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Notes -
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
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.
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.
In a world where government is representative of the constituents, these are effectively the same thing.
Yeah, it's a stupid system that would reward behavior like this.
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.
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