Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
You'all might have covered this in my absence, but, I thought the sin of gerrymandering was getting more representation from one party or side than reflects the votes of the people. Do we really care if it results in party hacks who won't leave, as long as the representation ends up proportional to what the people want? It's not like, in a world where the parties winnow the choices down from 2000 to 2, that we would be missing our perfect candidate choice anyway. We're still mostly voting for the parties, because those parties' internal structures have done the preselection for us.
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This is what I wrote earlier:
The Governator just tried to pass a proposition in California whereby the drawing of the district lines would be taken away from the legislature and given to a panel of retired judges. A system that is used in a few states. Iowa has such a system and three of its five congressional seats were competitive last last election. California, out of 52 seats, did not have any that were competitive. In fact, of its forty state senate seats, eighty assembly seats, and fifty congressional seats, not one changed party hands in the last election.
The Unions spent twenty five million dollars to defeat the Governators proposition. That is reason 116 that I hate Unions.
When you have a large swath of independent voters (38 percent in California) and the election are decided in the primary they do not get any say. In a general election these independend swing voters will not go for extremeists, so when elections are actually competitive in the general election it has a strong moderating influence. That is why the centrists from both parties all come from the swing districts.
In addition, in the primary, especially a non=presidential congressional primary turnout is unbelieveably low (twenty percent). The lower the turnout the less likely moderate are to vote. Extremists always show up to vote, it is the moderating influences that turn out only in big elections.
In addition, in the primary a plurality of the votes can win (it works the same in the general election, but in reality there is just two competitive parties so there are only two candidates). With an open seat in a Republican primary you can get as many as ten candidates. The candidate with the most votes wins, no matter how little votes they get. In districts in California, in the Republican primary (with ten candiates and a twenty percent turnout) you get candidates winning with only fifteen thousand votes. The general election is a non event so you get a person with fifteen thousand votes representing 500,000 people.
Anybody who has spent fifteen minutes in retail politics knows that gerrymandering polarizes districts. Not because it is the conventional wisdom but because it is so painfully obvious a blind brain damaged orangutan could see it.
