Originally Posted By Dabob2 The question is not whether they can. It's whether they should, and how convenient it is that only the states that went for Obama but have GOP-led legislatures are looking into it.
Originally Posted By tiggertoo <<A comment on another website raises a good point. If this goes through, it will significantly alter the way campaigns are conducted.>> Of course it would. If, due to gerrymandering, a district is packed with 80% Democrats (the way PA, OH, MI, and VA are)neither party would have any incentive to go there. The same is true of every "safe" seat. There are already very few competitive districts. All this would do is make the swing electorate even smaller.
Originally Posted By mawnck >>All this would do is make the swing electorate even smaller.<< ... but also more regionally dispersed. You can't limit a campaign to just one district. TV and radio buys go out to an entire market. While the actual swing *vote* may be smaller, the ad campaigns will need to be considerably larger to reach them. It'll be interesting to see whether any of the states in question actually go through with this. It's been tried before in some of them. And as I've noted before, I think they're starting to figure out that districts full of crazy people tend to elect crazy people. I can see a scenario where this plan hands over a bunch of delegates to a third party kookoohead, rather than the GOP "RINO" you just know they're going to nominate.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 <... but also more regionally dispersed. > Well, I'm not sure about that. It's true that neither party had to campaign much in the NE, Pacific Coast, or most of the south this time. But the dozen or so swing states did include a lot of midwest, borderline south i.e. VA, FL which is deep south only geographically and NC, and mountain west. I've heard quite a few people say that after 2010 there only only about 30 true swing districts left any more, at least till the 2020 census/redistricting. That's not many for the whole country. This time they at least had to campaign ALL OVER Ohio, for instance (basically, every district, because even if you have a heavily red or blue district, every vote counts overall for the state), ALL OVER Florida, etc. etc. I'm sure they visited more than 30 congressional districts in those 2 states alone. It sucks either way, as most of the country gets ignored. But I think a dozen entire states is less sucky than 30 CD's. If there IS a swing district a non-swing state, yay for them, but the rest of the state still gets ignored.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 Put another way, as much as it sucks that right now 12 states get all the attention (it sucks for the states that get ignored AND for the states that get pelted with campaigning non-stop), it would be even worse if only a few dozen CD's got all the attention. And it would REALLY suck if the gerrymandering were so tight that no amount of campaigning would change the outcome, i.e. one candidate or the other had so many safe districts that the other guy couldn't overcome him even if he took all 30 swing districts. That might not be the case today, but I could easily see it happening if a census year happened to produce a wave even bigger than 2010. Then the results would be locked in for a decade and all the presidential races that decade.
Originally Posted By tiggertoo Regionally, maybe. But demographically? Heck no. Urban voters will be ignored. Most rural votes will be ignored. It would be a fight for suburbia or the few districts that haven’t been carved to favor any particular party. In short, the swing electorate would principally consist of middle class white people in suburban districts. Sure, campaign ads bleed into several districts. But what would the content include? Would a Republican candidate make an appeal to urban votes, or a Democrat make an appeal to rural interests? No, because they don’t have to. The election was fixed in these areas before the campaign began. That’s the whole point of gerrymandering. The premise also assumes that both red and blue states would implement these procedural changes. I’ve seen no evidence this. Ergo, the presidential elections would be gerrymandered to favor Republicans only---the presidency is now a de facto “safe” seat.
Originally Posted By tiggertoo <<I've heard quite a few people say that after 2010 there only only about 30 true swing districts left any more, at least till the 2020 census/redistricting.>> These are the figures I've seen too. So that would amount to 30 electoral votes up for grabs (give or take a few). As bad as things are right now, at least there were between a 160 to 180 reasonable swing electoral votes in 2012.
Originally Posted By mawnck >>We need a non-partisan election commission like they have in Canada.<< ... and California. The most recent redistricting was done by a non-partisan Citizens Redistricting Commission, with the enthusiastic support of the Republicans, who, with typical Republican optimism in the face of reality, were just SURE it would work out in their favor and loosen the grip of the Godless Socialists in Sacramento. (And yes, the Dems, who figured they had nowhere to go but down, were largely opposed.) Surprise! Result was a Dem supermajority in both houses of state government ... and, three years later, a balanced budget. It's great fun watching the Gop twist themselves into pretzels on why the balanced budget is a bad thing. (Their most popular retort is some variation of: "Nananananananana! Not listening! Not listening!") Read all about the commission here: <a href="http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Citizens_Redistricting_Commission" target="_blank">http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/in...mmission</a>
Originally Posted By SingleParkPassholder <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/25/politics/electoral-college/index.html?hpt=hp_t2" target="_blank">http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/25/...pt=hp_t2</a> While Reince Priebus (I'm willing to bet no one else has ever had that namebefore or ever will again, save for maybe his relatives) is "intrigued" by these proposed new electoral changes, it turns out some local officials and governors realize that maybe the idea goes too far, to say the least.
Originally Posted By TomSawyer We also need to take politics out of the design of congressional districts and create them through a computer model that creates the smallest geographic area with the fewest number of sides that covers an equal share of people per district.
