Posted on 03/08/2021 9:33:04 PM PST by Vendome
A key factor in who wins the House majority, how lines are drawn for the bulk of its 435 districts, may not be clear until later this year. And that's adding an element of chaos to the 2022 election cycle.
It's not even clear at this point how many House seats each state will have in the 435-member chamber. That's because the U.S. Census Bureau in February announced that processing of data needed to allocate House seats, based on population, would be pushed back from March 31 until Sept. 30. COVID-19 is largely to blame for the delays, as census-takers couldn't as easily as in previous years knock on doors and count the U.S. population, as mandated by the Constitution every 10 years.
EXTENDED DELAY IN CENSUS REDISTRICTING DATA COULD LEAD TO ELECTION MAYHEM
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
It doesn’t matter they’ll just cheat got who they want.
Easy to predict. Dems will gerrymander massive districts until they can be assured of 300 votes, claiming it’s “only fair” based on past racial discrimination. The Republicans will whine and pout then eventually concede the whole thing. If it is challenged in the Supreme Court, RINOs Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett will just roll over for them.
Unexpected, yes. Gee whaddasupprise. Can’t wait to see all the previously unknown citizens in blue states, and the unexpected losses in red states.
Glad to see this corrupt Biden decision getting some coverage.
Horrible abuse of power to distort the elections.
Biden won the presidency; Republicans cemented their grip on power for the next decade
The Guardian UK ^ | 16 Dec 2020 | Alvin Chang and Sam Levine
FR Posted on 12/16/2020, 4:16:16 AM by blueplum
While the world focused on the election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in November, some of the most consequential contests were in state legislative races between candidates many have never heard of.
State lawmakers have the authority to redraw electoral districts in most US states every 10 years. In 2010, Republicans undertook an unprecedented effort – called Project Redmap – to win control of state legislatures across the country and drew congressional and state legislative districts that gave them a significant advantage for the next decade.
...Republicans came out of election night in nearly the best possible position for drawing districts, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, and will have the opportunity to draw 188 congressional seats, 43% of the House of Representatives. Democrats will have a chance to draw at most just 73 seats. Republicans will probably also be able to...
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Republicans Retain a Marginal Advantage in Redistricting
Townhall.com ^ | November 27, 2020 | Michael Barone
FR Posted on 11/27/2020, 8:50:06 AM by Kaslin
One of the many big surprises in this month’s surprising election was the Democrats’ failure to overturn Republican majorities in state legislatures. Various Democratic committees budgeted $88 million to flip majorities in big states such as Texas, Florida and North Carolina. Total gains: zero.
That’s a bad return on lavish investments in money and psychic energy. Liberals have been bemoaning partisan redistricting as a betrayal of democracy, as politicians removing choice from the people.
Such rhetoric is overheated and ahistorical. Those who have followed redistricting since the Supreme Court’s equal population decisions in 1964, as I have, know that redistricting can give a party a marginal and temporary advantage — but that the voters have the final say.
I remember few lamentations about the evils of redistricting in the cycles following the 1960, 1970 and 1980 censuses, when Democrats mostly controlled state legislatures and when Phillip Burton, who held what is now Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco seat, was crafting clever plans.
Partisan redistricting, plus skillful young politicians first elected in the Watergate years and crafty conservatives from the South, enabled Democrats to control the House for 40 straight years. High-minded liberals had no problems with redistricting then.
That started to change in the 1990s, as Watergate babies and Dixiecrats retired, died or were defeated and Newt Gingrich’s Republicans won a House majority in 1994. Redistricting was a partisan wash after the 1990 census, and Republicans had a clear advantage in the 2000 and 2010 census cycles. That helped them hold House majorities for 20 of the past 26 years and control 59 of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers.
Hence the denunciations of partisan redistricting as the death of democracy.
Yet the Republicans’ partisan advantage is not as overwhelming as it seems. Some eight states give some role in redistricting to supposedly nonpartisan independent commissions. Democrats have proved adept at gaming their proceedings. Voters have imposed restrictions on redistricters, and in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Democratic governors can veto Republican legislatures’ plans.
Technically, after this month’s elections, Republicans control redistricting in states with 188 congressional districts, and Democrats control it in states with only 47. But redistricters’ leverage is limited in the 35 states with fewer than 10 congressional districts.
The most important thing to understand about redistricting is that the equal-population standard set by the Supreme Court in 1964 limits the advantage any party or faction can gain over the 10-year period between censuses.
If you create too many 53 percent districts, you may end up losing most of them if your party’s percentage of the population there falls 5 points. That happened to Michigan Republicans in the 2010s, just as it did to California Democrats in the 1960s.
The other problem for partisan redistricters is that political alignments can change over a decade. As parties gain among one segment of the electorate (as Democrats have with high-credential voters and Republicans among blue-collar whites), districts that favored one party at the beginning of a decade swing toward the other before it ends. The affluent Houston and Dallas seats, which were the most Republican congressional districts in the nation in the 1980s, elected Democrats in 2018 and 2020.
Such changes are the rule rather than the exception. Neither party has won House majorities in all five congressional elections following the censuses of 1990, 2000 or 2010.
Next month, the Census Bureau will release the 2020 census totals that trigger the statutory formula reapportioning the 435 House seats among the states. Texas and Florida, which account for about one-third of the nation’s population growth since 2010, are expected to gain multiple seats, and five other states are expected to gain one each. New York, Illinois and (for the first time ever) California are among the 10 states expected to lose one each.
Then redistricters get to work in the states. RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende writes that with “non-aggressive” redistricting, Republicans could gain six seats, and Democrats could lose six seats — a small number though enough to cost the Democrats their apparent 222-213 majority.
Partisan redistricters may get more aggressive, as Republicans did in the 2010 cycle after Illinois Democrats created multiple “bacon strip” districts extending from Chicago wards out through suburbs and into the countryside.
That could raise Republican net gains up to a dozen. But that’s about as many as they gained in this nonredistricting year.
One factor helping Republicans over the past two decades has been demography. Democratic voters — blacks, Hispanics, gentry liberals — tend to be clustered geographically, in central cities, sympathetic suburbs and university towns. Republican voters are spread around more evenly.
But maybe this is changing. This year, Donald Trump ran better than previous Republicans among Hispanics and blacks, and Joe Biden ran better than previous Democrats in affluent highly educated suburbs. Partisan redistricters will want to take these trends into account, but how long will the trends last, and how far will they extend? The perfect partisan redistricter requires a knowledge of the future as well as the past.
The Census Bureau fully recognizes that Soros is in total control of almost all redistricting operations...
So, Census can just slouch along slowly since it is a wasted exercise...
LIZ
Why do you keep thread sliding?
It cannot last long.
They are due for a reversal.
Thanks, Liz! Good info.
Y/V/W
“That helped them hold House majorities for 20 of the past 26 years...”
Delivering Boner and PRyno to help us out?
With President Trump’s E.O. forbidding the counting of illegal aliens for purposes of apportionment overturned in court, look for Kalifornia to add representatives.
Note to the rest of the country: If NYS tries to tell the nation it lost less than 2 House seats...SUE.
NYS is LYING.
The Demagogic Party gerrymanders a state, nothing happens, the Pubbies reapportion, the Demagogic Party appeals it to a stacked court and wins another gerrymander. As pointed out decades ago in (of all places) Harper's, the DP manufactures a majority in the House, and reality is more the shape of the Senate. Beyond that of course, (my view, not Harper's) is bribery and extortion.
Fixed the title...
5438 character article is a threadslide. If an article is worthy of posting, it should stand separately.
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