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On August 05 2025 20:44 Doublemint wrote:
just Trump using the already available corruption with the gerrymander and turning it up to 11. Republicans happily oblige.
Dems face a dilemma.
something you can only face if you have at least a teeny tiny bit of morals. Republicans just fall in line when their leader calls.
the amount of stink you could make... let them arrest you. you do this as the whole Dem representation that "fled" and let them fight it in court but more importantly in the court of public opinion. unprecedented levels of righteous indignation. and eyeballs.
people will rally for you, giving a damn for what's right and getting arrested for it? what's more American than that?
in addition you give people room and a reason to vent. the amount of actual disdain for Republican policies is off the charts, and that's before the health care cuts - with hundreds of rural hospitals on chopping block - come into effect.
Republicans rehabilitated depraved and misguided Jan06ers - a ton of them actually criminal - and you wanna tell me you cannot do this for standing up to corruption a child can understand? that it's majorly fucked that politicians are able to willy-nilly choose their voters instead of the other way round?
Democrats refused to delay their vacations to prevent the worst legislation Trump has signed with basically 0 accountability.
Democrats are cowards and con artists, not a real opposition party. Their supporters are basically hostages with stockholm syndrome
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On August 05 2025 19:37 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:Show nested quote +On August 05 2025 19:07 oBlade wrote:On August 05 2025 18:18 Slydie wrote:On August 05 2025 15:47 Velr wrote:
And is there any realistic scenario where the Democrats somehow "win" in this? Despite never showing up again which seems to be a strange solution? They probably already have their own maps ready to gerrymand NY and California to get the seats back, but they do not want to go there, so they go for "absence" first. That so many conservatives are fine with this is a major problem for the US democracy. Democrats in California have 82% of House seats with 60% of the vote. Gerrymandering has become reduced to a nonsense term these days. The distribution in California says nothing about the issue. If voters were spread out perfectly one party could take 100% of the seats with 51% of the votes. 60 for 80 seems like an actually fair system. The question for Texas is; do Democrats already have an unfair advantage with the current districts that makes them overrepresented? It's probably unlikely since the new map would take 5 seats from the minority party. Anyway the actual solution to this problem would be a constitutional amendment that adds some (~20%) "free" seats per state that gets assigned from non-winning votes. Makes it far less useful to redistrict and would also allow for smaller statewide parties to get a few seats.
Here are the latest results for House in Texas and California, respectively.
58.41% 40.39%
60.48% 39.23%
Here is party control of the seats:
66% 34%
82% 18%
Either that extra 2% or so is doing a lot of heavy lifting that makes it necessary to once again flee a legislative session in Texas for fear of becoming as lopsided as... California, or it's rank self-serving hypocrisy by the legislators. Self-serving I can understand. Less impressed by tough guy Newsom saying he's going to make California bluer if Texas changes their own state's map, as though California should have any influence on Texas politics, and as though his state wasn't already wildly away from the mean of proportionality.
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So you say that California that is 6% off per side is worse than Texas that is ~19% off per side?
Both are of course issues but I could see in a proportional system (depending on the amount of seats things are split on) that California might be theoretically possible without any gerrymandering. While the Texas one is clearly not possible without tweaking things.
California margins should be closer by ~5% or whatever ends up being correct based on seats. Texas by ~20%. That is 4x worse in Texas?
I am happy to agree both should be as close to 0 difference as possible.
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Gerrymandering is like nuclear weapons. Ideally nobody should have any, but expecting one side to give them up out of moral ideality while the other side builds more is simply insane for obvious reasons.
Since Republicans have decided that more gerrymandering will benefit them, there is zero reason whatsoever Democrats should not follow suit to the fullest extent possible. Politics isn't a game, Republican policies kill people every single day and there should be zero remorse about opposing them with every tool in the arsenal.
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Illinois is also most recently 82% 18% by control of federal House seats. Same as California.
They got there with aggregate votes of 52.78% to 46.97%. Seems skewed, compared to whatever will benefit Republicans.
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United States42692 Posts
Firstly, the higher the vote gets the more lopsided the result gets in simple plurality systems. Everyone knows this. Oblade is pretending that we don’t all know this. Each marginal percentage point yields disproportionate returns.
Secondly, different states can’t be compared like that. A state with evenly distributed populations could be 100/0 representation off of 55/45 vote. A state with big rural urban political divides and contiguous geographic districts could see large amounts of wasted votes as seats are won by large majorities. Texas is not California.
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The idea that the response to democrats actions is to gin up a reason to arrest them the moment they do return to Texas is hilarious to me. They are feeding into every reason for them not to want to return as they are legitimately going to be arrested for no reason if they ever return.
Even in Oregon the dems just used the law already on the books before the Republicans did the same thing to mandate that none of them could run for re-election.
Do Republicans just have power fantasies about arresting their political opponents? I was pretty conservative I thought before the trump years but I never saw this out of them.
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On August 06 2025 00:55 KwarK wrote:
Firstly, the higher the vote gets the more lopsided the result gets in simple plurality systems. Everyone knows this. Oblade is pretending that we don’t all know this. Each marginal percentage point yields disproportionate returns.
Secondly, different states can’t be compared like that. A state with evenly distributed populations could be 100/0 representation off of 55/45 vote. A state with big rural urban political divides and contiguous geographic districts could see large amounts of wasted votes as seats are won by large majorities. Texas is not California.
You can eyeball this by looking at the districts. There is zero reason to give Dems any highground here, and they've been master gerrymandering types for decades. Also, as I said, generally Dem voters are *less* efficiently packed. California has lots of purple areas they've drawn blue.
Second, this differential is exactly the criteria Dems use to complain. This is what they are doing right now. It's the most common criteria. See i actually agree with you to an extent, but nobody is saying what you are saying.
Third, in states Dems control entirely (both Houses+gov) their current advantage over their total vote share is higher than in states where the GOP controls eveything (something like +21 to +16).
Finally, calling out oBlade, when what you are saying applies equally to Democrats who are complaining, is just a teensy bit of bias. You are dealing in hypotheticals to avoid people who are here showing actual maps and numbers.
But finally, and this is for eveyone else too. In 2024 Republicans win the overall nationwide House vote by over two points. They won a majority by... 2 points. It's almost like these things cancel out. Thought I'd throw that in there for all the popular vote obsessives.
Edit: also im not sure why I should believe a 2 point difference between ca and TX should lead to that big of a difference because of "disproportionate" returns. That's insanely disproportionate and at least deserves a second look
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