House popular vote?

[Mr.Phips]

The only remedy for now is pushing initiatives for independent redistricting commissions that will begin their work immediately and not at the end of the decade. One such initiative failed in Ohio that year but it was poorly funded.

If Democrats put real money, time and effort behind it, then it may pass in the next years and even the playing field well before 2022.

Or elect governors in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in 2018.  Without those gerrymanders, Republicans would stand to lose 12-15 seats in those three states alone. 

[politicallefty]

Unfortunately, Ohio defeated the independent redistricting amendment on the ballot. If that had passed, there would have been a huge change in the district lines for 2014. I'm aware that it was somewhat convoluted, but the amendment was destroyed. Was funding really the only problem and is there a shot at trying again in two years with a better proposal and campaign? This seems like one of those good-government ideas that usually wins.

[greenforest32]

The only remedy for now is pushing initiatives for independent redistricting commissions that will begin their work immediately and not at the end of the decade. One such initiative failed in Ohio that year but it was poorly funded.

If Democrats put real money, time and effort behind it, then it may pass in the next years and even the playing field well before 2022.

An outside shot could be a non-conservative majority SCOTUS revisiting the issue and forcing federal or state independently drawn maps on all the states at once.

Probably not too likely but ending it completely will have to be done federally eventually because many states have no initiative systems and thus no chance of ending partisan redistricting without the state legislatures in those states voluntarily ending it.

[morgieb]

Unfortunately, Ohio defeated the independent redistricting amendment on the ballot. If that had passed, there would have been a huge change in the district lines for 2014. I'm aware that it was somewhat convoluted, but the amendment was destroyed. Was funding really the only problem and is there a shot at trying again in two years with a better proposal and campaign? This seems like one of those good-government ideas that usually wins.

The ballot language was like "take powers away from elected officials into a new unelected commission". That would've turned voters against the proposal.

[Landslide Lyndon]

Unfortunately, Ohio defeated the independent redistricting amendment on the ballot. If that had passed, there would have been a huge change in the district lines for 2014. I'm aware that it was somewhat convoluted, but the amendment was destroyed. Was funding really the only problem and is there a shot at trying again in two years with a better proposal and campaign? This seems like one of those good-government ideas that usually wins.

The ballot language was like "take powers away from elected officials into a new unelected commission". That would've turned voters against the proposal.

Yeah, if the Democrats spend money to explain what this means they can very well have a fair map in 2016 and gain 2-3 seats easy.

I don't know if they can do something similar in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

But they don't really want that. They want to be the ones doing the gerrymandering. There's the problem.

[adma]

Re the gerrymandering thing: as long as the vote's so polarized t/w the Dems in urban/minority seats, the Dems'd have a problem w/o counter-gerrymandering.  Look at it this way: it's like Quebec, where the Liberals can outpoll the Bloc Quebecois yet still fall way behind in seat counts because they're "overadvantaged" in Anglo/Allo areas...

[politicallefty]

Unfortunately, Ohio defeated the independent redistricting amendment on the ballot. If that had passed, there would have been a huge change in the district lines for 2014. I'm aware that it was somewhat convoluted, but the amendment was destroyed. Was funding really the only problem and is there a shot at trying again in two years with a better proposal and campaign? This seems like one of those good-government ideas that usually wins.

The ballot language was like "take powers away from elected officials into a new unelected commission". That would've turned voters against the proposal.

Yeah, if the Democrats spend money to explain what this means they can very well have a fair map in 2016 and gain 2-3 seats easy.

I don't know if they can do something similar in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Ohio allows for odd-year ballot initiatives, so they could try again as soon as next year. If they write a better proposal and organize a better campaign, it's certainly possible. Michigan also allows for initiative constitutional amendments, but I'm not sure if it allows for odd-year initiatives. Pennsylvania is a lost cause on that front, since it only has legislatively-referred constitutional amendments. If those three maps were nonpartisan, the House would have at least been within striking distance.

If you compare 2008 with this year: Ohio went from 10D-8R to 4D-12R, Michigan from 8D-7R to 5D-9R, and Pennsylvania from 12D-7R to 5D-13R. The Democrats are down 16 seats and Republicans are up 12. That accounts for almost the entire House Republican Majority right now, just in those three states alone.

Re the gerrymandering thing: as long as the vote's so polarized t/w the Dems in urban/minority seats, the Dems'd have a problem w/o counter-gerrymandering.  Look at it this way: it's like Quebec, where the Liberals can outpoll the Bloc Quebecois yet still fall way behind in seat counts because they're "overadvantaged" in Anglo/Allo areas...

That may be true to a certain extent here, but I think that would easily be overcome without gerrymandering. The current median Cook PVI for Congressional districts is R+3, which is up from R+2 last decade and R+1 the decade before. I think it's pretty clear that the root cause of that is more gerrymandering (and Republicans have tended to get lucky in 00 years in the right states), not to mention software that makes the maps even more solid.

[krazen1211]

Michigan Republicans complied by drawing a map where Barack Obama 2008 won 12 or 14 districts.

Interesting to see how complaints are still in force.

[Miles]

Michigan Republicans complied by drawing a map where Barack Obama 2008 won 12 or 14 districts.

Interesting to see how complaints are still in force.

But many of them still have Republican PVI's and there are entrenched incumbents (like Camp and Upton) that really had no chance of losing.

[politicallefty]

Michigan Republicans complied by drawing a map where Barack Obama 2008 won 12 or 14 districts.

Interesting to see how complaints are still in force.

It's a bad idea to use Obama's 2008 Michigan performance as a judge of any of the district's partisan leanings. That result was obviously not the norm for the state. I would hope you're not arguing that Michigan's map is anything other than a Republican gerrymander (albeit not as bad as Ohio or Pennsylvania).

And I don't see anyone complaining. No one is questioning the legitimacy of the House elections. I'd rather move forward and like to see a push for more independent redistricting (in all states) to even the playing field, as I've said before.

[krazen1211]

Michigan Republicans complied by drawing a map where Barack Obama 2008 won 12 or 14 districts.

Interesting to see how complaints are still in force.

But many of them still have Republican PVI's and there are entrenched incumbents (like Camp and Upton) that really had no chance of losing.

That's true. There are indeed some vicious gerrymanders but outstate Michigan is not one of them.

Upton is in a 50/50 district. The district is not unfair merely because he wins it all the time.

[krazen1211]

Democrats won:

Americans Actually Voted for a Democratic House

Think Progress: "Although a small number of ballots remain to be counted, as of this writing, votes for a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives outweigh votes for Republican candidates... 53,952,240 votes were cast for a Democratic candidate for the House and only 53,402,643 were cast for a Republican -- meaning that Democratic votes exceed Republican votes by more than half a million."

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/11/08/americans_actually_voted_for_a_democratic_house.html

LOL, redistricting by the GOP-controlled states ... P

Instead we have a 235-200 GOP House, or 54%-46% ...

Of course, those 500k votes could easily be made up by the fact that 4 Texas Republicans were unopposed, and 5 sets of California Democrats got 100% of the vote in their districts, among other things.

[rob in cal]

     Time for the Dems to get behind proportional representation?  Heck, we could even have a mini form of PR with a national list of seats that would go to compensate parties that didn't get their proportional share, but with a massive threshold so that only the GOP or Dems would have a shot at it. Come on guys, how long do we have to be wedded to the single member district system. There's a whole different world out there people.

[krazen1211]

This was the PA Senate Dems map.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/75689772/Dems-Congressional-Map


PA House Dems pretty much lined up behind the actual one. Bob Brady, Mike Doyle, and Jason Altmire all endorsed the map. Brady wanted blacks out of his district. I voted for Bob Brady.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Brady wanted blacks out of his district. I voted for Bob Brady.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that these sentences appearing right next to each other is accidental.

Also, the Senate Dem map is genuinely worse than the one Pennsylvania actually got. Wow.

[krazen1211]

Brady wanted blacks out of his district. I voted for Bob Brady.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that these sentences appearing right next to each other is accidental.

Also, the Senate Dem map is genuinely worse than the one Pennsylvania actually got. Wow.

Just presenting the facts for the peanut gallery.


Pennslvania Senate Democrats also complied with Bob Brady's order to remove blacks from his district and add more whites.

See charts.

http://www.azavea.com/blogs/atlas/2011/12/pennsylvania-congressional-redistricting-we-have-a-plan/

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Out of curiosity, why did you vote for Brady? Was his token opponent particularly useless?

[krazen1211]

Well, he seemed like a nice enough congressman and he helped redistricting pass. Just the kind of fellow needed in Washington DC.

[minionofmidas]

Brady wanted blacks out of his district. I voted for Bob Brady.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that these sentences appearing right next to each other is accidental.

Also, the Senate Dem map is genuinely worse than the one Pennsylvania actually got. Wow.

Not really. Bad as it is.

It's basically a sloppily drawn thing apparently based on the premise that the 19th District is to be eliminated since PA doesn't have 19 districts anymore, and the map should stay roughly the same otherwise. Beats me as to why they even proposed it.

Well, he seemed like a nice enough congressman and he helped redistricting pass. Just the kind of fellow needed in Washington DC.

Congressman is just his evening job, of course. His day job is running the Philly Dem machine. (He and Joe Crowley, over in Queens, and now probably Juan Vargas in National City. Part time Congressmen.)

[politicallefty]

Michigan Republicans complied by drawing a map where Barack Obama 2008 won 12 or 14 districts.

Interesting to see how complaints are still in force.

But many of them still have Republican PVI's and there are entrenched incumbents (like Camp and Upton) that really had no chance of losing.

That's true. There are indeed some vicious gerrymanders but outstate Michigan is not one of them.

Upton is in a 50/50 district. The district is not unfair merely because he wins it all the time.

I don't disagree with that. Michigan isn't a vicious gerrymander like Ohio and PA, but I believe that's only because they are constrained by the state constitution where you can't bust apart too many counties and municipalities. It's still a Republican gerrymander though, mild as it may be.

And yes, there are many incumbents that far outperform their district's PVI. Your example is R+1, which on paper would be a highly competitive district.

[rbt48]

Democrats won:

Americans Actually Voted for a Democratic House

Think Progress: "Although a small number of ballots remain to be counted, as of this writing, votes for a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives outweigh votes for Republican candidates... 53,952,240 votes were cast for a Democratic candidate for the House and only 53,402,643 were cast for a Republican -- meaning that Democratic votes exceed Republican votes by more than half a million."

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/11/08/americans_actually_voted_for_a_democratic_house.html

LOL, redistricting by the GOP-controlled states ... P

Instead we have a 235-200 GOP House, or 54%-46% ...

Of course, those 500k votes could easily be made up by the fact that 4 Texas Republicans were unopposed, and 5 sets of California Democrats got 100% of the vote in their districts, among other things.

So, someone tell the truth:  does this ~500K Democratic vote lead in anyway try to account for R or D votes that would have been cast in unopposed districts?  If not, the Democratic victory is a fairy tale.

[Vosem]

Democrats won:

Americans Actually Voted for a Democratic House

Think Progress: "Although a small number of ballots remain to be counted, as of this writing, votes for a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives outweigh votes for Republican candidates... 53,952,240 votes were cast for a Democratic candidate for the House and only 53,402,643 were cast for a Republican -- meaning that Democratic votes exceed Republican votes by more than half a million."

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/11/08/americans_actually_voted_for_a_democratic_house.html

LOL, redistricting by the GOP-controlled states ... P

Instead we have a 235-200 GOP House, or 54%-46% ...

Of course, those 500k votes could easily be made up by the fact that 4 Texas Republicans were unopposed, and 5 sets of California Democrats got 100% of the vote in their districts, among other things.

So, someone tell the truth:  does this ~500K Democratic vote lead in anyway try to account for R or D votes that would have been cast in unopposed districts?  If not, the Democratic victory is a fairy tale.

It doesn't -- since unopposed races are uncounted in some states, it's impossible to tell who 'really' won, but it could very well have been the GOP: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/08/1159272/-Dissecting-the-House-Popular-Vote

[Marokai Backbeat]

Whether or not Democrats would've actually won a House Majority with fairly distributed districts is something we'll never know, but there was a 7% popular vote swing from 2010 toward the House Democrats overall and we're only going to end up with an extra ~9 seats tops (and many of them are super close wins) and a roughly 35 seat Republican majority. Somehow, under better districts, I sincerely doubt it would be that lopsided. The result we probably would've ended up with would look more like the 2000 House result than 2010.

[Vosem]

Whether or not Democrats would've actually won a House Majority with fairly distributed districts is something we'll never know

I doubt it, myself. Democratic vote is much more tightly concentrated than Republican vote, so in a system with districts, a national tie always breaks in favor of the Republicans. Admittedly, not to the extent to which it happened last night, but a Republican majority in the House would still've occurred.

And, yes, the gerrymander becomes even more egregious when you realize Democrats swept a vast majority of the close races and still only gained (a maximum of; assuming McSally or Rouzer or somebody doesn't come from behind) 8 seats.