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The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

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Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

This would be great.

An important new redistricting lawsuit in Wisconsin just cleared a major hurdle by surviving a motion for summary judgment and will now head to trial. The suit raises an argument that has been made many times before but without success: that election districts were drawn with the improper aim of maximizing one side's partisan advantage. In this case, the plaintiffs, a group of Democrats, have alleged that Wisconsin Republicans unfairly gerrymandered the state's legislative maps to benefit the GOP.

Every such case in the past that has made similar claims has ultimately failed because the Supreme Court (or more specifically, Justice Anthony Kennedy) has ruled that there's no manageable standard for judging when a partisan gerrymander is impermissible. But here, plaintiffs are relying on a new metric known as the "efficiency gap," a very compelling approach its creators describe thusly:

The efficiency gap is simply the difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast. Wasted votes are ballots that don’t contribute to victory for candidates, and they come in two forms: lost votes cast for candidates who are defeated, and surplus votes cast for winning candidates but in excess of what they needed to prevail. When a party gerrymanders a state, it tries to maximize the wasted votes for the opposing party while minimizing its own, thus producing a large efficiency gap. In a state with perfect partisan symmetry, both parties would have the same number of wasted votes.
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A few comments re: this.

1. It's a really serious problem that is hurting our democracy.

2. It is bipartisan.

3. It favors incumbents, so obviously sitting Members will never do it themselves. The solution has to come from the Court.

For reasons I am not clear about, liberals have been more concerned about this historically than conservatives. This doesn't make much sense to me, since both parties are equally to blame and the net result is zero sum for both parties: it puts more seats of each party in play. If anything, the last 6 years ought to have made it a priority for conservatives, because these heavily gerrymandered districts are what make it possible for the Free-dumb Caucus to primary insufficiently evil Republican Members.

A genuinely objective and rational solution is probably second only to ridding our system of bribery in terms of restoring democracy. I hope this succeeds.
 
Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

Trouble in Mordor.

Sen. Mike Lee will run for a Republican leadership post currently held by Sen. John Barrasso, a surprise move that instantly roils the Senate GOP.
The announcement could set up a clash between the first-term Utah senator and Barrasso, a low-key Wyoming senator, for the No. 4 slot of Republican Policy Committee chairman. Barrasso is eligible to serve one more two-year term after this year, though GOP leaders are term-limited to three two-year terms. GOP leadership elections typically occur at the end of the year before the new session.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly moved to back Barrasso over Lee, who was seen leaving McConnell's office on Monday evening at a leadership meeting. Lee's run for the slot was first reported by the Washington Examiner and blindsided most of the tight-knit conference.
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Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

I don't get the vote efficiency idea. If you had a state that overall voted 80% X and 20% Y, and it had 5 districts, what should the breakdown be? Is it supposed to have 1 Y winner and 4 X's? Even if you put all of the Y voters in a district by themselves, (so that all 20% minus 1 of the votes were wasted) you would still be wasting (80% minus 4) votes for X. I must be missing something, because I don't see how the wasted votes could ever be equal.
 
Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

Maryland is roughly 60/40 D, with the D's having a super majority in 3 places - Baltimore City, and Montgomery and Prince Georges counties (& in the town of Point of Rocks). It is in the interest of the D's to maximize their voter advantage in those areas to maximize their HofR seats.

The last redistricting was perhaps their most blatant gerrymander. It even managed to offend democrats, but not too much.
 
Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

joecct said:
Maryland is roughly 60/40 D, with the D's having a super majority in 3 places - Baltimore City, and Montgomery and Prince Georges counties (& in the town of Point of Rocks).
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In the 2010 census, POR Republicans outnumbered Democrats 387-374. We also had 3 Greens. :)
 
Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

LynahFan said:
I don't get the vote efficiency idea. If you had a state that overall voted 80% X and 20% Y, and it had 5 districts, what should the breakdown be? Is it supposed to have 1 Y winner and 4 X's? Even if you put all of the Y voters in a district by themselves, (so that all 20% minus 1 of the votes were wasted) you would still be wasting (80% minus 4) votes for X. I must be missing something, because I don't see how the wasted votes could ever be equal.
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I don't think they are going to be equal, just the delta between the years should be zero. As I understand it... Still need to read it again and try to make sense of it.
 
Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

The idea is to waste the same number of votes from each party. For example, say you have a state that is a 60 D/40 R split, and 10 districts. The districts are equal so they each provide 10 points towards the total.

If you have 10 districts with 6D/4R, then the total waste is 10D/40R. The Republicans get ripped off.

If you have 4 districts 4D/6R and 6 districts 7D/3R, then the total waste is (16+12)D/(4 + 18)R = 28D/22R. The Democrats are hurt, but by far less. Keep tweaking the numbers and eventually you get to close to even waste.
 
Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

Kepler said:
The idea is to waste the same number of votes from each party. For example, say you have a state that is a 60 D/40 R split, and 10 districts. The districts are equal so they each provide 10 points towards the total.

If you have 10 districts with 6D/4R, then the total waste is 10D/40R. The Republicans get ripped off.

If you have 4 districts 4D/6R and 6 districts 7D/3R, then the total waste is (16+12)D/(4 + 18)R = 28D/22R. The Democrats are hurt, but by far less. Keep tweaking the numbers and eventually you get to close to even waste.
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No, you won't. Try it yourself. I just did. Once you decide that there "should be" 4 R winners (proportional to their 40% overall share), the number of wasted R votes is fixed.

Let's say that there are 1M total voters (400K R, 600K D), 100K per district. If Rs win their 4 districts by 50.0001%, that 4*.50*100K = 200K total votes in winning districts (none wasted), with the other 200K wasted on losing districts, so a total of 200K wasted. If they win their 4 districts by 60%, then all you end up doing is taking some votes that were formerly wasted on losing districts and moving them over to winning districts - where they're still wasted. The number of wasted R votes will ALWAYS be 200K votes - the number of extra votes they have that are not needed to win their 4 districts.

Similarly, the number of wasted D votes will ALWAYS be 300K. They only need 300K to win their 6 districts, and they have 600k total votes, so 300K will always be wasted - whether they are wasted as extra votes in a winning district or votes in a losing district.

Therefore, there will ALWAYS be a difference in wasted votes of 100K, regardless of the individual winning percentages in each district.

Interestingly enough, you CAN get the number of wasted votes to equal out - if you district such that the Rs win only 3 districts and the Ds win 7. In that case, the Rs would usefully use 150K votes to win 3 districts and 250K would be wasted. The Ds would usefully use 350K votes to win their 7 districts and waste...250K. So you can get an equal number of wasted votes only by "exaggerating" the number of districts that the majority wins. Note that regardless of how many districts are won by either side, the total number of wasted votes always has to be 500K (50% of the total), so you're not even minimizing the total number of wasted votes.

Really, really dumb proposal - again, unless we're missing something (standard scientific caveat)...
 
Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

Another sign of the changing times. Kirk is bending himself into a pretzel to pretend to be sane long enough to sneak in another term in IL. We used to have a steady diet of Dems in red states and districts throwing out a racist policy here or a sexist comment there to try and blend in with the GOP; now the shoe is on the other foot.

Also: Duckworth is a great candidate -- hopefully she'll destroy him.
 
Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

And another good sign: a strong challenger to a GOPer in a blue district, due to the anticipated CF of the GOP ticket.

Democrats scored a big coup over the weekend in Minnesota, as state Sen. Terri Bonoff made a late—and unexpected—entry into the race against GOP Rep. Erik Paulsen. News of a possible Bonoff bid only surfaced late on Thursday; on Saturday, she announced her campaign at a party convention. Lobbyist Jon Tollefson, who had been the only Democrat in the race but had raised little money, immediately dropped out and endorsed Bonoff.

Bonoff ran for this seat once before, when it became open in 2008. However, the Democratic Party's official endorsement that year went to Iraq vet Ashwin Madia, and she declined to challenge him in the primary. Madia went on to lose to Paulsen 48-41 (an Independence Party candidate took 11 percent), and since then, the incumbent has won re-election three times, never with less than 58 percent of the vote.

But Minnesota's 3rd Congressional District, located in the Minneapolis suburbs, voted for Barack Obama by a narrow 50-49 margin in 2012, making Paulsen one of the few Republicans to sit in a seat the president won—and thus a tempting target for Democrats. The problem for Team Blue, though, has always been candidate recruitment, but in Bonoff, they've just landed a legitimate contender with the right sort of moderate profile for a district like this.
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Any Minnesotans care to comment?
 
Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

Not my side of the metro, but I could have sworn Paulson used to be a moderate republican rather than a Tea Partier.

The big problem is that side of the metro is basically a rich man's haven. It also includes a lot of rural area. Looking at it, it's almost perfectly gerrymandered to split up Brooklyn Park, Brooklyn Center, and Coon Rapids. All are fairly large and ethnically diverse (relatively) cities. But it effectively includes the exceedingly rich and white cities of the southwest metro as a whole.

Edit: my god, it also has chunks of Wayzata, Edina, and Eden Prairie.

Maybe there isn't a good way to split up the suburban districts of the Cities. I have no idea. But it manages to pull in just enough of Brooklyn Park, Center, and CR to make me suspicious.
 
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Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

While not a current member of Congress, are any of the moralists on the right concerned that the Republican party and conservatives have given the country its highest ranking child molester in the history of the nation?

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/hastert-sentenced-to-15-months-in-prison-222538

I mean, we heard so much about Bill Clinton stepping out with a (willing) overweight intern, so how about something regarding GOP House Speaker Dennis Hastert? :rolleyes:
 
Re: The 114th Congress: How Low Can They Go?

Cruz fails at taking the high road. "I have never worked with a more miserable son of a b*tch in my life" shall live in infamy...for about the next week.
 
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