reDRAW, reDRAW, reDRAW

By Jonathan Brown 

Texas redistricting

 By Nick Anderson

Gerrymandering

 The wonders of American "democracy".

Are red or blue states better?

 From Applied Sentience

Source: Applied Sentience

In comparing the quality of life between Red vs Blue states, I’ll be grouping all 23 indicators into 4 main categories:

• 4 Crimes Indicators,
• 4 Social Indicators,
• 7 Health Indicators
• 8 Economic Indicators.
• Plus the Research Methodology
• And the Summary of All 23 Indicators

Intro Comments

As with every other indicator in this study, all of the data collected comes from official government sources and not potentially liberal universities, think tanks, etc.  Specifically, the Bureau of Econ Analysis at the Dep of Commerce (GDP per Capita), the US Census (Median Income, HS Graduation, College Graduation), the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Dep of Labor (Unemployment), the Dep of Agriculture (All Poverty, Child Poverty), and the US Interagency Council on Homelessness (Homelessness).  All data sets are the most recent I could find, and from 2018 or 2019, except for the two graduation rates (2017).

If you have any questions about purchasing power parity, what year $$’s are bench-marked at, real vs nominal figures, etc etc, then please check out the respective data sets linked to in this Excel document on Economic Indicators.  Since this is just a personal side project I’m doing for fun, I decided to defer to whatever that gov agency decided was the best to collect and present that stat when comparing states.

One interesting indicator that was ultimately rejected was 1) a State Gov’s Federal Dependency, ie funding per capita a state receives from the national government.  In some recent debates, states that take the most money are, in a twist of the common phrase, “welfare states.”  However, I couldn’t find direct gov stats, only third party studies (which themselves used such stats).  Similarly, I couldn’t find anything about per capita welfare program participation, except for 2) Food Stamps.  I rejected using this since I didn’t want to be seen as cherry picking this particular program.  Both Indicators are analyzed in the Controversial Indicators post (not yet up).

Note: A political party can do “vastly,” “clearly,” or “slightly” better.

GDP per Capita  –  Democrats do Vastly Better

Median Household Income – Democrats do Vastly Better

Unemployment  –  Democrats do Slightly Better

All People in Poverty  –  Democrats do Vastly Better

Child Poverty  –  Democrats do Vastly Better

Pop Graduated HS  –  Democrats do Slightly Better

Pop Graduated College  –  Democrats do Vastly Better

Homelessness – Republicans do Vastly Better

[Read the rest of the article here]

What I find especially interesting about this analysis is that the poorer States are right-wing.  In the rest of the world, the poor support left-wing parties.  In America, the poor vote for the Republican Party.  Some of that has to do with religion, as the book Deer Hunting with Jesus so cleverly shows.  Some with the resilient but (these days) inaccurate belief that everybody in America can escape poverty if only you work hard enough.  What it means, though, it that the Republican Party is a coalition of the rural precariat and the rich who prey on them.  

One of the reasons America is so strange to outsiders is this bizarre nexus.  Another is the extreme inequality not just within the States, but between them, too.  And the rich keep in power by frightening the (white) poor with bogeymen:  Mexicans, Blacks, "liberals", "elites", "gays", the ungodly; and by dragging people to vote for them using single-issue triggers, like gay marriage, abortion, critical race theory, immigration.  You then engineer your way to electoral victory by gerrymandering and denying poor people and Blacks the vote.

It's no wonder America is so dysfunctional, nor that right-wing parties elsewhere have attempted to follow the American play-book.  After all, most billionaires are perfectly happy to pay less tax than nurses and teachers, and if you can construct a political movement which achieves that, then why not?

American democracy?

 It's extraordinary that this is permitted.  Bizarre.  No wonder so many people don't bother to vote, when the elections are already stitched up.

Americans want reforms to curb gerrymandering

 From The Economist

America’s states are required to redraw their electoral districts every ten years, to take account of changes in the population or new rules on how to delineate districts. After 2010 many Republican state governments passed notoriously biased maps—called “gerrymanders”—which discriminated against voters by their race and partisan affiliation. According to an analysis of election results by The Economist, Democrats in 2010 would have won roughly 213 seats in America’s House of Representatives in a perfectly tied election. After maps were redrawn, they were favoured in just 197.

This time it is Democrats who have gained. Our analysis of new congressional plans shows the party would this year be favoured to win about 211 seats in a perfectly tied election. That is close to the number they would have won in 2010 before the Republican-led gerrymandering, and up from a hypothetical 202 in a tied election in 2020. Their gains are a result of both new rigging, in states such as New York and Illinois, and court cases which have forced Republicans to rethink their own gerrymanders. The new maps also show a decline in competition. In 2020, 44 of the 435 districts in the House were considered competitive (ie, the Democratic candidates’ share of the vote was within five percentage points of the national average in the past two election cycles). After all states submit their new maps, we estimate that just 40 will be.

What can states do to prevent rigging? One idea is to hand over the redistricting process to a nonpartisan commission of citizens who have full power to draft, review and finalise new maps. Four states—Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan—already do this. In the latest round of redistricting, those states submitted maps that were more balanced than they had been in 2020. In a poll conducted by YouGov for The Economist, 63% of American adults said they wanted the maps for their electoral districts to be drawn by independent commissions. More than 60% of Democrats and Republicans supported this. And voters broadly favour other reforms, such as removing lobbyists from the map-making process and requiring input from the public on new boundaries. A majority of Democrats (67%) and Republicans (50%) also want the Supreme Court to smack down partisan gerrymanders. But states have to enact these reforms on their own, and it is in legislators’ interests to keep rigging. What voters want is not so easy to get.

Gerrymandering

A cartoon by Bill Bramhall