Democrats are the gerrymandering party

The latest talking point from MSNBC and CO. is that Republicans are gerrymandered so they are safe from acting radical.

Like always the facts are just the opposite.


For comparison purposes, look at the makeup of the House at the time of the last government shutdown, in late 1995 and early 1996. Then, 79 Republicans came from districts won by Bill Clinton in 1992’s presidential race — a third of the entire GOP conference, according to David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. Today, just 17 — fewer than 10 percent — are in districts won by Obama last November. (There are only nine Democrats in districts won by Romney.)

The Cook Report team has created an index to measure the partisan leanings of every congressional district. What the most current analysis shows is the degree to which members of Congress represent even more ideologically polarized districts than in the past.

At the time of the last shutdown, Wasserman said, not quite one-third represented districts where the Republican vote was 10 points or more above the party’s national average. Today, more than half of them are in such districts.

But it is not just that Republican districts have become redder. Democrats’ districts are bluer, as well. In 1995-96, the median Democratic seat was about 6.7 points more Democratic than the national average. Today, that figure has jumped to 11.2 points. Wasserman notes that the partisan leanings of the median Democratic district actually rose more than in the median Republican district.


The bunching of Democrats in urban areas is clearer from a look at county-by-county results from last year’s presidential election. Obama won just 705 of the nation’s 3,153 counties. But Rhodes Cook, an independent analyst of political trends, points out that the president won “the bulk of those counties that really mattered.”

Obama won 35 of the 39 counties with populations of 1 million people or more. He won those counties by a margin of 8 million votes. He lost the rest of the country by about 3 million.

 

They're practiced at the arts of voter fraud and lying as well.

 

The good news is, they're not as safe as they thought from acting radical.

 

I wonder how much gerrymandering contributes to it. It does seem to me that the divide between conservatives and liberals has grown enormously over the past decade. Obama of course excacerbated partisan tensions more than any president in recent memory. Just like Obama's policies are eradicating the economic middle class, they are driving out political moderates.

Ironically, gerrymandering was encouraged by the Justice Department Civil Rights Division-- the nazis who used to sit in jdugment on southern states election laws-- to guarantee the election of black candidates. Now suddently, it's a big problem.