2020 Redistricting v Gerrymandering Setback

[Tigers!]

Australia has a rigorous population based electoral distribution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisions_of_the_Australian_House_of_Representatives

Based upon what I have seen on the US system you could worse that read the link.

What do you Yanks need to do?
1. Electorates based upon population only.
2. Make every vote count and be important. We take the importance part so seriously we reran the Senate election in WA in 2014 again because 1370 ballots (not votes) could not be accounted for.
3. Truly independent electoral commission that reports only to the responsible governmental body (note it does not report to politician's or parties.
4. Get more people to vote, Frankly make it compulsory.
5. Vote on a Saturday not a weekday.

Nos. 3 & 4 will be your stumbling block.
5. Don't announce results until the last polling station is closed. Across time zones this is important. This is avoid early results causing those in electorates not bothering to vote as they think their vote is wasted.

 

[lpetrich]

Advantage, GOP | FiveThirtyEight

Why Democrats have to win large majorities in order to govern while Republicans don’t need majorities at all

...
For a variety of reasons — some long-standing, some intentional, others newer or incidental — the political institutions that make up the field of American politics are increasingly stacked in favor of one side: the Republican Party.

Take the Senate. Republicans currently hold half of the seats in that chamber even though they represent just 43 percent of the U.S. ...

... The founders purposely designed many of our federal institutions to only indirectly reflect the will of the people — in political science lingo, they made them “counter-majoritarian.”

And for most of our nation’s history those minority protections helped both parties in roughly equal measure. In other words, to revisit our tennis game analogy, the two players regularly switched sides of the court, but now, that isn’t the case.

Instead, according to political scientist Rob Mickey and author of “Paths Out of Dixie,” a book about enduring antidemocratic rule in Southern states, our institutions are now being “weaponized and used … by a coherent set of actors with a coherent set of interests and preferences” — the modern GOP.

Southern Republicans are the successors of Southern "Dixiecrat" Democrats, and it shows.

 

[lpetrich]

Continuing,

It may seem dramatic to suggest that Republicans are overriding democracy to win power when Democrats currently control all three elected legs of the federal government: the presidency, Senate and House. But in order to secure them, Democrats had to go above and beyond winning a simple majority of votes, like a tennis player having to ace all of her serves on a particularly windy day.

...
That said, of course, it is Republicans who have now won the presidency twice in the last six presidential elections while losing the popular vote. Political scientists say this occurrence risks “significantly decreas[ing] the perceived legitimacy of the winning candidates.”

One would expect that it is people on the Democratic side who lose belief in the winners' legitimacy. Over the last few decades, the EC has weighted pro-Republican states more than pro-Democratic ones, thus the discrepancy.

• 1980 - . -9.74%
• 1984 - . -18.21%
• 1988 - . -7.72%
• 1992 + . +5.56%
• 1996 + . +8.51%
• 2000 - . +0.51% *
• 2004 - . -2.46%
• 2008 + . +7.27%
• 2012 + . +3.86%
• 2016 - . +2.09% *
• 2020 + . +4.45%

D: +, R: -

The false election-fraud allegations surrounding the 2020 election showed that legitimacy may be difficult to regain, especially when Republicans continue to push the lie that the election was stolen: Only 27 percent of Republican respondents to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted almost five months after the election said that the 2020 election was “legitimate and accurate.”

That was due to Trump being an incredibly sore loser. Even though Republicans did better than expected, Trump did not feel very satisfied. He still thinks that he was cheated out of victory, and if he continues that, he may convince many of his followers that voting is not worth doing. That may depress Republican turnout in upcoming elections, like what happened in the two Georgia runoffs.

 

[lpetrich]

The article continued with Republicans' packing the courts by obstructing Democratic Presidents, then got into the House of Reps.

Unlike the Electoral College and Senate, the founders actually did intend for the House to represent the majority of people — yet the chamber now shares the others’ Republican bias. One reason for this is, again, urban-rural sorting; the clustering of Democratic votes in urban areas has made it harder to draw maps that benefit Democrats rather than Republicans. But another reason is engineered by Republicans themselves. The GOP has taken full advantage of its many opportunities to draw boundaries that give them an unfair advantage. For instance, after the red wave election of 2010, Republicans drew more than five times as many congressional districts as Democrats, and they used it to push their structural advantage in the House to record levels.

...
State legislatures are the last piece in the institutional jenga. Here, too, urban-rural sorting and gerrymandering have handed Republicans an advantage ...

...
It’s always been possible for state legislators to write partisan laws and draw self-serving maps, and to some degree it has always happened. But if legislatures’ recent actions have felt especially antidemocratic, it’s not your imagination. In our highly polarized era of politics, Democrats and Republicans view each other with increased suspicion and hatred, meaning they’re willing to go to greater lengths to keep the other side out of power. And as the parallel trend of political nationalization has made state and national politicians more like-minded, they’ve been able to more efficiently coordinate their efforts to exploit minority rule for political gain.

Republicans, in particular, have been more willing than Democrats to violate norms — and even subvert democracy — in order to retain power.

...
Though these attempts have only sometimes been successful, they demonstrate how Republican-controlled state legislatures are increasingly willing to circumvent the will of the people in order to achieve their desired ends.

“You have a party that believes at a high level in democracy, and you’ve got a party filled with a number of people who wield power who don’t,” Hakeem Jefferson, a FiveThirtyEight contributor and a professor of political science at Stanford University, told us. “I think it’s uncomfortable for scholars to say outwardly, because it doesn’t seem like the objective thing to say, but it is empirically the truth.”

As to why the Republicans are doing that, a possible reason is demographic shifts combined by an unwillingness to seek new constituencies.

Americans have picked up on this: More than half of Black respondents in a 2020 poll conducted for FiveThirtyEight by Ipsos said that Republicans don’t want “people like me to vote” while just 6 percent said the same of Democrats. A similar pattern was evident among Hispanic and other nonwhite respondents. In part, this reflects partisanship, but it is hard for a multiracial democracy to endure when entire demographics feel — with some justification — that one party opposes their right to vote.

 

[lpetrich]

In America’s ‘Uncivil War,’ Republicans Are The Aggressors | FiveThirtyEight

The Jan. 6 insurrection and the run-up to it is perhaps the clearest illustration that Republicans are being more hostile and anti-democratic than Democrats in this uncivil war. Biden pledged to concede defeat if he lost the presidential election fair and square, while Trump never made such a pledge; many elected officials in the GOP joined Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results; and finally, Trump supporters arrived at the Capitol to claim victory by force. But there are numerous other examples of conservatives and Republicans going overboard in their attempts to dominate liberals and Democrats:

• Republican officials at the state level have engaged in a sustained campaign to make it harder for liberal-leaning constituencies, particularly Black people, to vote.
• GOP officials have used aggressive gerrymandering and attempted to manipulate the census-taking process to ensure GOP control of state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives, even if Democrats are winning more votes.
• Trump supporters and conservatives have threatened not only to physically destroy institutions they view as hostile to conservative causes, such as CNN, but to kill or injure prominent Democratic politicians, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. And, in attempts to intimidate liberal protesters, these conservatives sometimes show up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations wearing military gear and brandishing extensive weaponry.
• Trump, conservative lawyers and most Republican members of Congress tried to disqualify the election results in some swing states, which would have in effect invalidated the votes of millions of Americans, particularly Black people and residents of large urban areas. And, as mentioned earlier, that effort culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.
• State-level Republican officials have tried to criminalize the types of protests organized by liberals who support Black Lives Matter and oppose the expansion of oil and gas pipelines. In fact, conservative lawmakers in Missouri and other states are considering provisions that would limit legal liability for people who drive into protesters blocking traffic.
• State-level GOP officials have limited cities and other localities from enacting policies meant to reduce the spread of COVID-19, essentially preventing elected officials in cities (usually Democrats) from taking measures to save the lives of their constituents.
• GOP officials at the state level are engaged in a broader effort to preempt laws passed in Democratic cities, meaning that mostly white GOP state legislators elected in conservative, rural areas are often determining education, economic and other policies for heavily Democratic cities with large numbers of people of color.

We could also compile a long list of anti-democratic and hostile actions taken by Trump himself against Democrats. At the top of that list would be his attempt to coerce the Ukrainian government into announcing it would investigate the Biden family — essentially a scheme for Trump to use the power of his office to tilt the upcoming presidential election in his favor.

Most of these actions are taken not by ordinary Republicans but by Republican officials, especially state ones.

 

[lpetrich]

More from the article.

Conservatives “are reacting to something real,” said Zimmer. “Their version of ‘Real America’ — a white, Christian America — is under threat. Republicans are convinced they are waging a noble war against the demise of ‘Real America.’ Conservatives think their backs are against the wall.”

“[On the left] there is a demand for more redistribution and laws and programs that help some people and not others,” said Vasabjit Banerjee, a political scientist at Mississippi State University who studies political conflicts. For example, he described Black Lives Matter as a “form of status redistribution,” that might be threatening to non-Black Americans because the movement’s goal is to, in effect, make Black people truly “full citizens” in America, equal to white Americans.

Reflecting on the actions of both sides, you can see why conservative attacks on liberals are much more problematic than the inverse.

... But the reality is that some Republicans in America are so intent on defeating liberals that they are willing to erode America’s democracy, or even end it, along the way to victory.

Now Florida Republicans worry their new voting restrictions may backfire and hurt GOP turnout | Salon.com - "Florida Republicans spent decades making mail voting easier — before Trump spread lies about the election"
If they get an electoral own goal out of that, then I'm going to gloat. Just like how I gloated when Trump's rhetoric about election fraud discouraged a lot of Republican voters in the Georgia Senate runoffs -- enough to elect two Democrats by margins above the recount threshold.

 

[lpetrich]

Now that NYT article.
Opinion | Why 1850 Doesn’t Feel So Far Away - The New York Times
"Congress has been here before. It wasn’t pretty."

Scarcely had the violence ebbed on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 when the Republican calls for healing began. ...

Although couched in calls for unity, these warnings are remarkably one-sided. There is no talk of reconciliation or compromise. No acceptance of responsibility. Lots of blame casting. And little willingness to calm and inform their base. ...

And many of them are using threats of violence to encourage Democrats and the disloyal to fall in line. If you impeach the president there will be violence, they charge. Masked in democratic platitudes like “unity” and “healing,” the inherent menace in such pleas is utterly deniable. But they are threats nonetheless.

They are now purging Liz Cheney from the House Republican leadership, and who will they purge next?

The impact of such threats was apparent in the House vote on impeachment. “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night,” reported Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, on MSNBC on Jan. 13, and a “couple of them actually broke down in tears … saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.”

What a bunch of cowards.

The article then got into the 1840's, when Southern politicians bullied their Northern colleagues into submission.

For some Southerners, this brand of politics wasn’t much of a stretch; their slave regime was grounded in violence, and mastery was their way of life. Between 1830 and 1860, there were at least 70 violent incidents on the House and Senate floors, most of them prompted by Southerners.

This Southern strategy of force was no happenstance, no mere matter of custom. Representative Richard Kidder Meade, Democrat of Virginia, declared as much in 1849 on the House floor, bragging that the best way to manage antislavery congressmen was to keep them afraid for their lives. And it worked. Joshua Giddings, a freshman Whig representative from Ohio, was stunned at the sight of it. During his first weeks in Congress in 1838, he saw that Northerners were too “backward and delicate” to confront Southern insolence. “We have no Northern man who dares boldly and fearlessly declare his abhorrence of slavery.”

 

[ZiprHead]

 

[lpetrich]

Opinion | How Republicans Could Steal the 2024 Election - The New York Times

Erica Newland serves as counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization founded in 2017 to fight democratic breakdown in America. Before Joe Biden’s victory was officially confirmed in January, she researched some of the ways that Donald Trump’s allies in Congress might sabotage the process. She came to a harrowing conclusion.

“It occurred to me,” she told her colleagues then, “as I dug into the rules and watched what happened, that if the current Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, there’s no way if a Democrat is legitimately elected they will get certified as the president-elect.”

...
Absent an overwhelming mobilization by Democrats, Republicans have a good chance of winning the House in 2022. Redistricting alone will probably give them several new seats. They could win the Senate as well. If Biden or another Democrat prevails in 2024, a House run by Kevin McCarthy, the craven minority leader who helped push Cheney out, seems likely to collaborate in right-wing schemes to change the result.

Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election revealed how much our democracy depends on officials at all levels of government acting honorably.

Like respecting vote counts and not endorsing baseless claims of huge amounts of fraudulence.

Our current system, Newland told me, provides lots of opportunities for “bad actors” to “claim there are ambiguities and to exploit those claims of ambiguities. They have to believe in the process in order for the process to actually work.” Otherwise, they can purposely gum up the works so thoroughly that it’s impossible to declare a winner.

If that happens, the election would be tossed to the House, with each state delegation getting one vote. Even now, with the House as a whole controlled by Democrats, there are more states whose representatives are predominantly Republican. With enough procedural mischief, politicians representing a minority of the country could hand the presidency to a candidate who got a minority of both the popular and Electoral College votes. If this has never been an evident danger in the past, it’s because both parties were at least outwardly committed to liberal democracy, and probably thought their voters were, too.

That is no longer true. The Republican electorate, believing that Democratic victories are by their nature illegitimate, demands that everything possible be done to subvert them. For rejecting the anti-democratic turn in her party, Cheney — a right-wing extremist in many other regards — has been cast out. Republicans are showing us exactly what they expect of their officials. They’ve made it clear that while American democracy was given a reprieve in 2020, the work of repairing it has barely begun.

 

[lpetrich]

How The Republican Push To Restrict Voting Could Affect Our Elections | FiveThirtyEight

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Republican lawmakers have pushed new voting restrictions in nearly every state. From making it harder to cast ballots early to increasing the frequency of voter roll purges, at least 25 new restrictive voting laws have been enacted, with more potentially on the horizon. The GOP has introduced such measures in the name of “election integrity,” but at the heart of this effort is former President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

“I liken it to a quack doctor holding up an X-ray, pointing to something going, ‘See, see, see?’ and getting the person to believe that there’s something really there on that X-ray that requires expensive and dangerous surgery,” said Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University, of Republican efforts to pass new voter restrictions even though there is no evidence of voter fraud in the election. “We had an election that was amazing in the midst of a pandemic. And instead of applauding themselves for it, they went with a Trumpian lie.”

...
So while measuring the effect of a single voting rule can be challenging, put together, the cost of voting index suggests that a state’s collection of election laws does influence voter turnout, with more restrictions leading to lower turnout overall.

Schraufnagel, who studies the relationship between voting laws and participation at Northern Illinois University, told me that while he and his colleagues are confident that their metric helps predict voter turnout, they’re less certain about how different voting laws help or hurt a political party’s performance. For instance, Schraufnagel noted that in states where turnout increased more from 2016 to 2020, Trump actually tended to do slightly better in 2020 compared to his 2016 margin.

Vote-suppression measures may hurt the Republicans, since non-college-educated white people are now a big part of the party's base.

"To be sure, though, Fraga’s own research has found that white voters, regardless of how easy or hard it is for them to vote, consistently turn out at higher rates than voters of color, so we do want to be careful of not reading too much into this."

The GOP’s restrictionist bent sends the message that Republicans don’t want Black and brown Americans to vote. In September 2020, 54 percent of Black respondents and 35 percent of Hispanic respondents told FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos they believed Republicans didn’t want “people like me” to vote.

...
These new laws in states with large numbers of voters of color follow what Fraga has found in his research: States with large, highly engaged groups of minority voters — especially Black voters — are more likely to pass new voting restrictions. Fraga noted Georgia, which is about one-third Black, particularly fits this pattern, as its new law came on the heels of Black voters helping put Democrats over the top in both the 2020 presidential race and the state’s two 2021 Senate runoffs.

...
Collectively, these developments point to the democratic backsliding we’ve already seen in Republican-controlled states over the past couple of decades. From 2000 to 2018, the most significant predictor of eroding democratic health in a state was whether Republicans ran the state government, according to a study by Jacob Grumbach of the University of Washington. And in the aftermath of the 2020 election, we’ve only seen this come into clearer focus, as Republicans in states Biden carried sought to void the results or proposed legislation to make that possible in the future.

What a bunch of sore losers. Very dangerous sore losers.

 

[lpetrich]

Home | V-Dem

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. We provide a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.

We are a team of over 50 social scientists on six continents. We work with more than 3,500 country experts and a truly global International Advisory Board. Read more about the work we do here.

The 538 article then showed a graph of the two US main parties on their level of commitment to democracy. "Based on the V-Dem Institute's topline index for how "anti-pluralist" a party is, which is based on a party's commitment to the democratic process, tendency to demonize political opponents, disrespect for the fundamental rights of minority groups and the encouragement of political violence."

Starting in 1970, the Democrats are constant at around 0.12, while the Republicans are originally only a little worse, at 0.18. They improve a little bit over 1975 - 1985, then after being at their 1970 level, they start getting worse in 2000. By 2014, they are at around 0.4, and by 2016, 0.68.

"And although the V-Dem party data only runs through 2018, the Republican score may only further deteriorate once it is updated to account for the 2020 election, the scholars who developed the measure told The Washington Post last November."

GOP embrace of Trump refusal to concede is part of authoritarian trend, data shows - The Washington Post

“The Republican Party in the U.S. has retreated from upholding democratic norms in recent years,” said Anna Lührmann, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and a former member of the German parliament. “Its rhetoric is closer to authoritarian parties, such as AKP in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary.”

 

[lpetrich]

Demonization of opponents, for instance.

The drivers of the Republican Party’s drift toward authoritarianism are visible in the sub-indicators that make up the main index. Consider the demonization of political opponents: In 2006, V-Dem’s experts judged that GOP leaders “usually did not” resort to demonization and severe personal attacks in characterizing the Democratic Party.

But the rise of the tea party was a turning point, research shows. “Angry protesters have frequently made claims ranging from proclaiming Obama’s ‘socialist’ intentions to making explicit Nazi comparisons to suggesting that the President is defying or even subverting the Constitution,” the Anti-Defamation League wrote at the time.

By 2016, that sort of rhetoric had become the norm among GOP leaders.

Looking at the graph, demonization was rare until 2006, with the Democrats being slightly worse than the Republicans. But in 2008, both parties had a small bump, though the Democrats settled back down in 2010, and had the same-sized bump in 2016, complete with settling down again in 2018. But after 2008, the Republicans got worse and worse and worse.

Encouraging violence has become alarmingly common. From the 1970s through roughly 2010, V-Dem’s experts note that both Republican and Democratic leaders consistently rejected the use of violence against political opponents. For Republicans, that began to change under Trump.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump appeared to encourage violence against protesters at his rallies. Also during that campaign, Kentucky’s Republican governor suggested armed insurrection might be necessary in the event of a Hillary Clinton victory.

As president, Trump told law enforcement officers not to worry about hurting suspects during arrests, and praised a Republican congressional candidate who was convicted of assault for body-slamming a reporter. A Wisconsin teen accused of fatally shooting two Black Lives Matter protesters and injuring a third has been defended by Trump, various conservative groups and at least one Republican lawmaker.

In September, Facebook removed a post by a Georgia congressional candidate for violating a policy against inciting violence. The candidate, Marjorie Taylor Greene, went on to win her election.

Many GOP supporters have taken these messages to heart, with news reports documenting dozens of cases of violent crimes committed in Trump’s name. Survey data collected by a separate group of political scientists has shown that “willingness to support incivility, harassment, and violence are higher among President Trump’s supporters than among his opponents.”

From the graph, the two parties were close to "Never" until 2006, when Republicans started a little bit. They had a little bit more in 2014, then a big jump in 2016.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Looks like Illinois is goose-gander'ing it taking a state that is 13-5, losing a seat and making it 14-3. I hate gerrymandering.