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Notes -
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.
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.
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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.
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