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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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Virginia is voting on redrawing their congressional districts today. Here is the Wikipedia entry.

The main highlight is that it would change Virginia from 6-5 democrat-republican split to a 10-1 split. It is being sold by Democrats as an effort to counter Republican gerrymandering in other states. It is being panned by Republicans as unfair representation, and an election map that looks like Fairfax county (rich county in northern Virginia) gets to elect about half of the state's representatives.

I'm a Virginia resident. So I've been getting lots of mailers about the issue and simple vote "yes" or "no" signs are everywhere.

I'm very frustrated with the whole thing. First for Trump kicking off this fight. Second with the Democrats in Virginia that have made a ridiculously bullshit map. I still have yet to hear anyone from the "yes" side explain how this is good for Virginia other than "fight Trump". I even read one article that had a title implying it would be about voters not feeling represented, and it turns out the content of the article was about democratic leaders addressing the democrat voters in the now single solitary red district. No content about how Republican voters might feel in the 10 other districts.

If this level of bullshit is on the table I feel like other proposals that get shot down for being "crazy" in normal times might end up back on the table. Like a bunch of Virginia counties seceding and joining West Virginia. Or the right to giant congress

  • edit - it appears the redistricting effort has passed.

Mea culpa: the Virginia Supreme Court did find the amendment process-as-applied-here unconstitutional

Good of you to update. There are two potential cynical takes:

  1. The judges only went this way because the measure wasn't very popular. Had it passed with 60 percent of the vote maybe they find a reason it was legal.
  2. The judges were saving the Democrats from their own folly. Democrats want to be seen as opposing trump, but didn't want to pass a locally unpopular action that might lose them a close election.

The federal election system is already biased heavily towards Republicans to begin with what with the electoral college (both Dubya and Trump 1 benefited from that) and congress apportionments. A state like California has 20 million people per senator, Mississippi is almost 1.5 million. A citizen in Mississippi has more than 10x the influence in the Senate than one in California, entirely based on state lines.

I had ChatGPT find some information on this and due to this blue states even on lower estimates have twice the people per senator than red ones. In the strongly partisan states, it's almost 4x!

While the house of reps doesn't have such a bias (or at least a very very minimal one), even if the Dems could manage to lean the house countrywide towards themselves it still leaves them 1v2 in biased institutions. (Argubly 1v2.5 or something given that the bias in the Senate and presidency also means more likely to get SC picks through). And that's a big if.

The federal election system is already biased heavily towards Republicans to begin with what with the electoral college

Democrats could simply appeal better to small states. This was not a problem before c. the year 2000. Democrats used to be able to win in Montana and West Virginia and Mississippi. They can't now.

These changes all worked out as consequences of specific decisions Democrats made in real time. Some deliberately, some circumstantially. However, there is no reason Democrats can't go back to trying to win elections in these states. The idea that the federal election system is bias toward one political party is new in American history. It's actually the Democratic party that has been America's majority party for most of the 20th Century.

Basically this is sour grapes and I'm calling bullshit. Democrats are mad that decisions they made that collectively made them a party of urban voters has limited their power outside of urban centers. Instead of changing their platforms they just want to change the electoral system. Tough.

I had ChatGPT find some information

Well, no, you didn't.

You had an probabilistic compiler assemble what would be the most probable completion to a prompt you wrote. There was no real data outside of what you offered in your own prompt.

The federal election system is already biased heavily towards Republicans to begin with what with the electoral college.

Feature, not a bug. Federalist 10 does a better job of laying out the argument than I can, but my best attempt is that factions are inevitable and factions look out for themselves. Factions will often try to pass laws that are bad not only for their opponents, but for the polity at large and that infringe upon the rights of individuals.

If you're after a "pure" majority rule democracy with no checks and balances, you're going to have a bad time. It's just a matter of when it is your turn in the barrel, not if.

You had an probabilistic compiler assemble what would be the most probable completion to a prompt you wrote. There was no real data outside of what you offered in your own prompt.

You know they search the internet right? They've had this capability for ~2 years at this point. You can literally click the little reference button after its sentence to see if the "most probable completion" is accurate or not.

Well, no, you didn't.

You had an probabilistic compiler assemble what would be the most probable completion to a prompt you wrote. There was no real data outside of what you offered in your own prompt.

Yeah and it turns out what would be the most probable completion to a question asking for information with accompanying sources to a question is information with sources, which I can then go to and read and link. It got me a writeup from an associate professor at George Mason University.

Feature, not a bug. Federalist 10 does a better job of laying out the argument than I can, but my best attempt is that factions are inevitable and factions look out for themselves. Factions will often try to pass laws that are bad not only for their opponents, but for the polity at large and that infringe upon the rights of individuals.

If you're after a "pure" majority rule democracy with no checks and balances, you're going to have a bad time

Taiwan is the 14th highest GDP per capita and they elect their leaders through simple FPTP. But we don't even have to go to foreign nations, we have proof it's ok right at home.

State governorships all around the country don't use their own internal versions of the electoral college, and yet they seem to be generally fine. Same with many cities and their mayoral elections. 50 State elections + god knows how many city elections don't seem to have some unique glaring issues that implementing an electoral college system in them would fix.

It's quite telling that even the most ardent supporters of the federal electoral college don't seem to be calling for it in their own states. Do they hate their state having a healthier democracy?

Taiwan is the 14th highest GDP per capita and they elect their leaders through simple FPT

I wouldn't refer to Taiwan as any sort of a bastion of popular democracy. It's better than it was but a lot of fucking around there.

No country or system will ever be perfect, especially not for one right next door to an actively hostile country 60x bigger constantly trying to interfere behind the scenes. But by the metrics the Taiwanese system doesn't seem to be much worse. Things like approval ratings are at somewhat similar levels to other democracies for example.

Senators shouldn't represent people anyways. They should represent state governments like they were supposed to. And California should split into multiple states if it wants better representation in the senate. But they'd be dumb to do so because they get far more government control of the country by just having their state legislature act like a mini-national government and pass a bunch of regulations. Corporations/manufacturers are basically forced to comply because of the size of the California market. I'm unsympathetic to these complaints. On paper they have less representation, in reality they have an outsized influence.

Senators shouldn't represent people anyways. They should represent state governments like they were supposed to.

In a world where government is representative of the constituents, these are effectively the same thing.

And California should split into multiple states if it wants better representation in the senate

Yeah, it's a stupid system that would reward behavior like this.

But they'd be dumb to do so because they get far more government control of the country by just having their state legislature act like a mini-national government and pass a bunch of regulations. Corporations/manufacturers are basically forced to comply because of the size of the California market. I'm unsympathetic to these complaints. On paper they have less representation, in reality they have an outsized influence.

They don't have to, it's just that simple market dynamics and efficiency of scale generally means making just version X is better than making X and Y unless there's serious demand for deviation. Now there is enough demand spread across the other states that if consumers in the rest of the US really cared, many companies would do a version Y for them. A state like Texas or Florida could easily do some form of anti-regulation too if they really wanted.

Issue is, the consumers often don't actually care that much and sometimes even like it. Texas and Florida don't enact such opposite regulation laws because they don't really want that or care much to begin with.

In a world where government is representative of the constituents, these are effectively the same thing.

In that world Mao Zedong as supreme ruler is the same thing as democracy.

There obvious differences between direct democracy and representative democracy. Senate was supposed to be two layers removed from direct democracy, house and president just one layer.

I know why California regulations impact the whole US. If California was 1/50th of the US market it probably wouldn't be worth it. They are instead about 15% of the US economy. Which is enough that manufacturers will change to their requirements.

I'd be fine with Texas and Florida splitting up as states as well. New York should split. Virginia should split. Probably a few others.

The obvious solution is for Congress to just pass a law ending the practice for everyone. The Redistricting Reform Act has been introduced in ~every Congress since 2006 but has never gone anywhere. The most recent version has 55 cosponsors in the House. All Democrats, of course. Frankly, I think the best outcome would have been Rucho v. Common Cause coming out the other way. Since any legislative solution operates to the disadvantage of some fraction of the people who would have to endorse that solution. Something only a half dozen or so legislative bodies in the United States have managed to do.

Democrats put poison pills in this bill that were designed to repel Republican votes. Then they can rhetorically argue, "Democrats are against gerrymandering, Republicans aren't!" Looks like it worked since you believe it.

Republicans do this kind of thing too but Democrats are better at it in general, I would argue. At least, I don't see Republicans passing anti-gerrymandering legislation and arguing that Democrats are against it.

Of course, there is no such thing as banning gerrymandering, because you cannot really create a neutral political body that assigns neutral political power. Unless you want to argue that the Supreme Court is a nonpartisan institution and everybody who treats it as 6-3 is wrong.

If we really made eliminating gerrymandering our highest priority, we would dramatically increase the number of congressional seats. The ability to gerrymander approaches 0 as congressional representation approaches 1:1. Of course this has other problems that might not make it worth it. But this is what would work if we made it our highest priority.

I think you could resolve the worst of gerrymandering with a few simple rules.

I'm also a huge fan of mega-congress because I think it's fun, but I agree the problems are immense (although Congress in its current form can't get much worse, so...).

Anti gerrymandering rules:

  1. each district must have no more than X people, or less than Y people (adjust to taste)
  2. each district must have a permiter to area ratio of Z (idk, something more forgiving than a pure "4/s" square but just a bit), meaning that you have to force districts into relatively even squares, while being able to account for geography that doesn't run on right angles.

Philosophically, how could Rucho have come out the other way? There are no constitutional issues with partisan gerrymandering, not least because the two-party system is neither mentioned nor envisioned by the constitution. Any person in any 760,000-person congressional district has the same voting power as any other person in any other district.

On the narrow question in Rucho, I don't see why allegations that districts were drawn for partisan advantage is nonjusticiable while other questions of district drawing (ex, racial discrimination) are. If the court wanted to declare that any question of why districts were drawn particular ways were nonjusticiable that would be consistent. But they haven't done that and I am skeptical they will so I don't see why a partisan motivation, specifically, is nonjusticiable.

On the broader question I don't think it would be unreasonable to read substantive requirements for district drawing into the equal protection clause. Ideally these requirements wouldn't reference partisnaship as such but I think the natural effect of such requirements would be to reduce the possibility for partisan gerrymandering. I think when people complain about a lack of representation when discussing districts like Virginia's new 11, 7, 1, and 8 they are getting at something real and constitutionally cognizable. Compare also the TN 2020 map with the 2024 map. Am I to believe the interests of the people of Nashville are equally well represented when they are all together in the 5th district as when they are split between the 5th, 6th, and 7th district? And the constitution has nothing to say about this effective denial of the ability of a political community to have a representative represent them?

I don't see why allegations that districts were drawn for partisan advantage is nonjusticiable while other questions of district drawing (ex, racial discrimination) are.

Race is a real and justiciable subject matter for electoral law by constitutional fiat (specifically the 15th amendment).

And the constitution has nothing to say about this effective denial of the ability of a political community to have a representative represent them?

The constitution doesn’t give representation to “political communities”. The constitution gives representation to states and to the people. What if Nashville voted 85% Democrat? Maybe putting them all in one district is a partisan gerrymander? Is disproportionate representation okay because some areas happen to contain high-densities of single-party voters? There’s no way to get a satisfactory answer to these questions from a judicial process.

Note that an under-reported aspect of the Peter Magyar story in Hungary is that Fidesz put in all kinds of tricks to allow them to push through constitutional changes with a plurality vote share, getting huge majorities in parliament despite pulling mid-40s vote percentages. The flip side of this is that the "landslide" much lauded by global libs that pushed them out of office, came when Tisza got just over 50% of the vote.

With 97.35 percent of precincts counted, Magyar’s centre-right party secured 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament on 53.6 percent of the vote, while nationalist Orban’s Fidesz took just 55 seats with 37.8 percent, according to official results.

A gerrymander can quickly become a dummymander if things shift.

So all Republicans have to do to turn this into a huge Republican advantage is actually appeal to suburban VA voters again.

Saw a great This You? style tweet on it. The closer you cut the gerrymander the riskier it gets and some of the partisan shills on X who supported Texas are freaking out about it now with Virginia having gone left in most counties.

Twitter poster Christian Heiens was right. Republicans have way more juice to squeeze out of gerrymandering than Democrats do because Democrats have done more of it until now. The only reason Democrats are winning this fight is that Republicans are reluctant to fight. cf. Indiana

This also creates a deadlock situation. Surely many voters of Tisza would prefer changing the parliamentary system that was set up by the former ruling party, as it was a big source of opposition to the latter, but if Tisza does go through with this, it’ll be an open admission that the system which facilitated their landslide victory and thus put them in a position to change it is unjust and distorted.

if Tisza does go through with this, it’ll be an open admission that the system which facilitated their landslide victory and thus put them in a position to change it is unjust and distorted.

I literally do not see the problem. It is not like Fidesz wanted to help them when they set up the system. It would be like an absolute monarch who inherited the throne to birth deciding that absolute monarchy is bad and decreeing that power should be transferred to a democratically elected government. Only the terminally pedantic would whine that he only has the power to do so due to the present system being rigged, and expect him to renounce the throne and become a revolutionary instead.

The two situations are a bit different though. For one, no absolute monarch chooses to be born as such. In your example, the monarch voluntarily gives up his power, which is not the case here. The now-former Hungarian opposition has specifically been complaining for more than a decade that the current voting system hugely distorts results in favor of the party with the most votes. Unless they want to openly admit that it was all kayfabe and BS, they should vote to change the system.

Plenty of people got mad at king Juan Carlos anyways.

Once a suburbanite has gone Democrat they never go back.

To illustrate that this indeed applies to Hungary as well, I present this article on the subject which appeared two months before the election. Voting districts where the then-main opposition umbrella party, which just now had a landslide victory, positions itself as ‘center-right’ but is nevertheless supported by almost the entire local Blue Tribe and gets applauded in the US Blue Tribe media, has majority support are marked in different shades of blue (heh). Accordingly, the big blue blob in the middle of the map is the capital and the suburban/metropolitan regions and commuter towns around it.

Orange and blue are the colours Fidesz and Tisza chose for themselves.

In general (several countries are exceptions) European political colours are the reverse of the modern* US convention, with centre-left parties using red (even if they are no longer actually socialist) and centre-right parties using blue. See for example this official EU Parliament page, or any Wikipedia article about a European national Parliament. (Wikipedia by policy follows parties' own choice of colour where possible).

Tisza are a big-tent centre-right party, so using blue is unsurprising. (The left in Hungary is defunct, a it is in Poland and the Czech Republic.) Fidesz adopted orange in their early days when they were a right-liberal party opposed to Soviet Bloc communism - yellow and orange are the most common colours used by liberal parties, including the British Liberal Democrats (both over time), German FDP (yellow) and Dutch VVD (who use blue-and-orange, reflecting their role as the de facto conservative party in Dutch politics as well as their own right-liberal tradition).

* To the best of my knowledge, Red = Republican and Blue = Democrat only became the convention after Bush vs. Gore. (Both parties use red, white and blue in their imagery). The BBC used blue = Republican/red = Democrat up to and including 2000 for consistency with the British convention (e.g. the popup map on this archive page) and switched to the modern US convention in its 2004 coverage (archive example). One account I read was that the US networks generally used blue for the incumbent and red for the challenger and red this became fixed as blue=Dem/red=Rep because the 2000 map became a meme during the Bush v Gore litigation.

One account I read was that the US networks generally used blue for the incumbent and red for the challenger and red this became fixed as blue=Dem/red=Rep because the 2000 map became a meme during the Bush v Gore litigation.

As far as I know, marking the enemy in red and your own side in blue on maps has also been a tradition of armies.

Orange and blue are the colours Fidesz and Tisza chose for themselves.

I'm not sure about the latter, because as far as colors and politics go, blue is currently associated with one of the small and now practically defunct local leftist liberal parties. But anyway, as far as the article I linked is concerned, I thought it was a funny coincidence regarding the color blue.

As far as I know, marking the enemy in red and your own side in blue on maps has also been a tradition of armies.

I always thought it was a tradition of NATO and NATO-trained armies, based on the assumption that the enemy would be Red because it was the USSR. (Both the Nazis and the USSR marked themselves in red on military maps, consistent with the dominant colour on their flag). Googling suggests that the origins of the practice are older - during the long period of Anglo-French conflict everyone agreed that Britain was red and France was blue (mostly based on uniform colours, also consistent wiht the predominant colours on the medieval English and French royal flags), and there are various reasons why the capital-A Allies adopted the French colour scheme as early as WW1. If true this suggests that Germany chose to put themselves in red because they saw France as the permanent enemy.

European political colours are the reverse of the modern* US convention, with centre-left parties using red (even if they are no longer actually socialist) and centre-right parties using blue

Not true for Germany. The left is red, the center-left is red, the Greens are green, but the center right is black (with some tiny sparks of yellow disappearing rapidly). The extreme right is classically brown, but the main far-right party is using blue.

I suspect part of what is going on is that almost every political party for whom not being red is part of its identity (which covers the centre right, the far right, right-liberals and some left-liberals, particularly in the former Soviet bloc) wants to use blue if it is available.

Looking at the member parties of the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament, I would say most right-populist parties end up using a darker shade of blue than the main centre-right party in their country.

I think this is, sadly, more probable than not.

Arlington County, Virginia, 2036:

The "White Girl Buses", manned by former Blackwater security, roll in sequence up Wilson Boulevard in Clarendon for the nightly 7:30pm run to Whole Foods. The armed men spill off the bus and cordon off the parking lot. A sergeant dispatches a squad to hastily speed-cuff a few military age somali males who have strayed too far from Seven Corners.

15 minutes 38 minutes later, as Rebecca, Becky, Becca, and Ashlaighyeh re-embark on the security bus with their paper boxes (recycled of course) full of pad thai, one of them flips a crinkled old $100 bill to the Guatemalan street cleaner who bags the liquid shit of their golden-doodle-pug breed. "Gross-eyy-ahhhsss!" she wails, waving at him like he's deaf.

Cain, the security chief for the convoy, radios as the busses pull off; "Got some skinnys by the 66 on-ramp near Ballston that look sporty. Can we get a QRF to do a sweep?"

"Palantir recon already has them marked for a UAV sortie. It's logged." Comes the distorted reply. Cain doesn't even bother to respond. The bus hits a pothole and one of the newer guys loses his balance for a moment, his left hip knocking Becca's dinner box off her lap on, harmlessly, onto the seat next to her.

"Sorry, ma'am" he offers.

"It's like ...... whatever." She says.

Cain thinks about his home in Morgantown. 17 more days until I'm off rotation.

Thank God for redistricting.

This is your obligatory reminder that gerrymandering is only so effective because you have a terrible FPTP voting system.

Proportional representation actually works quite well for legislative bodies, and mostly removes the incentives for gerrymandering. (But I am sure that every voting nerd has their pet proposal which is better than FPTP.)

I'd be happy with structural changes. I hope if this passes it makes certain structural changes more likely as they are seen as one of the few workable ways to prevent this kind of bullshit.

I'm particularly peeved by the complete abdication of the courts, here. Partisan gerrymander is, ultimately, legal; it's not their place to complain that a lobster district looks too goofy.

But Virginia does, specifically, have a lot of process requirements, some statutory and some constitutional, for that constrain this redistricting amendment. Some of those constraints are matters of opinion:

Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia's standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?

That's a pretty hefty thumb on the scale, in my opinion, but I'm sure some others would disagree (in the distance, Mark Elias and Darwin sneeze). Other components, however, are straightforward math, such as whether 90 days occurred between the amendment being announced and the voting, or whether an election of the house of representatives had occurred in between. There is no universe where the law complied with those mechanisms; proof against is available with the use of a calendar alone.

Now, the courts could have stepped in. And, indeed, a lower court did. The state supreme court stepped in and said that the amendment process could continue, and only after the vote is complete would they review the constitutionality and legality of the amendment process.

There's some funny potential situations. If I trusted the Virginia Supreme Court, it'd be a really funny as a parallel to the old California Prop 8 were massive amounts of manpower and capital and political force applied to a constitutional amendment that never went into effect, but I don't. I'm very skeptical that the people who wouldn't put the brakes on a blatantly illegal process two months ago will do so now that millions of Virginians have put their names on it, and unless the amendment vote is still getting tabulated in six months, I don't even know that they could. It'd be funny to watch another cycle of everyone calling for other people to start de-escalating first, except we already saw several Red Tribe states pull back from less-extreme gerrymandering and I can't argue for them ever doing it again if this sticks.

The people could react. Everyone pretended that they were appalled by Jay Jones (for almost a whole month!), and Spanberger's claimed moderation immediately turned into a giant illegal gun grab and tax heist, and okay, I can't keep a straight face. The DC blob is blue, deep blue, and self-destructively blue, not just in the sense of having politics different than mine, but willing to melt down everything for that political flag. If the constitutional amendment was titled "Flip Republicans The Bird" and its actual text delivered a warm steaming pile of dogshit to the mailbox of every yes voter on a daily basis, it'd still beat 40%. The best case scenario is a staggeringly close loss that kinda embarrasses Spanberger and Obama, and the most optimistic Red Tribers are more praying that it's just a close win rather than a 5%+ one.

It could end up a stupidmander, which would be the funniest of all possibilities, but that depends on people reacting after the vote. Gfl.

But this whole combination -- the blatant manipulation of rules and expertise for their benefit, the complete disavowal of others as ever getting a voice in policy, and the sheer self-dealing and corruption -- is just the nature of politics, today. I'd like to say the Blue Tribe is worse about it, but if that's the case, it's just because the Red Tribe has taken the stupid party hat (cfe Texas).

Wait, what did Texas do this time?

Or are you talking about the bullshit redistricting from last summer?

More motioning around the Paxton/Cornyn mess, given my low opinion of both politicians -- the former for long standing tendency to wave a red shirt around the most marginal culture war stands and then not actually commit to a charge where it could matter, the latter for playing moderate in a way that's less compromise and more surrender.

but if that's the case, it's just because the Red Tribe has taken the stupid party hat (cfe Texas).

California?

That too, but Californian Republicans are like Californian Raisins in so many ways that they're not really a useful example of a broader trend.

I think it’s pointing to a blue tribe stupid party hat.

Not sure your exact meaning. Colloquially among Republican friends it's believed that hiring California Republicans (say, for minor party positions or comms roles or hillternships) is the correct move because they're understood to be much more reliable conservatives than their equivalents from Texas or Florida or other Southern States. The Californians know where things stand if we don't fight.

An Individual Californian Republican can be effective : I point to Moros Kostas pretty often as an example of a process-focused functionalist being radicalized for gun control matters. But the Californian Republicans as a party or as a coordinated group have been having trouble actually doing anything for nearly two decades, at this point. Part of that's downstream of the jungle primaries cutting them out of state power, but they've also just had troubles where they've collected people that are neither sane nor politically consistent: cfe Chad Bianco as a rising star who's both a BLM fan and chasing down ballots.

I'm very frustrated with the whole thing. First for Trump kicking off this fight.

I'm frustrated that you think Trump started this. All of the Dem redistricting proposals are in response to Texas redistricting, which is a legally mandated response to a 2024 5th Circuit ruling saying "no, you cant have racially discriminatory districts", which is generally a thing democrats claim to oppose, except when it helps them.

The fundamental truth is that currently the DNC is the overwhelming beneficiary of gerrymandering efforts, and the push in Virginia about the 759th finger on a very crowded scale.

If the DNC is the overwhelming beneficiary, why can basically every D stronghold find 4-6 house of rep seats just lying on the ground ready to be stolen, and ever R stronghold is hemming and hawing because their currently gerrymandered majorities might turn into dummymandering because Trump is eating shit so hard? This Not even going into the fact that the senate exists.

It seems like reality disagrees with your perspective here, so how do you bring the two into line?

Louisana, Texas, Florida, Indiana. Contrast with Connecticut, California, and now Virginia. It seems like math disagrees with your conception of reality.

Those are what I'm talking about, actually. Those states were already so gerrymandered that they are at risk of a Peter Magyar style dummymander; Texas and florida in particular were so map spaghettied that they are gonna have to take some real risks in this last round of the thing that they weren't doing.

All (read: like, 60-70%, allow me some hyper-bowl-eee as a treat) the D fuckery is safe and has been safe for years if not decades; they've just been too pussy to pull the trigger, trump finally gave them the excuse to put on their big boy pants and abandon civility.

There were lots of articles saying that Trump said Republicans were "entitled" to 5 more districts in Texas. Which is why I blamed him in the first place. Your comment got me to go research it more.

I place less blame on Trump now. This seems like a fight the Democrats were itching for and they picked up on a minor interview thing.

There were lots of articles saying that Trump said Republicans were "entitled" to 5 more districts in Texas.

He's putting the cart before the horse but presumably that's based on the census predictions.

Prior to Rucho v Common Cause in 2019, this level of extreme Partisan gerrymandering would have been presumed illegal. It was only a matter of time before the requisite shameless met with opportunity.

Maybe we will finally get another constitutional amendment out of this.

an election map that looks like Fairfax county (rich county in northern Virginia) gets to elect about half of the state's representatives.

This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.

Redistricting is retarded. Look at Louisiana. First the legislature draws up a map with 5 non-black majorities and 1 black majority. This is challenged in court and found to violate the VRA so they go back and draw up a new map with 2 black majority districts (Louisiana is 1/3 black). Another group of 'non-African-American voters' challenges the new map for being racially gerrymandered and a federal panel agrees, so now they might have to change the map again pending SCOTUS decision.

Redistricting changes that would significantly shift the results (based on the most recent election) should just not be allowed. Why can every other country make this work?

The VRA and related court precedent demands a mutually-contradictory set of requirements on drawing districts. That Gordion knot is maybe going to be (partially?) untied by the current Louisiana case.

Although my personal thinking is that eliminating geographic districting in favor of something more like slate-of-candidates parliamentary systems is probably the cleanest of the available options. None are perfect, though.

right to giant congress

Wow. I never knew there were originally 12 amendments in the bill of rights. I feel ashamed of my civics education.

Also, I'm fully convinced. Let's complete the Bill of Rights.

Despite sharing it and finding it interesting I'm against it. I think the actual result of this would be to weaken congress and strengthen the president/bureaucracy/supreme court/main parties. Congress is already weak enough.

It would be more difficult to gerrymander all of these districts.

First for Trump kicking off this fight.

The most gerrymandered states are all Democratic. VRA throughout the South has given Democrats dozens of extra congressional seats. This was the original basis of the fight, Texas had explicitly gerrymandered minority-majority seats that caused DOJ to send Texas a letter. But this in turn was a response to a 2024 5th Circuit decicision about the VRA. Which, ultimately, yes, this is about the midterms, which ultimately is about the question of who gets to govern the country. Which is the only fight anyone is picking at all.

I feel as though being annoyed at Trump for starting a fight over political power is like being annoyed at Steph Curry for starting a 3-point shooting war.

The more notable story is that after Democrats have already gerrymandered half a dozen states and Republican states have a lot of slack they could pick up to fight back, the 2025-2026 redistricting wars will either end neutral or with a Democratic win. Well I feel confident that if we had 1,000 Trumps instead of 1,000 generic GOP party apparatchiks that would not be the case.

The worst gerrymandered states are all Dems? Really? the most offensive examples that i'm aware of are all in the south and all in favor republicans. I know in NY the dems tried to do a big redistricting a few years back but the state supreme court nixed it and they got much less meat off the bone than they hoped for.

either way, i'm no expert on the quality of district lines across the country but this list seems relatively nonpartisan (as far as commentary on this issue goes) and seems to paint a picture that neither party comes out looking clean if we wanna call gerrymandering a sin.

The list you cited is not very good because it looks at percentage points. This magnifies small changes. It cites, for example, North Carolina as the most-gerrymandered state. North Carolina has 14 Congressional districts. In 2024 Republicans won 52% of North Carolina's Congressional vote and Democrats won 42%. That would "naturally" produce a Congressional delegation of 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats. Wow, the most gerrymandered state in the union -- Republicans gained 2 seats.

When you analyze by number of seats taken by gerrymandering instead of percentage points you consistently find that Democratic states engage in the most gerrymandering. This is why "neutral" analysts like to use the measure you cited. It sounds much better to come to a neutral conclusion about how gerrymandering is something both parties do equally. It sounds more fair and obvious. You must be some kind of partisan shill if you have any other intuition.

In California in 2024, Democrats won 60% of the vote and 43/52 Congressional seats.

In Illinois in 2024, Democrats won ~53% of the vote and 14/17 seats.

In New York in 2024, Democrats won 57% of the vote and 19/26 seats.

The link you posted somehow cites Illinois and New York but not California, possibly the worst offender. It's even more egregious now that Newsom passed his special referendum so that they could gerrymander it harder.

Traditionally, the Voting Rights Act has been interpreted to require the creation of "minority-majority" districts throughout southern states. I like the phrasing I found yesterday when reading this article for a different post in this discussion:

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/11/texas-redistricting-racial-gerrymandering-coalition-districts-trump/

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits election and voting practices that disadvantage minority groups, including drawing boundaries that dilute their ability to elect their preferred candidate by packing them into a single district or dispersing them throughout multiple.

You can't "dilute" minorities by "packing them into a single district or dispersing them throughout multiple". Ok then, what can you do with minorities? Logically the only legal outcome is whatever maximizes their voting power. This has traditionally only been applied to Southern States. A dozen Congressional seats reserved for Democrats by law, and you have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to overturn Civil Rights to stop it. Neat.

Oregon's last House election was 53% Democratic. They control 5/6 seats.

Washington State was 57% Democratic. They control 8/10 seats.

New England, as a region, does not send a single Republican to the House even though they only vote about 60% Democratic.

New York did mid-cycle redistricting in 2024. They increased Democratic margins in Democratic districts in response to concerns that the previous maps weren't generous enough to Democrats. You never hear about that though because all anybody cares about is Donald Trump. Trump gets involved in 2025, anything before that isn't real. Of course, after Trump gets involved, a Democratic judge in New York rules that the current map illegally discriminates against Latino and Black voters, which requires the elimination of more Republican seats. That one's being held up in court right now but it would eliminate a Republican Jewish congressional district in South New York City if it went through.

Let's look at Texas for a Republican equivalent.

In 2024, Texas Republicans won 58% of all votes cast for Congressional Representatives. Texas Republicans won 25 seats, out of 38. Democrats won 4/10 votes and still got 1/3 seats.

Now, of course everybody is gerrymandering, and it's especially favored to draw safe seats for powerful Congressmen from both parties. But when you look at the actual maps it's obvious and clear that Illinois and California, for example, have a special talent for gerrymandering.

There are some other things worth noting here as well.

For one, there were some errors made in the 2020 Census Reapportionment. Bizarrely, maybe a fluke of nature somehow, all these mistakes benefited Democrats. The Census Bureau released a report showing that mistakes had been made in 14 states. In terms of congressional representation, this resulted in Florida being short two seats, Texas being short one, Minnesota and Rhode Island retaining one seat each which they should have lost, and Colorado gaining a seat it should not have gained. (See here for Heritage's write-up on the situation)

For another base gut-check, consider how close Republican's Congressional majority is. In 2016, where Trump lost the popular vote, Republicans won the Congressional vote 48-47, and got a comfortable House lead of 241-194. In 2024, by contrast, where Trump won the popular vote, Republicans won the Congressional vote 49-47 -- and only got 220-215. The juice is being squeezed.

The list you cited is not very good because it looks at percentage points.

It's not ordered by percentage points. The first four are literally in reverse order of percentage-point difference. The list is bad, but not because it uses that measure (which I think is okay) - because it doesn't use any measure and is apparently just an arbitrary order.

It's also unfair to just be counting it for federal elections. State legislatures are often gerrymandered as well (or at least split in a way that is effectively gerrymandered) such as my state of NC where despite being a purple swing state, is effectively a red state in terms of state government despite having a Dem governor right now. The NC governorship is one of the weakest in the country due to state legislatures gerrymandering and things like Republican governors literally signing bills to limit their own power before leaving the position for a Dem successor. This is a routine thing the state legislature does, transferring power away from positions that Dems win to positions that Republicans win. Even when a Democrat wins in NC, they still lose.

The NC senate is 30:20 and house 71:49 for Republican/Democrat makeup. The GOP has held a veto proof majority until recently and are still so close they barely have to try to pass things they want. Again, this is considered a purple swing state that regularly votes in Democrats. It doesn't matter, the gerrymandering is simply too strong.

the most offensive examples that i'm aware of are all in the south and all in favor republicans

The ones in the south are all because the Supreme Court has mandated the creation of "majority minority" districts (minority = black in this case) and blacks tend to cluster in urban areas. Though recent court decisions might be changing that (and are actually what prompted Texas's redistricting in the first place).

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