their numbers from the Census didn’t really affect their 1913 representation; prior to 1912, the House had 391 members–a temporary increase to 394 came in 1912 as New Mexico appears to have received 2 seats upon admission while Arizona only got 1 but after 1913, New Mexico lost a seat).

      So, when the decennial proposal to increase the size of the House was raised following the 1920 Census, House GOPers blocked it. (They could do so as the Dems lost control of Congress in the 1920 elections.) As noted in the Wiki article on the Reapportionment Act of 1929 (which set the House at a permanent 435, barring a temporary increase for newly admitted states), had reapportionment gone through following the 1920 Census with the same rules as before, the House would’ve increased to 483 seats but would most likely have gone to urban areas and potentially lost some rural Congressional seats (the traditional rule had been to increase the size of the House *without* incurring the loss of any districts in any given state–basically, if say Iowa had 3 seats in 1910 and its population didn’t really increase, or even decreased, in 1920, it would’ve kept its 3 seats even if New York had 35 seats in 1910 and its population increased to warrant it getting 45 seats in 1920). But the main argument was that the House couldn’t seat 483 members and so the apportionment (as it was properly termed since states were generally adding members by splitting an existing “district”–there weren’t any requirements about districts having roughly equal populations) had to be postponed until a later date.

    • We just received a second house seat. That takes us to 2 districts at just better than 500k each.

      If we want less people per district, we need to get people to stop breeding.

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