Bay Area Party Tour
 

Unless you mean Galveston, I'd keep that on the down low.

Texas
 

I just might do that. Although, no, RT isn't in District 22 and I'm not sure how well my hippy-ass will go over in Ft. Bend county.

Bay Area Party Tour
 

1) All donations are public, as are fundraisers. Kind of hard to keep it on the QT and the DL

2) You don't think Delay does fundraisers all over the country?

Bay Area Party Tour
 

Yeah, true on both counts. Perhaps, maybe, though one should do some fundraisers elsewhere as well to dillute the Bay Area part. The fact he fundraises nationwide isn't going to stop him from talking about the San Francisco (which will be read as "gay") money behind her.

Bay Area Party Tour
 

Even thought she wont be in SF only the Silicon Valley, the pig may try and use it against us. But the money raised will outweigh the negatives. I think other people will do stuff other places, but as for me, I ain't much use outside the Golden State.

Someone will have to pick up that ball.

No matter what happens it will be lot of fun. Delay (or at least I assume it is him) has already sent PIs looking into my background. Isn't the first time and won't be the last time.

Bay Area Party Tour
 

Some guys came around my place asking about you. They claimed to be old freinds, and joked about how you always got in trouble- wanted to know if I knew any new stories. I told them about how you almost got arrested for illegal deer feeding. Honest, I didn't know it was people out to hurt you!

Now I feel the fool:( :(

Texas
 

My recollection is that the multi-member districts was not what got her in trouble (those are used in Japan, although I suppose that's unamerican). It was the next step, which was to have Congress package votes on disparate issues, giving everyone, say, five votes for a total of five bills, and any bill that got 218 votes passed. That would, in theory, allow a 1/10 minority to get a bill passed, assuming it was packaged with othr bills, because 44 members, with five votes all for the same bill, could get it done. That is what was unamerican. Well, that and her extreme liberalism. It's almost as big a sin as having a nanny for whom you don't pay taxes.

Texas
 

post hoc ergo proper hoc

They could have lost their seats because the state moved left.

whatever. read the paper. skim it. whatever. if you're unpersuaded, fine.

fwiw, they don't measure partisanship, they measure competitiveness of elections, which they use percentage of vote to measure. Presumably uncompetitive elections lead to greater partisanship because it allows the person to move to the extremes while still having room to spare.

Texas
 

No. That is ridiculous. The count is 26-26 for five elections. There is a Gerrymander and the count in the next election changes to 31-21. Then in the following election there is no change. If the state had been moving left the change would have been gradual - not all at once.

And we don't even have to look at the results. We don't have to deduce the cause by looking at the results. The Democrats took the Republican voters in these districts and put them in districts that were already safe Republican. Then they took Democratic seats from those already safe Republican seats and put them in the competitive seats. Once a Republican seat is 50% Republican it is a safe seat. No way a democrat can win. So every Republican added to that seat changes nothing but every Democrat taken out and put in a competitive seat makes it lean more Democrat. So twenty Republican seats that were already safe Republican districts had their percentages of Republicans increased from fifty or sixty to seventy or eighty percent. All the Dems taken away turned the swing seats from thirty percent Democrat to sixty percent democrat changin them to the Dem column.

Which points out another stupid thing about that study. If you are looking at pure turnover, there is no time when you get more incumbants losing or when you get more turnover then right after a Gerrymander.

In Texas, it is my understanding the count was also equal and then after the Gerrymander the Republicans got a five seat advantage.

There is a direct relationship and it is painfully obvious.

Texas
 

I haven't been around for the last 20 hours of discussion on this one, but let me point out another flaw in the study: it is a study of all the seats, where overall stability masks small changes that have big results.

Shifts of a percent or two do not excite the authors of that report; however, a shift of a couple of percent tipped control of the house and so is vitally important. That couple of percent was obtained fairly clearly by line-drawing, some of which was justified and some of which, from what RT says, was pure hardball political payback.

There has been a strong notion that constitutionally political decisions should be left to the political entities, and are best kept there. Thus, the House hears issues regarding whether or not someone should be seated. Thus, the Supreme Court defers in election issues to the state authorities whenever possible.

The question that I think is raised is, should we follow this approach with respect to redistricting or are the balance of powers better served by taking this power out of the hands of the most political branch? As it was, the decision was taken out of the hands of the federal political branch and put at the state level so we can't have a national gerrymander, but should we go a step further?

And the reason has nothing to do with incumbents or competitiveness of single districts, but rather with the ability to endless perpetuate control by one party.

Texas
 

Again, it is the study of the small number who turnover that is interesting; in the absence of these individual acts of Gerrymandering, the turnover would be remarkably lower.

In the state I am most familiar with, in the past 20 years there have been four turnovers due to death, four resulting from competitive races after district changes, one from an indictment, and two from voluntary departures. Of the four resulting from competitive races, two were inevitable (the state lost seats), and two were clearly engineered. In the inevitable ones, in each case the party out of power in the state lost the seat. So this informal study says that a large percentage of the total turnover relates to the manner lines are drawn.

During this entire time, the competitive races have occurred after a death (once), a redistricting (thrice) and an indictment. The other races were essentially handing of the batons to carefully picked successors.

Texas
 

Here's my issue with this analysis--you're conflating two effects, with no way to determine which is causative.

A state has to redraw lines every 10 years because of population shifts. The only question is whether the line drawing done politically increases the victory over the baseline result that would occur by "neutral" redistricting. Spanky sez yes, because he's witnessed it.

But there's simply no real way to know. If a party is in a majority already, it's very possible that it reflects a shift within the population towards that party. So it's no surprise that redistricting would allow that party to pick up seats.

Texas
 

Ah, yes, no way to know.

That is true. But that is true of almost any political "science" question or analysis. I'll leave the true nerds to argue why it is impossible to know things in the scientific disciplines as well. And so, we argue.

Texas
 

Agreed, which is why I pointed to that paper as a reasonable attempt to shed light on the question.

Texas
 

Yeh, but I've read better stuff. It read like a masters thesis.