The entirety of this conversation is a master-class in why it's INCREDIBLY obvious that only Democrats are viewed as actually having agency, and Republicans are just gonna "do what they're gonna do".
I mean, this is probably the view among Democrats, which says a lot about themselves and nothing about anyone else. But such beliefs seem typical nowadays. Only Democrats are capable of thought, reason, and empathy. Everything else is the gibbering lunacy of raving madmen.
I mean, on this very page, you called Republican policies being like Scrooge McDuck, as if it was just written in stone. And while the RHETORIC of Trump was supposedly populist, the only meaningful piece of actual legislation was a tax cut funneled to the top. I always heard his populist turn was right around the corner, in regards to healthcare, in regards to stimulus money during the pandemic, and that Trump was going to "outflank the Democrats" on their own issues, and exactly zero of it actually happened. Signing a make-believe payroll tax holiday doesn't count.
And I'll ask this: if someone with the force of personality on the level of Donald Trump couldn't corral Mitch McConnell to pass the policies you would have preferred, then what good was he?? He could have sent one tweet about him and his support in Kentucky would have sunk like an anvil. But he never did. Why??
Folks need to stop citing this point cuz it doesn't mean what you think it does. Every House seat was up for election this year. Democrats won the majority of them. Voters preferred Democrats in their House races by a fair margin.
This isn't the Senate with staggered election and where slow gains are important. Seats can swing wildly election to election. A five seat swing is about as close to consistent election-to-election standing in the House as you will find. By contrast the House swung by forty seats 2016-2018.
Every House seat is up for election every two years. The fact is that the Democrats lost seats compared to 2018. Thus less of a majority. Thus closer to losing the House. I don't see any rosy view for the Democrats to believe that they're going to gain ground in 2022 either. The plain fact is that the election of a President from one party generally swings Congress away from that party in the next election. I'll predict right now that the Republicans will gain the House but lose the Senate in 2022 (the Senate is indicating a trend to the left and the 6 year terms make it lag a bit behind). You heard it here first!
Winning a clear majority in the House in back to back elections is just fine.
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
But, as the essay I linked to said, one party clings to power via these means because it is "dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
As if partisan gerrymandering is a Republican, rather than bipartisan, practice. Our states map was gerrymandered by the D's a couple of years ago.
You are also combining the results of multiple races to come to the conclusion that Democrats unfairly lost out on seats. The far more likely explanation is that Democrats won states with higher populations but didn't win more elections overall. Nobody loses the popular vote but wins the seat here.
Boy. It's very clear to me that Democrats just absolutely hate Republicans. So much so that the guy they just elected to be president was clearly the person most interested in working with Republicans, and ran on a platform of trying to heal the nation.
But please - continue to try to argue that Democrats dont want to work across the aisle. That must instead be the party who recently had the catchphrase "Fuck your feelings".
Other thoughts: "Both sides" is intellectually lazy, and is most often borne out of either ignorance, a desire to seem impartial, or as a justification for your preferred ideology's antics. Both sides in *anything* are capable of being at fault, or responsible for any situation in which they find themselves. The only way to approach that situation in good faith is to breakdown the case for and against either. Appealing to whataboutism is implicitly in bad faith, and isnt instructive.
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
As if partisan gerrymandering is a Republican, rather than bipartisan, practice. Our states map was gerrymandered by the D's a couple of years ago.
You are also combining the results of multiple races to come to the conclusion that Democrats unfairly lost out on seats. The far more likely explanation is that Democrats won states with higher populations but didn't win more elections overall. Nobody loses the popular vote but wins the seat here.
The House numbers aren't fair either, at least not for California. And this is the body that is SUPPOSED to represent based on population. When I did the math on that one in my rundown, I believe it was short at least 6 seats. If you are going to argue that the Senate is totally fair, then the ONLY way to fairly balance that would be to take the population of California, and divide it by the population of the smallest state who has one House rep. Which I did. And they are STILL underrepresented.
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
As if partisan gerrymandering is a Republican, rather than bipartisan, practice. Our states map was gerrymandered by the D's a couple of years ago.
You are also combining the results of multiple races to come to the conclusion that Democrats unfairly lost out on seats. The far more likely explanation is that Democrats won states with higher populations but didn't win more elections overall. Nobody loses the popular vote but wins the seat here.
This is another case of false equivalency. Both sides do it. But both sides do not do it to the same degree.
"Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II."
...
"In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans"
...
"Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats and the average mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans exactly matched the newly elected delegation. Notably, California voters took redistricting out of legislators’ hands by creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission."
The whole article is worth your time.
Again, the Electoral College is allowed to be anti-democratic for reasons according to conservatives. So is the Senate. And now when the House is also not democratic... that's just fine. It's almost like certain folks don't want the majority to have a voice in governing for some reason.
The entirety of this conversation is a master-class in why it's INCREDIBLY obvious that only Democrats are viewed as actually having agency, and Republicans are just gonna "do what they're gonna do".
I mean, this is probably the view among Democrats, which says a lot about themselves and nothing about anyone else. But such beliefs seem typical nowadays. Only Democrats are capable of thought, reason, and empathy. Everything else is the gibbering lunacy of raving madmen.
I mean, on this very page, you called Republican policies being like Scrooge McDuck, as if it was just written in stone. And while the RHETORIC of Trump was supposedly populist, the only meaningful piece of actual legislation was a tax cut funneled to the top. I always heard his populist turn was right around the corner, in regards to healthcare, in regards to stimulus money during the pandemic, and that Trump was going to "outflank the Democrats" on their own issues, and exactly zero of it actually happened. Signing a make-believe payroll tax holiday doesn't count.
And I'll ask this: if someone with the force of personality on the level of Donald Trump couldn't corral Mitch McConnell to pass the policies you would have preferred, then what good was he?? He could have sent one tweet about him and his support in Kentucky would have sunk like an anvil. But he never did. Why??
I can't see how you could call his handling of stimulus money as bad. The emergency unemployment + stimulus money was over 10k altogether if you were on it the whole time. I should know, I was. The fact that they were even in negotiations for another one, rather than chanting the mantra of austerity, was a step in the right direction.
But I largely agree with you that Trump governed as a stock Republican ultimately, which is one of the reasons I believe he lost. I just simply believe the solution is to elect Republicans who are more like 2016 Trump than Any Time Mitch McConnell.
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
As if partisan gerrymandering is a Republican, rather than bipartisan, practice. Our states map was gerrymandered by the D's a couple of years ago.
You are also combining the results of multiple races to come to the conclusion that Democrats unfairly lost out on seats. The far more likely explanation is that Democrats won states with higher populations but didn't win more elections overall. Nobody loses the popular vote but wins the seat here.
This is another case of false equivalency. Both sides do it. But both sides do not do it to the same degree.
"Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II."
...
"In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans"
...
"Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats and the average mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans exactly matched the newly elected delegation. Notably, California voters took redistricting out of legislators’ hands by creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission."
The whole article is worth your time.
Again, the Electoral College is allowed to be anti-democratic for reasons according to conservatives. So is the Senate. And now when the House is also not democratic... that's just fine. It's almost like certain folks don't want the majority to have a voice in governing for some reason.
Opinion section, his own "unique analysis", never heard of the guy so he has no reputation with me, I take it with a grain of salt. Maybe his set of unexamined conjectures is accurate, maybe it's not, but from where i'm standing it's opinion, not fact.
Jesus christ, I'm saying it's BEEN tried, ad nauseam, and that I'm PERSONALLY sick of it because it NEVER works and is NEVER reciprocated.
You also said it was the only thing that could work, and that is why I was interested in asking further questions about your viewpoint. Reading more into it than that was error on your part. I apologise for giving you the wrong impression.
It's pretty clear to me your only goal here is to dissect everyone's posts line by line, scoring the exact "points" you accuse us of wanting to score on Republicans.
Against that, I present that I just conceded the entire "Republics are 100% to blame" thing to you in an attempt to get you to engage in fruitful discussion... which isn't really in line with an attempt to score valuable internet debate points, right?
I don't really think anything can "work", and if you'd just cared to ask it, I would have told you two hours ago. The only thing that can currently be done with the chess board as it is currently laid out is 4-8 years of damage mitigation and harm reduction in the most basic sense. That's it. That's best case scenario for Democrats. That's how little we are asking for and will accept at this point.
So, what do you think is the endgame of this scenario? If nothing can "work", then... what? War?
Are you going to offer a single solution to your own question, or are we just puppets on your string in this conversation??
As I already said, what I'm trying to do here is get a common ground for discussion of solutions. Not only is presenting my own solution unnecessary for this, it would be actively harmful to my intent to do so, as it would simply lead to discussion of that solution rather than the underlying problem. As evidence, I present that you preemptively attacked the solution ("outreach") that you merely assumed I had.
To put things another way, it is not necessary for me to have a solution to a problem for me to recognise that a problem exists. If I say "I have no idea what the solution is", it doesn't invalidate anything I've said or make my concern ungenuine.
You could actually ask me my thoughts on something specific if you genuinely want to know them, just like I did to you. But I can't answer "are you going to offer a single solution to your own question" until we define a shared ground of agreement (even if just for the sake of argument). I mean, am I supposed to answer based on your assumptions or my own? I can say that I have no single simple solution, but I do have some thoughts about what things both sides could ask themselves if they accepted that the current situation is untenable and dangerous for the country.
Solution? Simple. Everybody open up their minds a bit more and see things from 'the other's' perspective. How to get people to do that? No fucking clue.
I was able to do it though. The main reasons I didn't vote for Donald Dickhead this time around are still posting in this thread...
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
As if partisan gerrymandering is a Republican, rather than bipartisan, practice. Our states map was gerrymandered by the D's a couple of years ago.
You are also combining the results of multiple races to come to the conclusion that Democrats unfairly lost out on seats. The far more likely explanation is that Democrats won states with higher populations but didn't win more elections overall. Nobody loses the popular vote but wins the seat here.
This is another case of false equivalency. Both sides do it. But both sides do not do it to the same degree.
"Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II."
...
"In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans"
...
"Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats and the average mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans exactly matched the newly elected delegation. Notably, California voters took redistricting out of legislators’ hands by creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission."
The whole article is worth your time.
Again, the Electoral College is allowed to be anti-democratic for reasons according to conservatives. So is the Senate. And now when the House is also not democratic... that's just fine. It's almost like certain folks don't want the majority to have a voice in governing for some reason.
Opinion section, his own "unique analysis", never heard of the guy so he has no reputation with me, I take it with a grain of salt. Maybe his set of unexamined conjectures is accurate, maybe it's not, but from where i'm standing it's opinion, not fact.
The numbers cited in the article are not opinions.
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
As if partisan gerrymandering is a Republican, rather than bipartisan, practice. Our states map was gerrymandered by the D's a couple of years ago.
You are also combining the results of multiple races to come to the conclusion that Democrats unfairly lost out on seats. The far more likely explanation is that Democrats won states with higher populations but didn't win more elections overall. Nobody loses the popular vote but wins the seat here.
This is another case of false equivalency. Both sides do it. But both sides do not do it to the same degree.
"Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II."
...
"In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans"
...
"Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats and the average mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans exactly matched the newly elected delegation. Notably, California voters took redistricting out of legislators’ hands by creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission."
The whole article is worth your time.
Again, the Electoral College is allowed to be anti-democratic for reasons according to conservatives. So is the Senate. And now when the House is also not democratic... that's just fine. It's almost like certain folks don't want the majority to have a voice in governing for some reason.
Opinion section, his own "unique analysis", never heard of the guy so he has no reputation with me, I take it with a grain of salt. Maybe his set of unexamined conjectures is accurate, maybe it's not, but from where i'm standing it's opinion, not fact.
I have to say, this response really seems apropos of the entire discussion we're having/ You argued that "both sides" engage in partisan gerrymandering (they do). Dino explained how it's fundamentally unequal (which is speaks wonderfully to the past 2 or 200 pages of this thread, I've lost count) and your response was... "I dont like your source's math". Which is verifiable and would either prove (or more likely, disprove) your claim.
Folks need to stop citing this point cuz it doesn't mean what you think it does. Every House seat was up for election this year. Democrats won the majority of them. Voters preferred Democrats in their House races by a fair margin.
And yet, by less of a margin than they did in 2018, despite Trump's utter failure to competently control a pandemic.
What does that portend, for the dream of permanent Democratic domination until Republicans learn to face reality?
Based on your political knowledge, I think you very well know that comparing a midterm against a full election is apples and oranges. The midterm is usually significantly better for the party out of power. I genuinely believe comparing 2016 vs 2020 is far more instructive than 2018 and 2020.
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
As if partisan gerrymandering is a Republican, rather than bipartisan, practice. Our states map was gerrymandered by the D's a couple of years ago.
You are also combining the results of multiple races to come to the conclusion that Democrats unfairly lost out on seats. The far more likely explanation is that Democrats won states with higher populations but didn't win more elections overall. Nobody loses the popular vote but wins the seat here.
This is another case of false equivalency. Both sides do it. But both sides do not do it to the same degree.
"Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II."
...
"In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans"
...
"Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats and the average mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans exactly matched the newly elected delegation. Notably, California voters took redistricting out of legislators’ hands by creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission."
The whole article is worth your time.
Again, the Electoral College is allowed to be anti-democratic for reasons according to conservatives. So is the Senate. And now when the House is also not democratic... that's just fine. It's almost like certain folks don't want the majority to have a voice in governing for some reason.
Opinion section, his own "unique analysis", never heard of the guy so he has no reputation with me, I take it with a grain of salt. Maybe his set of unexamined conjectures is accurate, maybe it's not, but from where i'm standing it's opinion, not fact.
I have to say, this response really seems apropos of the entire discussion we're having/ You argued that "both sides" engage in partisan gerrymandering (they do). Dino explained how it's fundamentally unequal (which is speaks wonderfully to the past 2 or 200 pages of this thread, I've lost count) and your response was... "I dont like your source's math". Which is verifiable and would either prove (or more likely, disprove) your claim.
Which is, sadly, why Liberals are doomed to flail away at real power but never quite get there. Do you really think you're going to appeal to people on the right with logic? How about this? Do you really think that everybody that is voting for you is doing it because they think you're so logical, or is it maybe because you're offering them free shit? You disparage the education levels of the right, while totally ignoring the bad, or worse education levels of a great many of your followers. The uneducated masses in the inner-cities are voting for you because they think your brains are bigger? I don't think so. I think that the uneducated masses on the right are correctly assuming that they're going to be the ones paying for the uneducated masses on the left's free shit.
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
As if partisan gerrymandering is a Republican, rather than bipartisan, practice. Our states map was gerrymandered by the D's a couple of years ago.
You are also combining the results of multiple races to come to the conclusion that Democrats unfairly lost out on seats. The far more likely explanation is that Democrats won states with higher populations but didn't win more elections overall. Nobody loses the popular vote but wins the seat here.
This is another case of false equivalency. Both sides do it. But both sides do not do it to the same degree.
"Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II."
...
"In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans"
...
"Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats and the average mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans exactly matched the newly elected delegation. Notably, California voters took redistricting out of legislators’ hands by creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission."
The whole article is worth your time.
Again, the Electoral College is allowed to be anti-democratic for reasons according to conservatives. So is the Senate. And now when the House is also not democratic... that's just fine. It's almost like certain folks don't want the majority to have a voice in governing for some reason.
Opinion section, his own "unique analysis", never heard of the guy so he has no reputation with me, I take it with a grain of salt. Maybe his set of unexamined conjectures is accurate, maybe it's not, but from where i'm standing it's opinion, not fact.
I have to say, this response really seems apropos of the entire discussion we're having/ You argued that "both sides" engage in partisan gerrymandering (they do). Dino explained how it's fundamentally unequal (which is speaks wonderfully to the past 2 or 200 pages of this thread, I've lost count) and your response was... "I dont like your source's math". Which is verifiable and would either prove (or more likely, disprove) your claim.
Verifiable, yes. Verified, no. You're essentially trying to push opinion as fact. The source admits it is his own methods he is using, and he has not verified any of it with anyone. His methods themselves are questionable, such as the assumption of a uniform voting rate across all districts compared to the previous election cycle, highly unlikely in any election.
Ultimately, one article in the opinion section of a liberal newspaper spouting unverified numbers gained by questionable methods from an unknown person of questionable repute on these matters doesn't make a factual case for gerrymandering being a one sided deal when it is not. If that is convincing to you, I think your standards of evidence are remarkably low as long as the information is self serving.
Not only that, but I only have to go into the comment sections to see people picking his analysis apart. Neither me or you remember the 2013 elections very well, I imagine, but i'm certain the posters during that year did.
"The anomalous results in Arizona, where Democrats received only 43% of the House popular vote (vs. 52% for Republicans), yet won 5 out of 9 seats, arguably arose from a different cause. After the chair of the independent redistricting commission was fired by Gov. Jan Brewer, but reinstated by the Arizona Supreme Court, no Republican candidate ran in District 7, the state's most heavily Democratic one. This district covers southwestern Arizona, Yuma, and the largest part of the border with Mexico, is majority Hispanic, and contains seven sovereign Native American nations. Democratic incumbent Ed Pastor won with 82% of the vote, vs. 18% for his Libertarian opponent. Of the remaining districts, Republicans won 4 with large margins and Democrats won 4 with relatively small margins. Although some might claim, with Gov. Brewer, that the redistricting commission engaged in gerrymandering, a more plausible explanation is that the Arizona Republican Party acknowledged the toxicity of its brand in that part of the state, and directed its campaign resources elsewhere. "
Folks need to stop citing this point cuz it doesn't mean what you think it does. Every House seat was up for election this year. Democrats won the majority of them. Voters preferred Democrats in their House races by a fair margin.
And yet, by less of a margin than they did in 2018, despite Trump's utter failure to competently control a pandemic.
What does that portend, for the dream of permanent Democratic domination until Republicans learn to face reality?
I see no reason to try and predict 2022 based on 2020. So I don't think it portends anything at all. We're going to likely be in a post-vaccine world in 2022, one that will probably have a bunch of other issues being more salient than the ones we're worried about right now. Back to back comfortable House majorities is literally the least pressing issue on the federal level.
I wish Trump's response to the pandemic had hurt him and the party more because it's been so bad. But a number of governors are hugely popular despite obvious missteps (Cuomo) so I don't see evidence that the pandemic really hurt Trump. Frankly where he finished in the vote count is not too different from where matchup polls had him against Biden back in early 2020.
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
As if partisan gerrymandering is a Republican, rather than bipartisan, practice. Our states map was gerrymandered by the D's a couple of years ago.
You are also combining the results of multiple races to come to the conclusion that Democrats unfairly lost out on seats. The far more likely explanation is that Democrats won states with higher populations but didn't win more elections overall. Nobody loses the popular vote but wins the seat here.
This is another case of false equivalency. Both sides do it. But both sides do not do it to the same degree.
"Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II."
...
"In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans"
...
"Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats and the average mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans exactly matched the newly elected delegation. Notably, California voters took redistricting out of legislators’ hands by creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission."
The whole article is worth your time.
Again, the Electoral College is allowed to be anti-democratic for reasons according to conservatives. So is the Senate. And now when the House is also not democratic... that's just fine. It's almost like certain folks don't want the majority to have a voice in governing for some reason.
Opinion section, his own "unique analysis", never heard of the guy so he has no reputation with me, I take it with a grain of salt. Maybe his set of unexamined conjectures is accurate, maybe it's not, but from where i'm standing it's opinion, not fact.
I have to say, this response really seems apropos of the entire discussion we're having/ You argued that "both sides" engage in partisan gerrymandering (they do). Dino explained how it's fundamentally unequal (which is speaks wonderfully to the past 2 or 200 pages of this thread, I've lost count) and your response was... "I dont like your source's math". Which is verifiable and would either prove (or more likely, disprove) your claim.
Which is, sadly, why Liberals are doomed to flail away at real power but never quite get there. Do you really think you're going to appeal to people on the right with logic? How about this? Do you really think that everybody that is voting for you is doing it because they think you're so logical, or is it maybe because you're offering them free shit? You disparage the education levels of the right, while totally ignoring the bad, or worse education levels of a great many of your followers. The uneducated masses in the inner-cities are voting for you because they think your brains are bigger? I don't think so. I think that the uneducated masses on the right are correctly assuming that they're going to be the ones paying for the uneducated masses on the left's free shit.
Well...
First - I'm not sure where I fit in all of that. I'm just pointing out how the macro argument just repeated itself in micro here in the thread, which I find to be a bit amusing.
Second - I dont think your framing is really accurate or appropriate here. I dont see it as "free shit". I expect to pay for it with increased taxes. Also, the services I would like to see the government provide doesnt need to be "the left's" or "the right's". If you told me 75% of people who are currently benefiting from the ACA were conservative, I'd be happy that they were getting health insurance when they previously had none.
I support concepts like free college tuition, government paid healthcare and social safety nets, and I have absolutely zero issue with those resources benefiting conservatives of liberals (or vice versa).
As for who is paying for it? I want to emphatically state that I dont particularly care who is paying for it, but you should know that cities are the drivers for the majority of economic output in the country. If the cities are more often liberal, then it seems apparent that they will be the ones paying.
I point that out only to indicate that I dont think that there is some burden being placed upon conservatives to uplift liberals. I dont personally care who the burden is placed upon, so long as the uplifting is done fairly and equivalently for all those who need it.
Ultimately, one article in the opinion section of a liberal newspaper spouting unverified numbers gained by questionable methods from an unknown person of questionable repute on these matters doesn't make a factual case for gerrymandering being a one sided deal when it is not. If that is convincing to you, I think your standards of evidence are remarkably low as long as the information is self serving.
As opposed to making a bunch of personal attacks on the newspaper and its writer, you could have easily spent this time verifying the North Carolina state numbers, which was the author's most egregious example of gerrymandering. You chose instead to opt for personal attacks.
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
As if partisan gerrymandering is a Republican, rather than bipartisan, practice. Our states map was gerrymandered by the D's a couple of years ago.
You are also combining the results of multiple races to come to the conclusion that Democrats unfairly lost out on seats. The far more likely explanation is that Democrats won states with higher populations but didn't win more elections overall. Nobody loses the popular vote but wins the seat here.
This is another case of false equivalency. Both sides do it. But both sides do not do it to the same degree.
"Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II."
...
"In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans"
...
"Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats and the average mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans exactly matched the newly elected delegation. Notably, California voters took redistricting out of legislators’ hands by creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission."
The whole article is worth your time.
Again, the Electoral College is allowed to be anti-democratic for reasons according to conservatives. So is the Senate. And now when the House is also not democratic... that's just fine. It's almost like certain folks don't want the majority to have a voice in governing for some reason.
Opinion section, his own "unique analysis", never heard of the guy so he has no reputation with me, I take it with a grain of salt. Maybe his set of unexamined conjectures is accurate, maybe it's not, but from where i'm standing it's opinion, not fact.
I have to say, this response really seems apropos of the entire discussion we're having/ You argued that "both sides" engage in partisan gerrymandering (they do). Dino explained how it's fundamentally unequal (which is speaks wonderfully to the past 2 or 200 pages of this thread, I've lost count) and your response was... "I dont like your source's math". Which is verifiable and would either prove (or more likely, disprove) your claim.
Which is, sadly, why Liberals are doomed to flail away at real power but never quite get there. Do you really think you're going to appeal to people on the right with logic?
Yes. They should. Besides basic human kindness it's the only way to appeal to people long term.
But pushing what amounts to allegations as fact, instead of acknowledging them as merely potentially factual, isn't logical, it's partisan and dogmatic.
I support concepts like free college tuition, government paid healthcare and social safety nets, and I have absolutely zero issue with those resources benefiting conservatives of liberals (or vice versa).
What makes you think the Democratic Party is going to get you there? They didn't give free healthcare or education to the masses when they had a majority and they won't the next time. In fact, the elements of the party who most sincerely push for those things are actively sabotaged. The Democratic Party is a tightly controlled machine and the progressives are on the outside, given only token victories that never deal with economic reform.
Based on your political knowledge, I think you very well know that comparing a midterm against a full election is apples and oranges. The midterm is usually significantly better for the party out of power. I genuinely believe comparing 2016 vs 2020 is far more instructive than 2018 and 2020.
It's hardly "apples and oranges". They are, to extend the analogy, different cultivars of apple. For starters, both 2018 and 2020 were essentially campaigns against Trump on the Democratic side.
But okay, let's compare 2016 and 2020. My feeling is that they were both firm but electorally fragile victories decided by thin margins (slightly less thin in Biden's case, of course) in a small number of states. Trump's clearly did not make him unassailable. Biden's wont, either (this is particularly true since Trump was an unusually bad president, and also unusual in a few other ways - a "typical Republican" in a year without Covid-19 might have handily won reelection, given the fundamentals of the economy, historical voting patterns, etc.). Control will continue to swing between the two parties for the forseeable future (I would add "usually on eight year cycles", but it is not certain Biden will run again in four years, which would make reelection less likely as, for sake of argument, Kamala Harris would not have all the advantages of a typical incumbent).
You do this a lot, framing an argument and hedging on a distinction without meaning. I dont think it meaningfully helps your argument. Apples and oranges is an idiom, and cultivars of apples is not (at least, not that I've ever heard). There is a clear distinction between the two, and comparing the results between the two ignores an enormous number of factors. You yourself (unless I am much mistaken) have already made a prediction on how 2022 will go, based on the traditionally held idea that the out party overperforms in midterms.
In the second bit, you failed to even bring this back and address the issue: The house vote: While we certainly do not have a tally today, the GOP won the popular vote for the house in 2016 (despite Clinton winning the popular vote for presidency). It looks likely that the Democrats will have won the popular vote in 2020. The house differential between the two will be something like 30 or 20-something seats when it all plays out.
Boy. It's very clear to me that Democrats just absolutely hate Republicans. So much so that the guy they just elected to be president was clearly the person most interested in working with Republicans, and ran on a platform of trying to heal the nation.
Well, if we're going to be fair here... would literally anybody like to push the position that "hooray Joe Biden" (or "boo Joe Biden") motivated a significant number of people to vote compared to "boo Donald Trump" or "yay Donald Trump"? Because that doesn't reflect the polling I've seen.
IOW, his platform in this respect isn't all that relevent to his vote totals.
With that being said, polling does show that pluralities or majorities of Democrats (and Republicans!) both approve of the idea of their elected leaders reaching across the aisle and compromising with the other side. Finding what specific compromises they are agreeable to is more tricky.
He was selected in a primary. If the Democrats wanted to nominate a candidate that was the "fuck Donald Trump" candidate, they could have chosen someone other than Joe Biden. This why I explicitly said it was the Democrats who made this choice, rather than the nation. The primary looms large here.
I support concepts like free college tuition, government paid healthcare and social safety nets, and I have absolutely zero issue with those resources benefiting conservatives of liberals (or vice versa).
What makes you think the Democratic Party is going to get you there? They didn't give free healthcare or education to the masses when they had a majority and they won't the next time. In fact, the elements of the party who most sincerely push for those things are actively sabotaged. The Democratic Party is a tightly controlled machine and the progressives are on the outside, given only token victories that never deal with economic reform.
They're the only ones even trying? I mean, it's part of their platform, and it's nominally what they say they want. My brand of activism is to support the political party that is closest to doing what I think should be done, and then actively trying to push them in a direct that they will start doing those things. That means I typically vote in primaries for progressives, and other people who signal that they'll move the country in the direction I want.
These are all just claims to be fair, but it highlights how obscurantist saying "both sides do it" is.
You have a wrap up of nationwide lawsuits on the issue. On the Democratic side you have *one* House district in Maryland. And a prison case in Connecticut that isn't partisan at all.
On the Republican side you have *ten* states where multiple districts or in some cases the whole maps are being challenged.
I can already see the complaint coming that these are just allegations. But then, the one Maryland district that was marshaled as evidence of "both sides" being culpable is also a mere allegation.
I can already see the complaint coming that these are just allegations. But then, the one Maryland district that was marshaled as evidence of "both sides" being culpable is also a mere allegation.
Yes, and it's a valid one. The Democrats had a very specific reason for going through with those lawsuits at this time, namely, to increase their chances of winning this past election. Your own source even says this is their motivation. No surprise that so many of these were heavily contested states this election.
So yeah, i'd say Democrats had far more incentive to be challenging maps on the mere possibility that they could squeak out a win.
Why is it that allegations are so desperately wanted to be accepted as true before verification? Mere time will tell.
Comments
I mean, on this very page, you called Republican policies being like Scrooge McDuck, as if it was just written in stone. And while the RHETORIC of Trump was supposedly populist, the only meaningful piece of actual legislation was a tax cut funneled to the top. I always heard his populist turn was right around the corner, in regards to healthcare, in regards to stimulus money during the pandemic, and that Trump was going to "outflank the Democrats" on their own issues, and exactly zero of it actually happened. Signing a make-believe payroll tax holiday doesn't count.
And I'll ask this: if someone with the force of personality on the level of Donald Trump couldn't corral Mitch McConnell to pass the policies you would have preferred, then what good was he?? He could have sent one tweet about him and his support in Kentucky would have sunk like an anvil. But he never did. Why??
Winning a clear majority in the House in back to back elections is just fine.
And partisan gerrymandering in several states makes the House tilt slightly more Republican than it should. (In 2012 Democrats won the most votes but not the most seats).
But, as the essay I linked to said, one party clings to power via these means because it is "dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
As if partisan gerrymandering is a Republican, rather than bipartisan, practice. Our states map was gerrymandered by the D's a couple of years ago.
You are also combining the results of multiple races to come to the conclusion that Democrats unfairly lost out on seats. The far more likely explanation is that Democrats won states with higher populations but didn't win more elections overall. Nobody loses the popular vote but wins the seat here.
But please - continue to try to argue that Democrats dont want to work across the aisle. That must instead be the party who recently had the catchphrase "Fuck your feelings".
Other thoughts: "Both sides" is intellectually lazy, and is most often borne out of either ignorance, a desire to seem impartial, or as a justification for your preferred ideology's antics. Both sides in *anything* are capable of being at fault, or responsible for any situation in which they find themselves. The only way to approach that situation in good faith is to breakdown the case for and against either. Appealing to whataboutism is implicitly in bad faith, and isnt instructive.
The House numbers aren't fair either, at least not for California. And this is the body that is SUPPOSED to represent based on population. When I did the math on that one in my rundown, I believe it was short at least 6 seats. If you are going to argue that the Senate is totally fair, then the ONLY way to fairly balance that would be to take the population of California, and divide it by the population of the smallest state who has one House rep. Which I did. And they are STILL underrepresented.
Edit: scratch that, they are short TWELVE seats.
This is another case of false equivalency. Both sides do it. But both sides do not do it to the same degree.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/the-great-gerrymander-of-2012.html
"Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II."
...
"In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans"
...
"Surprisingly absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the two-party vote went to Democrats and the average mock delegation of 38 Democrats and 15 Republicans exactly matched the newly elected delegation. Notably, California voters took redistricting out of legislators’ hands by creating the California Citizens Redistricting Commission."
The whole article is worth your time.
Again, the Electoral College is allowed to be anti-democratic for reasons according to conservatives. So is the Senate. And now when the House is also not democratic... that's just fine. It's almost like certain folks don't want the majority to have a voice in governing for some reason.
I can't see how you could call his handling of stimulus money as bad. The emergency unemployment + stimulus money was over 10k altogether if you were on it the whole time. I should know, I was. The fact that they were even in negotiations for another one, rather than chanting the mantra of austerity, was a step in the right direction.
But I largely agree with you that Trump governed as a stock Republican ultimately, which is one of the reasons I believe he lost. I just simply believe the solution is to elect Republicans who are more like 2016 Trump than Any Time Mitch McConnell.
Opinion section, his own "unique analysis", never heard of the guy so he has no reputation with me, I take it with a grain of salt. Maybe his set of unexamined conjectures is accurate, maybe it's not, but from where i'm standing it's opinion, not fact.
Solution? Simple. Everybody open up their minds a bit more and see things from 'the other's' perspective. How to get people to do that? No fucking clue.
I was able to do it though. The main reasons I didn't vote for Donald Dickhead this time around are still posting in this thread...
The numbers cited in the article are not opinions.
I have to say, this response really seems apropos of the entire discussion we're having/ You argued that "both sides" engage in partisan gerrymandering (they do). Dino explained how it's fundamentally unequal (which is speaks wonderfully to the past 2 or 200 pages of this thread, I've lost count) and your response was... "I dont like your source's math". Which is verifiable and would either prove (or more likely, disprove) your claim.
Based on your political knowledge, I think you very well know that comparing a midterm against a full election is apples and oranges. The midterm is usually significantly better for the party out of power. I genuinely believe comparing 2016 vs 2020 is far more instructive than 2018 and 2020.
Which is, sadly, why Liberals are doomed to flail away at real power but never quite get there. Do you really think you're going to appeal to people on the right with logic? How about this? Do you really think that everybody that is voting for you is doing it because they think you're so logical, or is it maybe because you're offering them free shit? You disparage the education levels of the right, while totally ignoring the bad, or worse education levels of a great many of your followers. The uneducated masses in the inner-cities are voting for you because they think your brains are bigger? I don't think so. I think that the uneducated masses on the right are correctly assuming that they're going to be the ones paying for the uneducated masses on the left's free shit.
Verifiable, yes. Verified, no. You're essentially trying to push opinion as fact. The source admits it is his own methods he is using, and he has not verified any of it with anyone. His methods themselves are questionable, such as the assumption of a uniform voting rate across all districts compared to the previous election cycle, highly unlikely in any election.
Ultimately, one article in the opinion section of a liberal newspaper spouting unverified numbers gained by questionable methods from an unknown person of questionable repute on these matters doesn't make a factual case for gerrymandering being a one sided deal when it is not. If that is convincing to you, I think your standards of evidence are remarkably low as long as the information is self serving.
Not only that, but I only have to go into the comment sections to see people picking his analysis apart. Neither me or you remember the 2013 elections very well, I imagine, but i'm certain the posters during that year did.
"The anomalous results in Arizona, where Democrats received only 43% of the House popular vote (vs. 52% for Republicans), yet won 5 out of 9 seats, arguably arose from a different cause. After the chair of the independent redistricting commission was fired by Gov. Jan Brewer, but reinstated by the Arizona Supreme Court, no Republican candidate ran in District 7, the state's most heavily Democratic one. This district covers southwestern Arizona, Yuma, and the largest part of the border with Mexico, is majority Hispanic, and contains seven sovereign Native American nations. Democratic incumbent Ed Pastor won with 82% of the vote, vs. 18% for his Libertarian opponent. Of the remaining districts, Republicans won 4 with large margins and Democrats won 4 with relatively small margins. Although some might claim, with Gov. Brewer, that the redistricting commission engaged in gerrymandering, a more plausible explanation is that the Arizona Republican Party acknowledged the toxicity of its brand in that part of the state, and directed its campaign resources elsewhere. "
I see no reason to try and predict 2022 based on 2020. So I don't think it portends anything at all. We're going to likely be in a post-vaccine world in 2022, one that will probably have a bunch of other issues being more salient than the ones we're worried about right now. Back to back comfortable House majorities is literally the least pressing issue on the federal level.
I wish Trump's response to the pandemic had hurt him and the party more because it's been so bad. But a number of governors are hugely popular despite obvious missteps (Cuomo) so I don't see evidence that the pandemic really hurt Trump. Frankly where he finished in the vote count is not too different from where matchup polls had him against Biden back in early 2020.
Well...
First - I'm not sure where I fit in all of that. I'm just pointing out how the macro argument just repeated itself in micro here in the thread, which I find to be a bit amusing.
Second - I dont think your framing is really accurate or appropriate here. I dont see it as "free shit". I expect to pay for it with increased taxes. Also, the services I would like to see the government provide doesnt need to be "the left's" or "the right's". If you told me 75% of people who are currently benefiting from the ACA were conservative, I'd be happy that they were getting health insurance when they previously had none.
I support concepts like free college tuition, government paid healthcare and social safety nets, and I have absolutely zero issue with those resources benefiting conservatives of liberals (or vice versa).
As for who is paying for it? I want to emphatically state that I dont particularly care who is paying for it, but you should know that cities are the drivers for the majority of economic output in the country. If the cities are more often liberal, then it seems apparent that they will be the ones paying.
I point that out only to indicate that I dont think that there is some burden being placed upon conservatives to uplift liberals. I dont personally care who the burden is placed upon, so long as the uplifting is done fairly and equivalently for all those who need it.
As opposed to making a bunch of personal attacks on the newspaper and its writer, you could have easily spent this time verifying the North Carolina state numbers, which was the author's most egregious example of gerrymandering. You chose instead to opt for personal attacks.
Yes. They should. Besides basic human kindness it's the only way to appeal to people long term.
But pushing what amounts to allegations as fact, instead of acknowledging them as merely potentially factual, isn't logical, it's partisan and dogmatic.
What makes you think the Democratic Party is going to get you there? They didn't give free healthcare or education to the masses when they had a majority and they won't the next time. In fact, the elements of the party who most sincerely push for those things are actively sabotaged. The Democratic Party is a tightly controlled machine and the progressives are on the outside, given only token victories that never deal with economic reform.
You do this a lot, framing an argument and hedging on a distinction without meaning. I dont think it meaningfully helps your argument. Apples and oranges is an idiom, and cultivars of apples is not (at least, not that I've ever heard). There is a clear distinction between the two, and comparing the results between the two ignores an enormous number of factors. You yourself (unless I am much mistaken) have already made a prediction on how 2022 will go, based on the traditionally held idea that the out party overperforms in midterms.
In the second bit, you failed to even bring this back and address the issue: The house vote: While we certainly do not have a tally today, the GOP won the popular vote for the house in 2016 (despite Clinton winning the popular vote for presidency). It looks likely that the Democrats will have won the popular vote in 2020. The house differential between the two will be something like 30 or 20-something seats when it all plays out.
Meaningful differences.
He was selected in a primary. If the Democrats wanted to nominate a candidate that was the "fuck Donald Trump" candidate, they could have chosen someone other than Joe Biden. This why I explicitly said it was the Democrats who made this choice, rather than the nation. The primary looms large here.
They're the only ones even trying? I mean, it's part of their platform, and it's nominally what they say they want. My brand of activism is to support the political party that is closest to doing what I think should be done, and then actively trying to push them in a direct that they will start doing those things. That means I typically vote in primaries for progressives, and other people who signal that they'll move the country in the direction I want.
These are all just claims to be fair, but it highlights how obscurantist saying "both sides do it" is.
You have a wrap up of nationwide lawsuits on the issue. On the Democratic side you have *one* House district in Maryland. And a prison case in Connecticut that isn't partisan at all.
On the Republican side you have *ten* states where multiple districts or in some cases the whole maps are being challenged.
I can already see the complaint coming that these are just allegations. But then, the one Maryland district that was marshaled as evidence of "both sides" being culpable is also a mere allegation.
Yes, and it's a valid one. The Democrats had a very specific reason for going through with those lawsuits at this time, namely, to increase their chances of winning this past election. Your own source even says this is their motivation. No surprise that so many of these were heavily contested states this election.
So yeah, i'd say Democrats had far more incentive to be challenging maps on the mere possibility that they could squeak out a win.
Why is it that allegations are so desperately wanted to be accepted as true before verification? Mere time will tell.