About Me

In writing the "About Me" portion of this blog I thought about the purpose of the blog - namely, preventing the growth of Socialism & stopping the Death Of Democracy in the American Republic & returning her to the "liberty to abundance" stage of our history. One word descriptions of people's philosophies or purposes are quite often inadequate. I feel that I am "liberal" meaning that I am broad minded, independent, generous, hospitable, & magnanimous. Under these terms "liberal" is a perfectly good word that has been corrupted over the years to mean the person is a left-winger or as Mark Levin more accurately wrote in his book "Liberty & Tyranny" a "statist" - someone looking for government or state control of society. I am certainly not that & have dedicated the blog to fighting this. I believe that I find what I am when I consider whether or not I am a "conservative" & specifically when I ask what is it that I am trying to conserve? It is the libertarian principles that America was founded upon & originally followed. That is the Return To Excellence that this blog is named for & is all about.

Sunday, March 13, 2022

Computer Drawn Compact Congressional Redistricting Is Superior To Manipulative Gerrymandering

"As we all know elections matter.  And when folks vote, they order what they want, & in this case they got what they asked for."  - VP Kamala Harris, speaking while grinning @ the White House the week of February 28, 2022 - still giddy, but patiently waiting, fully realizing she is one heartbeat away from the presidency after dropping out of the Democrat presidential primaries without ever receiving one vote for president. 

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With few exceptions in our country's history, the political party whose candidate won the presidency loses congressional seats in the midterms two years later - & quite often quite big.  Democrats seem particularly aware of this historical fact & there are many additional reasons other than political history for them to be afraid. 

First & foremost the American people have come to realize that Biden is not up to the job & that a congressional check on him is in order.  Any fair minded person of any party affiliation who wants the country to come together should be able to agree on this - they should be willing to admit that Biden's incessant gaffes & mental lapses are no accident & that the real Biden, unlike the one seen during well rested & rehearsed appearances during campaign debates or SOTU presentations, needs to be checked so that the country, the world, does not take a chance on, or @ least minimizes, some disaster happening worse than the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  A person of the left, while supporting a Republican 2022 midterm congressional sweep, does not have to give up their political persuasion but could try again in 2024 supporting a less compromised presidential candidate - of which they would have a much better chance of winning.  

Next, Biden has a low overall approval rating that falls to dismal levels in some categories: 1) on his handling of inflation it is 28% approval; 2) handling crime is 36% approval; & 3) only 28% say the country is moving in the right direction.

And that congressional check on Biden is very important if he is persuaded by progressives like AOC, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, & Cori Bush to pack the Supreme Court with six more Sotomayor-like justices, add DC & other locales as states that will increase Democrat House margins & pack the Senate so that every piece of legislation that is objectionable to mainstream America is passed & signed into law in a blink of an eye, & effectively abolish the Electoral College without a constitutional amendment meaning the more illegal aliens entering the country the better as Democrats see nothing but additional Democrat voters crossing the border. 

But even more important than countering the peaceful fundamental transformation of America as described above we have the danger of the inability of the so far inept Biden/Harris administration to make the right decisions in an ever increasingly belligerent world.  In fact their record is so bad we have to question if they even want to make the right decisions.

As of March 1, seeing the writing on the wall, twenty-three House Democrats are retiring compared to seven retiring Republicans.  In a reversal, in the Senate five Republicans (Blunt, Burr, Portman, Toomey, & Shelby) are retiring compared to only one retiring Democrat (Leahy).  Both chambers are important but it is the Senate that confirms judicial nominees, as we are about to be reminded with the upcoming Senate hearings of Biden's first Supreme Court pick.

Democrats are defending fourteen Class 3 Senate seats & Republicans twenty - with six regarded as very close contests: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, & Wisconsin, some of which states have been Republican traps of high hopes in the past only to lose.

So even with history in their favor & an anti-American anemic Biden administration pouring sand in every gear they can find, Republicans have their work cut out for them in the midterms.

In November 2022 there are also 36 governors seats up for reelection (20 GOP & 16 Democrat) as well as the seats in 88 state legislative chambers in 46 states - 56% of all state senate seats are up for election & 92% of assembly seats.

In this regard & focusing on the state of Georgia, & in particular the governor's race - Trump has convinced David Perdue, one of the two Georgia Senate candidates who lost in the special election of January 5, 2021, to run for governor against Brian Kemp, a man that Trump feels slighted him.  This of course will split the Republican ticket & Stacey Abrams will become the next Georgia governor. 

But even with their strategic advantages listed above, Democrats are fighting with the best advantage they have - the ability to manipulate congressional boundaries to favor several of their candidates in New York & California & to a lesser degree in other states.  

For years conservative pundits have appeared unconcerned that Republicans won the popular vote in only one of the last eight presidential elections (GW Bush in 2004).  The thinking was that liberals in California & New York so overwhelm the electorate in those two states that it was only the rest of the country that mattered.  Spotting Democrats 84 electoral votes (nearly one third necessary to win the presidency) meant little to them.  

And there is some credibility to this.  In 2016 Trump won the popular vote in the other 48 states (i.e., excluding California & New York from the 50 states) by over 3 million votes.  But there is also reason for Trump supporters to beware of this statistic - in 2020 Biden received 81,284,778 votes nationally compared to Trump's 74,224,501 votes.  If you subtract the popular vote totals in California & New York Biden was still ahead in the total from the other 48 states by 36,327 votes so there was definitely a stronger anti-Trump movement in November 2020 in the other 48 states than in the 2016 presidential election.  Trump supporters discount this fact @ their own peril.

But considering the results from just California & New York: Hillary walloped Trump in California by 4,269,978 votes (8,753,788 - 4,483,810) & defeated him in NY by 1,732,973 (4,547,562 - 2,814,589).  It is these two large state totals following the constitutionally specified decennial census of 2020 that enlightened the latest Democrat mischief.

The Democrat Party advantage in the House is 222 to 211 with two vacancies (both Republicans - Devin Nunez retired on January 3 to work for Trump & Jim Hagedorn died on February 17) - meaning Republicans start the 2022 midterms needing to win seven seats to obtain the majority to control the chamber.

The California congressional delegation is 42 Democrats & 11 Republicans.  The New York congressional delegation is 19 Democrats & 8 Republicans.  And herein lies the trouble because Democrats have figured out how to take advantage of their large presidential popular vote totals by redrawing congressional district boundaries to overwhelm their opponents in the next election.  In essence it is truer that politicians pick their voters than voters pick their political representatives.

Now this process of manipulating congressional boundaries has a name - gerrymandering, named after Founding Father Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry who was instrumental in the redrawing of a state senate district that resembled a salamander.  See cartoon below that appeared in the Boston Gazette newspaper on March 26, 1812 that satirized the odd shaped district that had been drawn to obtain every possible vote needed to ensure victory for the candidate preferred by the party in power. 


Note that Mr. Gerry pronounced his last name "gary" so the term is correctly pronounced "garymander."  I only know two politicians who pronounce it correctly & no members of the press who do.

Check out the table below that shows how 50 people in a congressional district can be gerrymandered to give three different results.








So Republicans start the 2022 midterms seven seats behind but Democrat New York state lawmakers redrew district boundaries to ensure New York Democrat candidates have a better than even chance of winning four or five seats held by Republicans including targeting the seats currently held by Claudia Tenney & Nicole Malliotakis.  

California, New Jersey, Illinois, & Maryland have similar plans to each pick off a seat or two from the GOP ranks while legislators in Republican states feel forced to focus on playing defense, shoring up their suburban districts for their candidates in another sign that we're outnumbered.

In addition, the case of Congressman Madison Cawthorn (R, NC) deserves special attention.  Madison is a staunch Trump supporter & Madison appeared on the Ellipse in his wheelchair on January 6, 2021 delivering some fighting words of his own, regarding the 2020 presidential election, to the protesters before they broke into the Capitol.  Madison's opponents are now arguing that his name is ineligible to appear on the ballot in accordance with Section 3 of the 14th Amendment which specifies, according to them, that he violated the congressional oath to support the Constitution when he "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the country on January 6, 2021.  Hanging on to the unproven Trump claim that an election held over 16 months ago was illegitimate is an unforced error that could result in another lost seat when the country needs to look to the future.  The Republican infighting over what amounts to Trump's ego could continue to be a loser for all of us going forward.

But getting back to Gerrymandering - I am a fan of replacing the current politically manipulated redistricting system with a computer programmed to divide each state into congressional districts with the smallest perimeter possible while keeping communities & counties whole to the greatest degree mathematically possible - districts should resemble squares, rectangles, & circles not salamanders.  

The computer will produce compact districts without identifying the residents' party, gender, or race.  Its goal will be to find the most nondiscriminatory geographically compact districts possible.  In short such a change gives us a chance for unbiased elections & in essence term limits.

What people are interested in has changed over time as has the makeup of the country.  The best way I know to express the changing demographics in America is to understand that Bush (41) got 59% of the white vote in 1988 & won 426 electoral votes while Romney also got 59% of the white vote in 2012 & received only 206 electoral votes.

Throwing the midterms into a computer drawn configuration of districts that are redrawn in each state after every decennial census so that the boundaries of each district would change more as a function of people moving than politicians purposely rigging elections by drawing districts resembling salamanders is an obvious benefit to everyone except the political class.

4 comments:

  1. As usual a very good article. Agree with everything you said.

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  2. Hi Doug - I loved your latest post so much that I forwarded it to Donna Martinez Vice President of Marketing and Communications at John Locke Foundation here in N.C.

    I told her to read it and and told her about RTE. I hope she does!! I would like to see something happen with that idea.

    Also going to forward it to my Assemblymen, and legislative leaders in the N C Senate.

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  3. Doug - I agree with your pitch: "computer will produce compact districts without identifying the residents' party, gender, or race". That would be most fair; however, Democrats would strongly do all to deny that. Dems are all about power and masters of voter fraud.

    Regarding the extremely inept (incidental or by design?) Admin, it may be up to courageous USA loving Democrats (must be some) to state the obvious relentlessly to the media and public that (1) We must stop breaking the Laws of Economics else we will tank our economy with a deep Recession if not Depression; (2) stop polluting our air swapping world's cleanest fossil fuels (domestic US) for heavy carbon foreign imports and begging IRAN for their oil .. The Biden Admin is the most anti environment Admin since Richard Nixon created the EPA; (3) call out the Fake environmentalists (AOC and Squad); it makes no sense eliminating US fossil fuels while Green Energy is still in a nascent state. AOC and Squad are not Environmentalists; they are American Marxists with goal #1 -destruction of Capitalism, the most moral and successful economic system ever devised; (4) state we must end the madness (out right treason) utilizing Russia and China negotiating for us for a new US-IRAN deal(as IRAN REFUSES to TALK to us ). That deal likely will unfreeze over $10 Trillion for Iran to utilize majority of that for terror with Israel and US their top targets. I can go on and on. Central question -- are there any courageous Democrats to do all they can to stop the Biden Admin and AOC gang from destroying our nation?

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  4. The post specifically mentions Maryland as a state trying to use their vast majority to wipe out a Republican seat. See article by Alexa Corse below from Saturday's WSJ where a judge thwarted a blatant Democrat power grab to make the one Republican House seat in Md competitive highlighting that it violated requirements for compactness. This is an idea to get behind - people who like fairness will find it hard to argue against. To some degree it takes the politics out of politics.

    ***

    A Maryland judge blocked the state’s congressional map, saying the plan violated the state’s constitution and was drawn “to suppress the voice of Republican voters.”

    Judge Lynne A. Battaglia struck down the map of U.S. congressional districts in an opinion issued Friday, saying it violated requirements for compactness and didn’t give due regard to political subdivisions. She also said the plan violated free elections, equal protection and free-speech clauses in the state’s constitution.

    Judge Battaglia ordered the Democratic-controlled state legislature to draw a new map.

    “In many respects, all of the testimony in this case supports the notions that the voice of Republican voters was diluted and their right to vote and be heard with the efficacy of a Democratic voter was diminished,” wrote Judge Battaglia in Anne Arundel County.

    Maryland currently has seven Democratic members of the U.S. House and one Republican member. In December, the Democratic-controlled Maryland General Assembly overrode Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto of the state’s new congressional map, which turned the state’s lone district currently held by a Republican into a competitive seat. That map gave Democrats the prospect of sweeping all eight of the state’s seats in Congress.

    Maryland had more than 2.2 million active voters registered as Democratic, and just over one million registered Republicans, according to state data from October 2020. Nearly 767,000 voters weren’t affiliated with any party.

    The judge’s ruling came after a trial over two lawsuits filed by Republicans against state officials.

    States around the country have redrawn their voting maps based on the results of the 2020 census, spurring legal battles over allegations of gerrymandering by political parties. The drawing of the districts has been closely watched ahead of the 2022 midterm elections as Democrats and Republicans compete for control of the U.S. House.

    The Maryland Court of Appeals had already delayed the state’s primary by three weeks to July 19. That order was issued in a case related to the state’s legislative districts.

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