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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25387 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Redistricting fight

It's been in the news that Trump is pushing for mid-decade redistricting. Yesterday, the Texas house approved a new map(https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/20/texas-house-vote-congressional-map-redistricting-democrats-trump/) which nets the GOP five seats- while not a done deal de jure, in Texas politics when something the republican party wants passes the house, it's as good as done. Texas has only in-person filibustering(that is, a filibuster in the Senate needs to talk the entire time), so democrats can't delay the map for weeks in the upper chamber.

Separately, Gavin Newsom is pushing for redistricting California to gain more seats for democrats(https://apnews.com/article/california-texas-redistricting-congressional-map-4c22e21d5d4022d33a257045693b6fd4). One problem: California law doesn't allow the legislature to unilaterally do this. They need voter approval to override their independent redistricting commission. As gerrymandering tends to be unpopular with actual voters, their odds are a lot worse than Texas'. Other solidly blue states like Colorado have the same issue that they can't actually gerrymander on short notice due to their 'independent' redistricting commissions.

Trump is going beyond Texas as he tries to ensure Republicans maintain their House majority. He’s pushed Republican leaders in states such as Indiana and Missouri to pursue redistricting. Ohio Republicans were already revising their map before Texas moved. Democrats, meanwhile, are mulling reopening Maryland’s and New York’s maps.

The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against. Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions and it's pretty clear that democrats will lose in an all-out war of redistricting.

This is your regular reminder that gerrymandering is just a symptom. Your underlying problem is that your voting system sucks.

Now, on a theoretical level, all voting systems suck. But in practice, some do suck a lot harder than others.

The main appeal of first past the post (FPTP) is that you can tie every representative to one voting district. This used to matter a lot more than it matters today. In 1800, having a representative who would visit their district and talk with people was certainly useful. Today, nobody has to ride to DC to talk to their congresscritter any more, they can just use video calls (if they are interested). And for most stuff congress passes, regional considerations are not important. If congress declared war on Mexico, I suppose that Texas might feel different about that than Washington. But if they declare war on Afghanistan or pass Obamacare, the impact will be similar for every state. Most of the federal decisions where some areas are disproportionally impacted is probably federal funding spend on particular contractors located in a particular town. Senators trying to redirect the gravy train to their state seems a bad thing to me.

On the other hand, FPTP effectively means you have a two-party system. This is terrible for political discourse. Basically, you split the electorate in the middle, and everyone to the left -- from Marxists to centrists leaning slightly left -- votes for the D party while everyone to the right -- from right-leaning centrists to Klansmen -- is represented by the R party.

One lens to compare FPTP with proportional representation is through the lens of information content in a single vote. If you pick between two alternatives which are roughly 50-50, then the information content of a ballot is one bit. (Of course, if the outcome in your state is a foregone conclusion, there is a point to be made that your vote has a probability close to zero to change the election outcome.) By contrast, the Shannon entropy of a vote in the 2025 German federal election (if you voted for a party which ended up in the Bundestag) was 2.2 bits. Even if counting the 14% of votes for parties which stayed below the 5% threshold as devoid of information, this gives you 1.9 bit -- almost twice as much as in a US presidential election. In the US system, half of the relevant information -- which two candidates will appear on the ballot -- are decided in the primaries and party conventions.

I think that this is a big reason why US politics became so toxic when social media rose. Both in FPTP and PR, candidates and parties will attack other parties before the election. The difference is that in PR, parties can rarely hope for an absolute majority by themselves, they typically need a coalition. If you have called all the other candidates shitfaces, then it is unlikely that you will be part of a coalition.

With FPTP, once a controversial position is adopted by one party, the other party is bound to adopt the opposite position. If you like both abortion and gun rights, or are concerned about both climate change and immigration, you will just have to prioritize. (Even with a PR system, you are unlikely to find a party which will share all your priorities.

--

The fact that FPTP also allows you to rule with slightly over a quarter of the votes is just the cherry on the top.

I am wondering if any US state had thought to introduce multiple layers of gerrymandering. For example, in a presidential election, rather than awarding your electoral college votes to whom got most votes in your state, you could introduce a state-wide electoral-college-like abomination. Say each neighborhood will award their electors to whomever got the majority in that neighborhood, then the town's electors get awarded to whomever has the most neighborhood electors, then you repeat the same process for a few more layers. With each layer of winner takes all, you introduce another factor of 0.5 to the number of votes required to win.

The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against.

This isn't true. This dataset shows 4 different metrics of "fairness", and in every single one of them it's shown that Republicans are doing more gerrymandering today than Dems. Both sides could become even more crappy about this in the future if they wanted to, and we're probably going to see that happen unfortunately. It's not particularly hard to find states where Dems could increase their outcome by a lot, e.g. if they did North Carolina-level gerrymandering in New York it could easily amount to several seats.

Can immigration be considered a form of gerrymandering that dilutes the voting power of the existing population? Just a thought that occurred to me, I welcome pushback.

No, it could certainly be vote manipulation of some sort (I think Singapore did it effectively by importing a lot of Chinese), but it’s not gerrymandering. That term is fairly precisely about redistricting.

The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against

Is there a ranking of states and how gerrymandered they are somewhere that you would recommend? I briefly looked at https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/ and wasn't able to find like a CSV or something.

Look at this dataset.

The Princeton site does have individual report card data in JSON format. There is a download button slightly inconspicuous.

How gerrymandered is difficult to score in a single metric, but the largest tell tail is probably a step jump in the "District by average partisan win percentage" chart. It is evidence that the districts are being arranged to isolate one party in fewer districts. Especially if the jump spans the "competitive" line. Shape irregularity is the most common "look at this map it must be gerrymandered," but is not a necessary or sufficient condition to show a map is gerrymandered. That video cites openprecincts(dot)org, but it seems to be down now.

Some of the step jumps are also simply the results of people "gerrymandering" themselves. e.g. Drawing a box around metro-Miami could be chosen based off of pure geographic considerations, but if all the Ds in Florida move to Miami they have secured on "safe" district but given up contesting every other district. It seems this a natural result of choosing to draw the boundaries based on geography, but there being clear partisan differences in geographic distribution. Maybe someone has a clear counter example, but shouldn't there be a trivial lemma as a result of Arrow's impossibility theorem where you just substitute candidates with candidate map. Essentially saying there is not perfectly "fair" map. Or if you substitute candidate representation system for candidates to show that there is no perfectly "fair" representative system.

Edit: To add an example of why you can't just take the grade from Princeton. VA gets an A because it is fair in the sense of proportionate. The jump around the competitive zone on the average partisan win percentage chart is still there. This is probably so that the vote is proportionate for court intervention prevention, but locks in a strong gerrymandered incumbency advantage.

The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue

Evidence for this?

Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions

Note that California's process in particular was enacted in 2008, opposed by the democratic party and supported by the Republican party, but they shot themselves in the foot and lost several seats. calling California "dumb" for this is probably ignoring a lot of path dependency and/or requires applying some double standards.

It's just literally straightforwardly true that blue states tend to have bluer congressional delegations compared to popular vote than red states have redder congressional delegations compared to popular vote. Texas had actually come closest in proportionality among big states before redistricting.

Should minorities be guaranteed representation, even if they are geographically spread out?

If you say yes, then you're in favor of majority-minority gerrymandering, which is the cause of the most egregious electoral maps in the United States. If you take a look, you can see the individual buildings carved out to create a electoral district in the name of equity. Yes, this is for the benefit of black people in urban districts. Yes, they are primarily Democratic - even in deep red states.

This has been the status quo for so long that people forget that yes, it is a scandal.

Should minorities be guaranteed representation, even if they are geographically spread out?

No. They're not special; they're either Americans just like the rest of us, or they can go found their own country (with or without blackjack and hookers according to their national custom). Creating specialized ethnic ghettoes is empire shit (Ottoman millets, Soviet ethnic republics), and that's precisely what America was founded not to be. I know we're probably too far gone for this to be a meaningful position, but a man can dream.

Bonus quotation:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.

This is just as true of the man who puts "native" before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.

But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.

The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.

Teddy Roosevelt; Address to the Knights of Columbus, New York City. October 12, 1915

Does that actually benefit Democrats though? Concentrating your safe voters in a single district is generally the opposite of what you want to do if the goal is maximizing number of seats or attaining a majority. My default guess would be that majority-minority motivated gerrymandering would actually hurt Democrats, but I assume somebody has done the actual analysis.

it's an interesting question that's surprisingly hard to answer.

At first glance, you're right. Those majority-minority districts produce huge majorities for democrats that waste a lot of their votes. For example, look at Georgia's 4th district: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_4th_congressional_district#Election_results where the Democrats have been winning by 50+ points in almost every election.

On the other hand, those districts are very effective. It leads to way more black congressmen than they would probably have without them. For example the Congressional Black Caucus has 55 members while the Hispanic Caucus only has 37, despite the US having a larger overall Hispanic population. And since many of those are very safe seats, it leads to those congressmen sticking around a long time, giving them much greater influence in congress than the ones from swing districts who haveo spent all their time campaigning and usually don't last more than a few cycles.

That in turn leads to black voters being very loyal to the Democrats. Democrats typically get something like 90% of the black vote, compared to 40% of whites and 50-60% of other racial groups. It's actually really hard to find any other demographic that's nearly so loyal to one party. Black voters also have higher voter turnout than most other non-white racial groups. Going from this: https://edition.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results the only similar effect is if you group people by "do you self-identify as a liberal/conservative." Most demographic effects are waaaay smaller. And the Democrats really need that voting block. Playing with https://www.cookpolitical.com/swingometer/2024 shows how ugly the electoral map gets for them without it... changing their share of black voters down from 90% to just around 75% means they suddenly lose all the swing states they won in 2020, without changing anything else.

Or to put it another way: bringing in 10 extra black voters with one voting Republican gives the Democrats around +9 votes overall. Bringing in 10 extra Asian or Hispanic voters with 4 of them voting Republican gives the Democrats just +2 votes. So they'd need 5 times as many Asian or Hispanic voters to get the same effect they get from Black voters.

So, maybe it costs the Democrats a few congressional districts, but pays off for them overall in statewide elections. But then you also have to ask... why are Democrats doing so (relatively) badly among every other demographic? Probably a lot of reasons, but some of it might be that they're giving black voters too much control of the party. They take on positions like Reparations and Defund the Police which are popular with black voters, but unpopular with moderate voters. They choose Kamala Harris in large part just because they needed someone who was black enough to appease their base, not because she was a good candidate.

Overall it's hard to say. In a different world where they weren't required to have those majority-minority districts (mostly meaning black districts because of how the population maps play out), all of politics would be so different that we really can't say with any certainty. It's amazing how redrawing a few lines on the map, which aren't even state boundaries, can have such a drastic effect on everything.

As far as I can recall, you're correct. The fact that the law necessitates grouping minorities (blacks) into their own districts was started to prevent Southern states from chopping up the districts to give blacks 0 representation, but now it's a net-negative for Dems since it basically forces Dem voters to be inefficiently allocated.

Plus you get a bunch of loonies in Congress because the district is so far off center that the primary is the larger hurdle.

Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder. At least this time it’s closer to a tenuous gentleman’s agreement than settled law, right? Right?

From my perspective, gerrymandered districts are an insult to the idea of representative democracy. I hope CA fails in its shenanigans. I hope we Texans find a spine. Failing that, it would be nice if our leadership could pander to anyone other than Trump.

But I know how much those hopes are worth.

Texas being gerrymandered isn't exactly new. Trump et al. just want to make it more gerrymandered.

Prior to the mid 2000s there was gerrymandering in both Red and Blue states, but it was piecemeal and wasn't that impactful because it was largely aimed at protecting state-level incumbents (and, in the South, keeping the wrong people out of power), not generating national political advantage (also it was harder without computers). Still not great, but not a hugely pressing issue.

In the mid 2000s the GOP put together a national strategy for gerrymandering their way to success. They largely succeeded, which is also why they've repeatedly refused offers of mutual disarmament. (That and the tribal mindset of the many conservative struggles with the idea of independent redistricting - a process which isn't biased in their favor must necessarily be biased against them).

Two critical problems with gerrymandering reform: 1) virtually nobody prioritizes it highly enough to mobilize voters against it, and even if they did, gerrymandering makes it extraordinarily difficult for electoral reform to win 2) even when the electorate avails themselves of means to override state governments, it is not uncommon for the state government to simply ignore them.

Texas wasn’t that gerrymandered before this. In fact thé worst gerrymanders in terms of the difference between popular vote percentages and congressional results are in Oregon and Illinois, a complication for the ‘evil republicans’ narrative.

In fact thé worst gerrymanders in terms of the difference between popular vote percentages and congressional results are in Oregon and Illinois, a complication for the ‘evil republicans’ narrative.

That's not an especially good metric (though people understandably like to focus on it because it's legible); crucially, it is also not correct. MA, for example, saw Republicans get a little over a third of presidential votes* but precisely zero seats. In Iowa, Democrats got 43% of the presidential vote, but zero seats. Astute observers will note that neither of these states are actually gerrymandered, which perhaps illustrates why that metric is suboptimal.

The metric people who study gerrymandering have converged on for measuring partisan bias is performance relative to other maps that could have been drawn. In MA, for example, it would be very difficult to draw a map where the GOP got a third of the seats simply because of how Republican voters are distributed around the state. Iowa could potentially be better, but not by much.

By those standards, Texas is on-par to a little worse than Illinois.

And, of course, none of this addresses the elephant in the room, which is how the parties have, on the whole, tried to resolve the problem of gerrymandering. Democrats have repeatedly sought a nationwide solution, while Republicans have preferred a "gerrymandering for me but not for thee" approach.

*Using presidential votes as a proxy for general support is imperfect but better than statewide tally of legislative races because many House races are unopposed.

i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period. i assume one problem with this is people would try and simulate the rules in the future and try to choose rules that would benefit them. i guess maybe the current districting is so ridiculous that it would be difficult to come up with rules that can handle that as an initial state and be somewhat stable.

i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period.

It's relatively straightforward to figure out how any given rule would alter the existing electoral chances. Announce your commission, and people will figure out what ruleset gives them the best advantage, and then insist that this ruleset is clearly the "unbiased, optimal" rule and that the commission should adopt it.

Agreed that this makes districting quite the tough nut to crack.

I had a thought that I should learn more about the history behind the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, which was ratified by the very people that it took power away from. I did a little bit of reading, but there are competing historical perspectives that I'll have to ruminate on further.

There are definitely parallels in terms of national/state-level dynamics, impinging on one another. It also seems unlikely to me to propose that people at that time were simply naive to the possibility that such a rule change would be likely to advantage/disadvantage them. Some explanations try to argue that some of the main implications had already effectively come about via other means, so it wasn't a terribly sharp break. I don't know.

In any event, perhaps worth ruminating on and reading more history. It seems not entirely impossible to come up with something, but perhaps it is the case that nationalized interests are too entrenched and 'smart' to the scene that even minor steps will be more effectively blocked. In that case, we'd probably need to be more clever to messy up the predictive capabilities.

I haven't totally given up on toying with various schemes, but it is a difficult problem that is seriously resistant to most flippant proposals.

Obviously we should give each party a bull's hide, and they may claim any land it encloses as their own.

The party which won the last popular vote must provide two bulls between four and six years of age, white and without blemish, sharing a sire. The party which lost the last popular vote must pick their bull first; the party which won will then get to slaughter, eat, and enclose their lands to offset this advantage of picking the slightly larger bull.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

I've always favored assigning voters to districts by valid dice roll. Nothing up my sleeves there, must be fair.

Is statistical joke, if unclear: each individual district becomes a random sample of the whole and converges to such, such that this is the worst possible gerrymander. But I didn't do anything obviously against the rules like taking race into account.

To be fair, there's not a correct answer to how districts should be drawn. One view is that districts should be competitive, as this encourages moderation and tends to be more proportional. Another is that districts should do their best to represent communities of interest, as that will make it more straightforward for elected officials to represent their constituents coherently. Yet another is simple compactness: districts should be as regular as possible.

There are arguments for and against all of them, but none of them is obviously right and not all are amenable to algorithmic solutions.

What's interesting to me is the latter argument. Putting political advantage aside, an ideal district would be not competitive in the slightest. The reason being that districts exist to serve the needs of the local, and a politician with 100% of the vote is perfectly representing everyone in the district rather than half.

You're thinking too much in terms of the general election. In an election where a politician gets 100% of the votes, the process (primary/party otherwise) by which they were selected is the real election.

It's not a stable equilibrium point.

I guess that's a valid question these days - do we even want national legislators to represent a specific geography? My big-city House rep I can see is a party line liberal; that represents the district and I don't begrudge it, but when I look up her votes the single thing she broke with the party on was HR3633 (cryptocurrency regulation framework). I look up her social media, and 90% of her posting is on national issues, boosting other national politicians, Gaza, etc. My impression is that the idea of truly local representation has been broken for a while and that this dates back to the late 00s with the start of political nationalization and the decade-long earmark ban.

I’ll be honest with you that most normies just don’t really care about politics and thus don’t really care if their votes actually count. It’s not a question of getting people upset about losing their vote in whatever form it takes, people honestly don’t care about politics except as a means to amuse themselves on social media or feel important because they’re “informed.” Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board. Politics for the rabble isn’t about making decisions and changing things, it’s about feeling powerful feeling like they’re the good ones for being informed, and yelling at opponents who are “obviously screwing everything up.” As long as those things remain intact and the country is more or less running smoothly, the normies will be too busy watching sports and yelling at people online to notice that the votes the cast don’t matter.

I’ll be honest with you that most normies just don’t really care about politics and thus don’t really care if their votes actually count

I don't think this is right - people get extremely mad if they feel their vote is being taken away. What I think is true is that very few people have a sense for the details of politics. They want to show up once every 2-4 years and vote for someone they vibe with and otherwise not think too hard about the substance of policy.

Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up

In addition to the point I raised above, these meetings are often contrived to be difficult to attend and your individual participation is not particularly meaningful. Showing up as an organized group does have an impact (which is why these processes are often dominated by small groups of angry retirees), but that's contrary the central tenet of neogrillism, i.e. only absolutely minimum effort participation in the political process.

But as long as they get to vote, sure they argue about politics but, at least from my personal observation, the participation is mostly about feeling as if they participate, and very little about outcomes and certainly not about what happens after they vote. Like if they get little of what the6 say they want, sure they grouse, but it’s not like they’ll do much more than tantrum on social media and talk about lying politicians. So the median American “votes”, fails every time to get politicians to do what they actually want done … and are mostly perfectly okay with it. That’s not “caring about the vote” so much as “caring that they get to cast a ballot every couple of years.” Which is different, and furthermore doesn’t bode well for the predictions that people will get upset about their district being rendered non competitive. They still get the parts they care about: the process of casting a ballot, the ability to complain, the constant need to stay informed so “they know how they should vote.” The only part missing is the steering wheel being connected to the wheels. It’s like those little car-seat steering wheels kids have. The kid is perfectly content with turning the little wheel and couldn’t give a care that it doesn’t do anything to the car.

And really, for most human behavior, the truism holds that if a person really truly cares about something, they’ll find a way to do it. If they really cared about local politics, they’d find ways to participate, it’s not impossible. Yet nobody cares about that stuff. If people thought that politics was important, they’d at minimum know who sits on these various boards and committees, who’s mayor and which county ward they live in. They’d know the issues and vote accordingly. It doesn’t happen. Turnout for city races is somewhere near 25%, board meetings are not full of citizens concerned about the issues. Unless some sexy national issues come up, nobody attends school board meetings. Real politics is a ghost town, nobody knows or cares what happens there.

My hypothesis is that the modern hyper fixation on federal politics is bike shedding writ large. It's easy to have a strong opinion on federal issues (name one). Local politics deals with practical, boring questions about zoning, school bonds, and such. We spend way too much time arguing over the easy-to-understand bits (what color should the bike shed be), not on most of the details of governing.

It’s also the things that even in a direct democracy you’d personally have very chance of actually having much input on the issue. It’s the perfect way to get credit for being “concerned about the community” while having no real requirements to understand anything. It doesn’t matter, and you won’t be held responsible for making a mess of things. So you get to argue about it, thus appearing knowledgeable and caring about “the issues”, while facing absolutely no consequences if you get your way and are wrong. Call it M’aiq’s Law. The more visibility the debate has and the less responsibility anyone has for getting it right, the more likely people are to debate it.

Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board.

People sometimes do show up for those things. The boards then move to private session or otherwise make their decisions where the public can't interfere. Or on some occasions have people arrested for trying to speak; consider the infamous beating and pantsing of the Loudoun County VA father who spoke up against his daughter's sexual assault in school. People don't show up because they correctly conclude that if their showing up could change anything, it wouldn't be permitted.

The number of people who don't show up because they think it will be ineffectual (I somewhat agree) is dwarfed by the number of people who don't show up because they don't really care. Because however ineffectual it is, it's still more effectual than updating a profile pic with a slogan, retweeting something, or liking a TikTok short, which far more people do.

Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder. At least this time it’s closer to a tenuous gentleman’s agreement than settled law, right? Right?

What part of "the most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; there is no more gerrymandering blue can do here" don't you understand? The norm goes into the shredder when the first side defects, not when the patsy notices and finally decides to fight back.

To be fair, mid decade redistricting is, while definitely signaled well in advance, not very precedented.

What part of "the most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; there is no more gerrymandering blue can do here" don't you understand?

The part where it's not true. TX in particular is not gerrymander as aggressively as it could be (though it is still gerrymandered). The same is not true of, e.g., WI, NC, or OH.

Conversely, NY, CA, WA, etc... could be significantly more gerrymandered. The biggest limitation here is not "room" for gerrymandering, but legal constraints for doing so.

Conversely, NY, CA, WA, etc... could be significantly more gerrymandered.

Uh, without some blatantly illegal actions, none of those three could be really any more gerrymandered than they already are. NY was a 57-43 D-R split last election, and yet splits seats 19-7 (76-24%), CA was a 60-40 split and yet seats are split 43-9 (82-18%), and WA was 57-43 splitting seats 8-2.

Conversely Texas was 58-40 with independents, and split seats 25-13 (66-34%).

The problem (and dirty secret) of the DNC in this whole dust up is they have no juice left to squeeze. Their biggest safe states are already gerrymandered as hell, and even friendly courts only bend so far. Gavin Newsome won't do shit because if he pushes harder he might get his already incredibly advantageous map thrown out for one that might more proportionately represent the voters.

To his credit though- he's not as cringe as the Connecticut democratic party and governor who are taking the high road on social media about how they are "avoiding partisan warfare". This conveniently glossed over the fact thst they have already achieved what is proportionally the most gerrymandered state in Amwrican history- the 42% of GOP voters gets exactly zero congress critters, a flawless victory.

Characterizing Texas' current actions as "a patsy finally noticing and fighting back" is a-historical nonsense im afraid. Republicans have had their share of innovation in the gerrymandering space. See operation REDMAP.

Yes yes, and Phil Burton and Willie Brown were gerrymandering California - home of Reagan and Nixon - blue in the 1980s:

After the 1980 census California became entitled to 45 congressional districts, a growth of two.[4] Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature and the governorship but were feeling vulnerable after former Governor Reagan had won California by a landslide in the 1980 presidential election. Democratic Congressman Phillip Burton and new State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown devised a redistricting plan that would result in five new safe Democratic seats.[5] Congressman Burton would boast that the bizarrely shaped map, which included a 385-sided district, was "My contribution to modern art".[6] Reacting to what was called "one of the most notorious gerrymanders" of the decade,[7] Republicans successfully placed a veto referendum on the primary ballot and California voters overwhelmingly rejected the legislature's redistricting plans in the June 1982 election, the same election that enacted the California Constitution's Victim's Bill of Rights.[8]

A majority of the California Supreme Court justices, however, had been appointed by Governor Jerry Brown and a sharply fractured court ordered the rejected districts to be used in the November election because only it was "practicable".[9] Democrats won 60% of the congressional seats despite only taking 49.9% of the statewide vote.[10] Democrats still lost the statewide elections, losing the governorship and incumbent Governor Jerry Brown losing his U.S. Senate bid to San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson. Governor Brown responded by calling an extraordinary legislative session, amending a previously passed bill with the redistricting plan that had just been rejected by the electorate, and signing the redistricting plan into law hours before being replaced by Republican George Deukmejian.

That's arguably significantly worse than what the GOP is trying to pull now in Texas.

You say that the Dems clearly started it. Others says the Reps clearly started it.

Without reading (at least) 50 years of redistricting history, how does one possibly get to the bottom of this? As time goes on it becomes increasingly obvious to me that it's a folly to believe there is anything resembling objective truth on almost any contentious issue.

I read something on TheMotte that appears to be well-argued, some guy replies with what appears to be an equally compelling argument, and some other website has information that contradicts them both. My brain feels like it's going to explode. There is no hope.

The "he started it", "no HE started it" is almost always pointless if it goes back further than like 1 or 2 decades max. There will usually be some hidden counterexample that can always be trotted out by either side. If that's lacking, they can just pull out an example that's only tenuously related. E.g. say we lived in a world where we could all 100% agree that gerrymandering was initiated by Republicans in 1990; in this case R's could simply say they were responding to the "dirty tricks" the Dems were using in general, such as when they sank Bork's SCOTUS nomination in 1987.

It's more productive to focus on questions like 1) who's benefiting more, right now or in the recent past, and 2) which side is trying to escalate, right now or in the recent past.

Without reading (at least) 50 years of redistricting history, how does one possibly get to the bottom of this? As time goes on it becomes increasingly obvious to me that it's a folly to believe there is anything resembling objective truth on almost any contentious issue.

I'm really struggling not to read this comment as "without expending energy to assess the evidence, how can I find truth?" Or, alternatively "figuring things out is uncomfortably hard, therefore it can't possibly be done." Except that feels really uncharitable and I really hope that's not what you meant.

Yes, motivated argument and even honest disagreements exist. It's true of most things, not just politically/culturally controversial ones. That doesn't absolve you - or any of us! - of the burden of assessing things for yourself as best you can. What hope is there for democracy, the idea that common people can be trusted to manage their own affairs and be entrusted with political power, if the default attitude when confronted with dispute and contention is "welp, no way to determine who's right here, fuck it!" That's not the attitude of a citizen; it's the resigned fatalism of a slave.

Look, I’d absolutely prefer a norm of independent redistricting. Sweep away the decades of bullshit. Make everyone fight for their seats.

Divorcing redistricting from the census is going in the wrong direction. It is strictly worse to have the winners of each election clamoring to entrench their lead. But Trump and Newsom think they can score some points by mashing the big Defect button, so that’s what we get. It’s like calling a snap election. It’s chicanery.

Look, I’d absolutely prefer a norm of independent redistricting.

Several states have "independent" committees to draw district lines, but still manage to have drastic swings between party votes (let's use "votes for presidential candidate from each party" as a good, but imperfect proxy) and congressional representation. California comes to mind, but certainly isn't alone. I've even seen this defended with "but reds choose to live in dense blue areas, so we can't draw lines to create majority-red districts". Note that the Civil Rights Act requires, and we manage to generally, draw districts that are majority-minority (Q: if neighborhoods broadly ever become effectively non-segregated, can we throw up our hands and say this isn't possible?). The Louisiana SCOTUS case recently included peripheral questions about whether two disconnected historically-Black areas (one urban, one rural) could reasonably be drawn into the same district for this purpose.

Honestly, I've come to the opinion that in this day and age, good geographic district boundaries just aren't a solvable problem, and that we should probably move to proportional slates of candidates by state like some parliamentary systems do. This has its own problems, but I think if limited to one house of Congress would balance reasonably well. Pity that existing law disallows such schemes, I believe.

Good geographic district boundaries wouldn't matter if we expanded the House properly. The entire need to mess around with district borders is downstream of them being so huge that the decision has to be made, but fundamentally there's no good reason why the House shouldn't have a membership in the thousands, and it's the most straightforward solution we could have to a number of issues; it wouldn't require overturning SCOTUS precedents, it wouldn't require overturning CRA district rules (the smaller districts would be easy to make compliant), we wouldn't have to spend years in a domestic political fight about whether Americans would go for multi-member districts, and so on.

I mean other than that congress would get even less done with thousands of members? I think the size limit is needed simply because there’s no way that a 3000 member house is going to get any useful work done. 500 members is already pretty big, and the current congress hasn’t passed a proper budget in over a decade. Adding more people to the body isn’t going to fix the inertia.

One of my more unhinged pet ideas for the house is that the the main problem with Arrow's impossibility theorem and Gibbard's theorem are the requirements for a deterministic process.

In my fantasy each voter would be able to nominate one person to serve in the House for a two year term. You would then select 2,500 ballots to establish the house for the next two years, continuing to select random ballots one at a time in the case of duplicates. No one would be guaranteed incumbency, so you couldn't trade as much on future electoral success. Very popular politicians would still be more likely but not guaranteed a spot, so they would also have to maintain a real job or do a good enough job to maintain influence even when not in power. With a 2,500 strong body crazies should be a small enough minority, on an given issue, to be safely ignored. And if the sample is random you would have enough statistical representation to match the populace to within 1% on any given topic, even tighter if things are not 50/50. The idea would be that the majority go back to their regular life after serving.

Leave the institutional knowledge building and statesmanship to the Senate.

Article going into detail on this topic

AMENDMENT XXXI: There shall be not less than one Representative for every thirty thousand persons, and not more than one Representative for every twenty-five thousand persons.

I enjoyed the charming quaintness of the argument that expanding the House to 11,000 people would require fewer, not more, staffers to keep up with the magnitudes more institutional relationships such a reorganization would imply.

I'll admit that that was exactly the article I was thinking of; I rounded off the 11,000 member proposal just for convenience's sake, even though it probably shouldn't scare anyone here.

Norm. LOL. Here is the New Jersey map. District 10 is a triskellion. District 6 is your classic salamander. District 3 for some reason has a dagger through the heart of Monmouth County. District 11 is a Republican area plus just enough of deep blue Essex to flip it Democratic. And District 8 is just WTF.

The only "norm" broken here is the Republicans are doing it loudly instead of the Democrats in a back room.

We don't have to go back far in time to find a situation where NJ was roughly 50-50 in party congressional seats (2014 and 2016). The big swing towards Democrats happened in 2018, but new maps were not drawn until 2021, so partisan gerrymandering could not have played a role there.

the previous district map was drawn in 2011 by a bi partisan committee, in which a Republican cast the tie-breaking vote.

Looking at the two maps, one is not clearly more gerrymandered than the other.

So my conclusion is that regardless of how squiggly lines on the map are, Republicans have historically been proportionally competitive in nj-- so the squigglyness tells us little.

Of course cherry picking squiggly districts is orthogonal to the question of whether Republicans in this specific case are smashing the 'defect' button and trying to pick up extra house seats 'for free' . (They definitely are.)

You've provided a map without much context with regards to population or voting demographics, so in the absence of that information the map doesn't demonstrate much of anything about the prevalence of gerrymandering

Gerrymandering as a term dates to 1812. Some gerrymanders are more egregious than others, but the practice is very hard to expunge. It’s also limited by the fact that the canvas these districts are painted on, and the political parties themselves, are ever-shifting. A gerrymander can only ever be a temporary success. If a party gets too strong, and too unrepresentative, people will successfully organize to take it down a notch. That’s how it’s always been.

I’d relax about this particular problem. Unless your specific qualm is that you’re a Democrat in Texas and are worried about being disenfranchised. In that case I fully understand your concern and would recommend you view it as a personal issue (and move states) or a local issue (and organize with state Democrats to undermine Republican rule by adopting a more Texan-palatable local platform). I wouldn’t think of this as the end of Democracy in America. It’s just the usual political grift. Unpleasant but sustainable.

I can buy the argument that the specific shape of a district matters less over time as people re-assort themselves. The corollary to this is that what does matter is the cycle-to-cycle changes in the districts. But on this basis, Texas' current actions are more likely to be a unilateral defection versus a tit-for-tat against previous democratic actions.

Also, if the district maps can be drawn at the whims of the legislature then the incumbent party can in general continuously redraw the map to maintain their advantage. This hurts your argument that everything will equalize eventually. The only way to prevent that is a norm that says "redistricting with the purposes of consolidating partisan advantage is bad". But your argument is the opposite of this.

My argument is effectively that trying to secure power in a democracy through anything other than pleasing the majority of constituents is eventually opposed to its own goal. If you can get away with pleasing your constituents less by virtue of a gerrymander, then they will come to distrust you. If they distrust you, your voterbase will erode out from under the gerrymander, and when the dam bursts you will be in real trouble. The one-party democratic systems, like in Singapore and Japan, are obsessed with pleasing the majority of constituents and use the opposition parties as ways to find areas where they are falling behind public opinion. That’s the heart of it.

One party states also hand out gibs constantly and force influential stakeholders into using their platforms to support the ruling party.

Hmm… I’m not sure how true either of those is of the examples I gave. Japan’s main “gibs” are highly focused domestic policies around food and agriculture, and I think they’re better categorized as strategic subsidies. Singapore mostly gives to its minorities, but the ruling party depends on the (non-gibs-receiving) Chinese majority for most of its support. I do know that Singapore actively represses other parties, but Japan does not, and the main party actually lost an election recently (and are now trying desperately to reform internally to weed out corruption).

Is it true of, say, Russia? Yeah, because Putin doesn’t depend on votes. But I’m not sure it’s true of countries with permanent or near-permanent elected parties. If there’s information you have to the contrary I’m all ears.

Hungary and Mexico both do this. I'm pretty sure South Africa does as well.

Mexico is AFAIK basically a narcostate. Opposition “disappears” and then reappears in several different garbage bags.

Hungary - not familiar on the details, what gibs do they give to whom?

SA is a bit of a special case. To be a majoritarian gibs-based political party, on practical terms you need an exceptionally productive minority to tax for the sake of the voterbase. This doesn’t happen in most places. SA, with a wealthy white minority, is able to do it. I’d call it an exception that proves the rule.

More comments

Worried about? Ha. Ha ha.

Any plan which relies on our state Democrats is probably less effective than shooting myself. At least with that strategy, I’d reduce our share of the next census.

Gerrymandering every four years instead of every ten is obviously not the end of democracy. It’s just another thing made shittier to score a couple points in the here and now. You’d think I might be used to it by now.

State democrats are very effective at turning money into pointless drama, much moreso than shooting yourself.

If a party gets too strong, and too unrepresentative, people will successfully organize to take it down a notch.

Gerrymandering is sustainable in the sense it's not a catastrophic disruption to the function of government. It is still less than ideal. Safe seats lead to more important primaries which leads to more important primary voters. Primary voters skew radical, older, and more influenced by interests. It is poorly representative practice, but not in any positive "the King knows best" sort of way.

The pendulum is a comforting idea. It's also not an Iron Law of democracy. Political machines entrench themselves and last much longer than they should because people don't successfully organize to take them down a notch. Chicago has been poorly governed by a political machine for a long time. I consider competition closer to an Iron Law of Good in democracy, and gerrymandering reduces it.

That said, if we want to stop arguing about gerrymandering we need a new system. I'd choose a limited form of proportional representation for the house. Limit the number of parties represented with thresholds to preclude 1% parties. I don't know how other places do that, but pick whatever is the best I'm sure it's easy. Keep the senate as is to preserve the contract of the Union. Oh, I guess we have to start by killing all current representatives to not slow or obstruct the reform process. Tree of liberty, etc.

and organize with state Democrats to undermine Republican rule by adopting a more Texan-palatable local platform

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

I've heard less realistic jokes, but not many. Texas democrats exist to expend out of state donor money on various retarded bullshit, not to win elections.

Listen, man, Donald Trump the New York Democrat managed to convert the Republican Party (organization of “pretend to care about Christianity so we can deliver tax cuts for the rich”) into a bunch of bootlickers and imitators that are seriously if sometimes ineffectually trying to deliver the platform they were elected on. It’s patently possible to take advantage of deliberate sandbaggers and repurpose their organization to your own ends.

Not saying it’s easy, duh. But if it matters to you…

The Texas democratic party reacted to Trump's victory in '24 by firing their chair for suggesting that it might be wise to put trans issues on the back burner- he didn't even ask for a platform change. These people's idea for winning over young men was trying to pay fraternities to listen to Olivia Juliana(they refused). They ran Beto of 'hell yeah we're going to take your AR-15 away' fame as a moderate on gun control- and he kept it front and center.

The only thing they reliably accomplish is being a very inefficient machine for converting turn Texas blue money into inane twitter drama and circular firing squads.

Yeah it's a problem as old as the republic and has a buncha good to go with the bad - making a minority district so the minority actually gets a representative instead of just getting diluted is a good thing. Or a bad thing?

...It's deeply complicated.

Yeah my understanding is that even in a lot of gerrymandered situations the boots on the ground for the party that's losing out would frequently rather have one ultra-secure seat to enable a 30 year tenure in the House versus 2 55-45 seats in which they've got competition coming both internally and from the other side. Plus more vulnerable to random macro upheavals.

There's a reason a bunch of the longest house tenures are Southern Democrats who essentially sit in Rotten boroughs.

There's a reason a bunch of the longest house tenures are Southern Democrats who essentially sit in Rotten boroughs.

A non-trivial number of these are effectively required to exist by the Civil Rights Act.

How does that work? I genuinely do not know.

Very roughly: If there is an opportunity to give black people a majority black district, then it is required to do so. The American south has lots of black people. Some of whom packed into gerrymandered districts giving them black congressional representatives. This is “good” gerrymandering required by law.

How large does said district have to be? A city block? An apartment complex? Ten thousand people?

In the other reply, @VoxelVexillologist says that it's not well defined, except by litigation and negative examples, but a rough ballpark would be something I'm interested to know.

More comments

I'm not the election law lawyer you're looking for, but in short I'd say "it's a mess". Longer: the law in question is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, accompanied with a bunch of court precedents, of which the Gingles test. Per Wikipedia:

Under the Gingles test, plaintiffs must show the existence of three preconditions:

  1. The racial or language minority group "sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district";
  2. The minority group is "politically cohesive" (meaning its members tend to vote similarly); and
  3. The "majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it ... usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate."

There is some relevant more modern precedent, but that's the basic part. IMO it's not a good answer because it effectively dilutes the no-longer-majority votes that end up in that district (in largely the same ways, just reversed), and because putting too many minority voters in one district is "packing" which is also disallowed.

This is what happens when you don't have a constructive example of what should exist, just congressional and judicial legal wrist slapping saying "no, but not that".

ETA: Hopefully someone else can give a more complete answer.

Exactly! Is that enabling sclerotic politics? Is that perfect for enabling minority representation?

Shit I don't know but it is complicated and not a new political ethics problem caused by modern political division.

Norms only matter insofar as they're supported by a belief in a level playing field. Outside of boomers and some nothing-ever-happens centrists, both left and right seem to believe that the other side is an existential threat that cannot be stopped within the boundaries of our current norms, and so the shredding will continue at an increasing speed. At this point, all democratic norms should be considered pre-shredded, they are in a stack next to the shredder waiting their turn. The only reason they have not yet all been shredded is that the shredder operator works with an urgency that is proportional to the amount of political unrest in the U.S., which is currently only at a moderate simmer.

There's no reversing this until either both sides believe the other is acting in good faith, or (IMO) more likely the losing side is shut out from power and the winning side splits into two factions with enough political common ground to trust one another to uphold a new set of norms.

Which doesn’t matter at all because we basically never lived in a true democracy. I’m just kind of tired of the elite playing games as if they’re actually worried about the votes of the plebs.

Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder.

I'm not sure if that norm wasn't shredded years ago. I've been hearing complaints of gerrymandering since at least Bush II, and that's only because I wasn't really paying attention before that.

In your opinion, what makes this qualitatively different than past instances of gerrymandering?

Traditionally, redistricted has been restricted to the years immediately after a census, with outliers being driven by judicial command (or the results of recent judicial command, like the 2005 Georgia redistricting being driven by Cox v. Larios). In this case, the charitable motivation is downstream of the serious errors by the 2020 Census; the less charitable explanation is just politics.

Whether this difference matters or is anything but an ex post rationalization is left as an exercise for the reader; as long as it's a compelling and coherent rationalization the difference is pretty academic.

One might also note that until fairly recently, "judicial command" based on the Voting Rights Act included a mandate to maximize minority (in practice, Democratic) representation.

Packing enough minorities into a district minimizes Dem representation overall.

Yes, but both "packing" and "cracking" minorities are disallowed.

The way Texas politics works if this was going to be stopped it would've been stopped in the house.

Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions

Well, one formerly red state did. It turns out that "the Legislature" and "the People" in the U.S. Constitution mean the same thing (or so 5 Supreme Court justices thought).

It's worth reading Roberts' dissent if you enjoy that kind of thing. (starting at 2678 by the pagination on the left side).

Just over a century ago, Arizona became the second State in the Union to ratify the Seventeenth Amendment. That Amendment transferred power to choose United States Senators from "the Legislature" of each State, Art. I, § 3, to "the people thereof." The Amendment resulted from an arduous, decades-long campaign in which reformers across the country worked hard to garner approval from Congress and three-quarters of the States.

What chumps! Didn't they realize that all they had to do was interpret the constitutional term "the Legislature" to mean "the people"? The Court today performs just such a magic trick with the Elections Clause. Art. I, § 4. That Clause vests congressional redistricting authority in "the Legislature" of each State. An Arizona ballot initiative transferred that authority from "the Legislature" to an "Independent Redistricting Commission." The majority approves this deliberate constitutional evasion by doing what the proponents of the Seventeenth Amendment dared not: revising "the Legislature" to mean "the people."

Yeah, I’m not very sympathetic to Roberts here. This precise case is, I believe, best read as a naked power struggle between the voters and the legislators. The latter had a privilege the former believed was being misused and wanted stripped from them. The defense of the legislature was best read as “you don’t have the right to tell us what to do, only we can decide whether we have this power (or Congress with an amendment), and we say no.”

Given this, what recourse would the voters have? They’d have to make this a single issue or else give up. And I’m really not sympathetic to the idea that a certain class - and politicians are by now definitely a class - deserves inalienable privileges over the rest.

Finally, his example of senator elections is trite. The question for senators was formally, how those elections should be operated. That obviously requires an amendment, since it’s changing a specific process. The point of the section on state elections is that the details are deferred to the state. Nothing more is specified beyond “the legislature.” Would Roberts have objected to a legislature voting for their own independent districting body on the basis that the Constitution forbids it? Or if you want something even wackier - the US Constitution does not specify the political structure of the states (beyond saying that the federal government will ensure they can have a republic, which was not defined as the American structure prior to America)! That is done by the state constitutions, individually. It is convention that they all resemble one another. But if a state rewrote its constitution to move the legislative power to something like, say, a series of elected bureaux, what in the Constitution would forbid this? Is this not a power delegated to the states? And then would “Legislature” in the Constitution refer to the legislating bodies, or to nothing at all, rendering the point moot? Or what if, oh, I don’t know, the state had rewritten its constitution to allow voters to legislate through the ballot? Does that include them in the legislating body? If not, then was the ballot initiative law unconstitutional? How can there be one without the other, when the Constitution does not state explicitly what structure it wants the states to have?

Roberts’ dissent is beyond specious. I rest my case.

The defense of the legislature was best read as “you don’t have the right to tell us what to do, only we can decide whether we have this power (or Congress with an amendment), and we say no.”

Given this, what recourse would the voters have? They’d have to make this a single issue or else give up. And I’m really not sympathetic to the idea that a certain class - and politicians are by now definitely a class - deserves inalienable privileges over the rest.

You're in good company since 5 of the Justices thought this way. They thought the result was good policy (as opposed to the many, many times the Supreme Court dislikes ballot initiatives, as Thomas lists in his dissent) and therefore the actual language of the Constitution didn't matter.

As to your other points, I suspect you didn't read Roberts' full dissent since he addresses some of your concerns. Not that you have to; there are better things in life than reading random SC decisions from 10 years ago about election laws.

Does he? I certainly didn’t find that when reading it. He certainly doesn’t present a compelling case that the US Constitution provides for any specific organization on the part of the states beyond assuming that they all must follow a familiar pattern. Well, now they don’t. So what now? Rule the very practice unconstitutional because it was not anticipated by the initial authors? He doesn’t make that claim ever. Why not?

His whole initial section on the definition has a particularly laughable moment where he undermines his whole argument, if he had been aware of it. Quoted in full:

Moreover, Dr. Johnson's first example of the usage of "legislature" is this: "Without the concurrent consent of all three parts of the legislature, no law is or can be made." 2 A Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1755) (emphasis deleted). Johnson borrowed that sentence from Matthew Hale, who defined the "Three Parts of the Legislature" of England as the King and the two houses of Parliament. History of the Common Law of England 2 (1713). (The contrary notion that the people as a whole make the laws would have cost you your head in England in 1713.) Thus, even under the majority's preferred definition, "the Legislature" referred to an institutional body of representatives, not the people at large.

That is, in the initial definition of legislature, THE KING OF ENGLAND was a necessary component. We obviously don’t have that. The institutional body of representatives was ONE house of Parliament. The Lords Temporal and Spiritual were institutional, but not representative. The King was not a body in the sense he intends at all. Yet “the voting public when they select a ballot initiative” is somehow excluded from a definition of “legislature” that is obviously descriptive as to how the laws are passed in the country of concern? On the basis of THIS paragraph? Did this guy read what he was quoting?

Like I’m telling you, specious in its entirety. Come on, you can’t read this and tell me the guy doesn’t come off like Sotomayor.

To be clear, said legislatures are allowed to vest that power in an independent committee, right? Why was a ballot initiative even on the table?

Because the legislature refused to do it and voters pushed it through via the ballot measure.

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