Help
I kind of skimmed this post earlier when I was looking for references to the registration issues I talked about. Something to add to one of phib's points:
amphibian, on 26 November 2014 - 07:02 AM, said:
The gerrymandering in the US is particularly bad. All political parties involved in government engage in gerrymandering (rigging election districts to produce dramatic majorities for one party above the other). They try to rig things their way, but by and large, the Republicans have won the local and state levels often enough that the lines really favor Republicans to win local and state level elections by slicing the voting districts to skew white in the in-between-city-and-country areas and concentrate minority votes in purely city districts as often as possible. The skill in gerrymandering lies mostly in the manipulation of the not-sure-fire-for-one-party district lines.
Let's say we have 50,000 minority people in Area A (has 5 districts that send one gov't representative each to State Gov't) who usually vote for Working Party or Democratic out of 150,000 , they have more of a voice in gov't representation if they're spread out across 5 different districts, rather than if they're all in the same one or if 2,000 are left in one district, 1,500 in two, 5,000 in one and 40,000 in another. If evenly spread out across the 5 districts, the 10,000 minority voters in each of the 5 districts have to be paid attention to by more gov't representatives. They're a big enough voting group that they have to be paid attention to. If they're all squeezed into the one, then the other four gov't representatives can completely ignore them and cater harder to the 100,000 non-minority voters.
Let's say we have 50,000 minority people in Area A (has 5 districts that send one gov't representative each to State Gov't) who usually vote for Working Party or Democratic out of 150,000 , they have more of a voice in gov't representation if they're spread out across 5 different districts, rather than if they're all in the same one or if 2,000 are left in one district, 1,500 in two, 5,000 in one and 40,000 in another. If evenly spread out across the 5 districts, the 10,000 minority voters in each of the 5 districts have to be paid attention to by more gov't representatives. They're a big enough voting group that they have to be paid attention to. If they're all squeezed into the one, then the other four gov't representatives can completely ignore them and cater harder to the 100,000 non-minority voters.
This is also why Republicans have been getting more and more extreme in recent years; they've gerrymandered their districts so red that they don't have to pay any attention at all to centrist views any more. This was supposed to be a good thing for them, but it ended up biting them in the ass because now they've got to go further and further to the right to avoid getting primaried by the hard core of GOP voters.
Of course, GOP senators are getting primaried from the right too, and they don't have gerrymandered districts (the whole state votes for them) but that's because the voters have the taste of blood; they've seen it work so many times with their House districts, and the Democratic voters usually aren't messing with their senate primaries anyway.
I am from Mississippi, which along with Alabama is the most politically recalcitrant state in the old Confederacy. Back in the day when the Democratic party was split between mostly southern segregationists and mostly northern liberals, MS and AL have been known to go it alone in the electoral college for the segregationist. My incumbent Republican senator Thad Cochran was elected in the year I was born, 1978, after the South had started to switch to Republicans at the national level.
Cochran was primaried this year by a guy in the Ted Cruz mold, a state senator named Chris McDaniel. Cochran recruited black voters to come out for the Republican primary to put a stop to McDaniel, which was easy to do since 1) our Democratic front-runner was a Dixiecrat, in other words a conservative unlikely to inspire black voters, and 2) McDaniel had a reputation for being a neo-confederate, which was probably not entirely fair, just because he spoke to the Sons of Confederate Veterans which is a very popular organization in the South and hardly the KKK. My grandmothers were members of the women's version, and I was a member of the children's version because I am descended from Confederate veterans. I won't deny that they are typical white southerners who pine for the antebellum days, but they are no more racist than your average white person down here; the organization bespeaks a certain middle or upper class status more than anything else; poor people ain't got time for that.
Anyway, McDaniel voters went absolutely crazy when Cochran recruited black voters. Of course, many of them didn't phrase it that way; his sin was recruiting Democrats (which is not really true; he specifically recruited black voters). His real sin was that it worked, but it made these people so angry to know that the GOP primary had been influenced by black voters. What really made them angry was that black voters had any political power at all. This is Mississippi; only white people can have political power here, except that one House district that we begrudgingly gave up a long time ago. It's our birthright, and if you don't like it, then you can move to Detroit, or whatever.
