Democrats in New York delivered a stark warning to Republicans in the 2025 elections, revealing a seismic shift in voter sentiment that could spell disaster for the GOP in the upcoming 2026 midterms.A Politico analysis of 268 county, town, and village races painted a grim picture for Republicans. De...
One point that I don’t think gets enough attention: gerrymandering gets more districts for a party by chipping into districts usually held by opposing parties. That dilutes the strength a party has in each district.
Can you imagine if the R’s gerrymandering drive ends up gaining Democratic districts because they stretched their leads too thin? That may have been part of the reason Indiana didn’t move forward with it.
That’s called a dummymander and it has happened in the past.
This already occurs.
It took me awhile to understand what you were saying. So basically, you’re watering down any leads in existing locations because there are more democrats in the places the republicans are trying to take over. They might lose a bigger area. I hope this happens over and over again.
Correct. Gerrymandering means several different specific ways to cheat by drawing the districts, but one way is taking a district that’s going to be a blowout for you—say, you’re expected to reliably get 88% of the vote—and sharing that 88% with a nearby district, where you’re expected to get maybe 37%. If you draw the lines right, you can get two districts where you win with 66% of the vote, instead of winning one and losing one.
But why stop there? 88% is a huge lead, and in first past the post it doesn’t matter how much of the vote you get, so long as you get more than the next most popular candidate. It may require some truly unhinged district drawing, but what if you could get, say, five districts where you’re going to win with 46% of the vote, due to a strong (but not strong enough) third party spoiler candidate? Now you’ve spread out the voters in that 88% area and used them to bolster four other districts that you were going to lose (or were going to be competitive) into solid and reliable wins, or at least turn solid victory for the opposition into a competitive contest.
Except, oops, the guy at the top of the ticket is a literal supervillain except without any superpowers, and now it’s starting to weaken that original 88%. Now, instead of one blowout district, and instead of five solid wins, you’ve got, maybe, two competitive contests and three solid losses. If you’d left well enough alone, you might’ve still been able to win that blowout district with 58%, but because you got greedy you’ve lost everything.
You’ve got a point for sure but that’s not what gerrymandering means… that is one example of gerrymandering. You could just as well have gerrymandering where a district is constituted by areas which did not previously form a majority of the now-winning party.
True, and I guess I’m not sure which one is more prevalent, but this one is the one I hear most often.
Exactly that. Sorry if my wording sucked!
It wasn’t your fault, thanks for talking about it. I just didn’t understand the implications that it could go wrong for either side.
Well I hope Democrats give it an honest try in all these red districts.
Indiana did move forward.
Stalled. The Indiana senate will hold their “final” vote on it December 8.