by JDHURF » Wed Dec 04, 2013 11:24 am
I agree that the GOP will hold the House thanks to the incredibly anti-democratic gerrymandering that rigs the vote. They were quite explicit that they were going to do this. The Republican State Leadership Committee led by Ed Gillespie with Karl Rove in the background, as always, initiated the "Redistricting Majority Project" which had as its goal to "keep or win Republican control of state legislatures with the largest impact on congressional redistricting."
As Tim Dickinson writes in Rolling Stone, "[e]very decade following the census, the task of redrawing federal congressional-district boundaries falls (with some exceptions) to the state legislatures. If Republicans could seize controlf of statehouses - and, where necessary, have GOP governors in place to rubber-stamp their redistricting maps - the party could look in new districts that would favor Republican candidates for a decade." Dickinson quotes Rove from a Wall Street Journal column: "He who controls redistricting can control Congress."
Dickinson takes the example of North Carolina where the outcome was particularly egregious. In NC "Democrats outpolled the GOP by 81,000 votes, but Republicans took nine of the 13 seats. The RSLC's map was spoiled only by Rep. Mike McIntyre, a Democratic incumbent, who eked out a 645-vote victory in a district drawn to favor the Republican by 11 points." In Pennsylvania, as an RSLC report triumphs, voters "'cast 83,000 more votes for Democratic U.S. House candidates...but elected a 13-5 Republican majority to represent them in Washington; Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress.' In Wisconsin, where $1.1 million in RSLC cash helped flip both chambers of the state legislature, empowering union-busting governor Scott Walker, Republicans prevailed by a five-to-three margin in House seats despite losing the popular vote by more than 43,000." It goes on like this.
The GOP is well aware of the writing on the wall and will by any means, including the anti-democratic, stave off their irrelevance. Make no mistake though, these are the death throws of a desperate and hysterical fringe party. These heinous machinations may bide them some time, but without substantive reform of their ideology and party it is in a terminal downward spiral. The only ultimate resolution is moderate reform.
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