Frustrated Republicans looked Wednesday to rebound from another setback in a nationwide redistricting chess match, as the high-stakes contest turned to Florida and the courtroom.
A Democratic victory on Tuesday in Virginia, where voters approved a change to the state’s House map that could give the party up to four more seats in the midterms, left Republicans with little to show for a tit-for-tat they started last year in Texas at the urging of President Trump.
Republicans are holding out hope that Virginia’s top court might reverse Tuesday’s result. And they are eying a chance to gain ground by redrawing the House map in Florida, where they control the governor’s office and hold supermajorities in the Legislature. But there is growing doubt in the party about its broader strategy.
“The two sides spent hundreds of millions dollars to get back to where they started, and in general, it’s turned out to be a net loser for Republicans,” said C. Stewart Verdery Jr., a Republican consultant.
Read the rest here.
Too bad “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” or the GOP would feel the pain of their own voters’s disenfranchisement in blue states and make common cause to enfranchise all voters in all states. Democrats in TX cities and Republicans in Upstate NYS all deserve to have their voices represented in Congress - and politicians who have to argue and compete for their policies. Ranked choice voting for all!
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that the number of congregational seats do not get adjusted with the increase in population. Large districts invite shenanigans. More, smaller districts would better reflect the desires of the population.
DeleteAgree. We need more democracy, not less via gerrymandering. The year the Constitution was ratified, each Representative in the House served between 34,000 and 60,000 residents. (The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, fixed the number of Representatives at 435.) If the ratio of Representative to resident today was set at one representative for every 64,000 residents, the House of Representatives would require ~5,454 members.
Delete(There are higher ratios in the 19th century that we could adopt, as well, but it’s an issue for the Senate, too. We Should consider a variety of solutions that would maintain the difference structure between the house, and the Senate are still increasing democratic representation in Congress. This could include requiring the largest states to split when they get to a certain size larger than the smallest state by population. We could begin adding additional senators and representatives to larger states or districts, thus weighting their votes more representatively. I favor the first option plus ranked choice voting plus electoral synergy as the solution myself.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/us/politics/supreme-court-voting-rights-act.html
ReplyDeleteRanked choice voting for a state’s entire House delegation would sidestep this obviously disingenuous and self-serving political ruling pretending racial discrimination is over (“we elected a black President!”) and supposed race neutrality is neutral when one group of people have been discriminated against right up to today. It’s like declaring a fair race when one marathoner starts miles behind the others.
Ranked choice voting allows actual statewide representation by within the only Constitutionally necessary borders (that of the state itself). There’s no necessity for voting districts, which even when “fairly” drawn disenfranchise minority political voices in that district. Republicans in downstate NYC and upstate Democrats deserve to have their state delegation represent them, too. Add electoral synergy and you can have pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans, as an example, can register their mixed support and dissent as a coalition party.