5 April 2016

More on the Democrats’ lost majorities

Can the Democrats’ lost congressional majorities be attributed solely, or mostly, to Republican gerrymandering — or, as I posited yesterday, is gerrymandering only one of several factors that switched the U.S. House of Representatives to Republican control beginning in 1994, with Democrats winning house majorities only in 2006 and 2008 since then?

Gerrymandering certainly is a large part of the problem. At Salon, David Daley, whose book on redistricting, Ratf**ked, will be published in June, explains how Republican controlled redistricting efforts after the 2000 and 2010 censuses hurt Democrats. Thanks, Pete, for the heads-up on Daley.

At Amazon, incidentally, the price for the Kindle edition is $19.39, just $1.02 less than for the hardcover edition. Talk about getting ratf**ked to read Ratf**ked on your Kindle. (The Seattle Times has more on exorbitant prices for Kindle ebooks at Amazon.)

Squeezing Democrats into districts they win by large majorities, which concentrates the Democratic vote into fewer and fewer districts, is made easier, contends conservative Sean Trende, of Real Clear Politics, by the changing face of the Democratic electorate.

In theory, there are remedies, or at least partial remedies, such as multi-member districts and proportional voting, but to be employed, laws must be changed by Congress and state legislatures. Don’t count on that happening anytime soon. As John Judis noted at Vox in January, Democrats are in deep trouble at the state legislative level as well as at the national level — and they are fools if they think changing demographics will come to their rescue.

In Montana, Democrats may be able to reduce the Republican majority in the Montana House of Representative by a few seats by running good candidates and smart campaigns — in the debacle of 2014, Democrats went from down 22 to down 19 seats — but doing that will require being lucky as well as being good and smart.

Unless Denise Juneau can raise four to five million dollars, and right quick, and spends it effectively, she has better odds of winning the lottery than defeating Ryan Zinke. Her best argument against Zinke, provided the Republicans nominate Cruz or Trump, is that he belongs to and caucuses with a political party that is too dangerous to be trusted with the power to govern. Whether she’ll make that argument is problematical. Today’s Democrats don’t like waging that kind of partisan warfare, not even when it’s effective and necessary. But if they want to seal the deal for a Juneau victory, that’s how to do it.