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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25393 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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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.

All congressional districts are A: contiguous and B: have very roughly the same number of people- the number of Americans divided by the number of representatives. Google says this is 747,000, but grain of salt. The one caveat to (B) is that every state gets at least one representative, even if- like Wyoming- it has less than 747,000 people.

You can just google congressional district maps- by state probably gives a more detailed view- to see the twisting contortions involved.

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.

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