Democrats won the popular vote in the house of representatives election

cannabis said:
btw...you're talking less than 500,000 votes.

no matter how you change the districts, pubs still would have won.
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If the districts were relatively fair, you would sometimes see one party winning a handful more seats than the other even if they narrowly lost the popular vote. You would not, however, expect a party that won a 55%-45% landslide of the vote in one election (as the Republicans did in 2010) maintain nearly the exact same position in a subsequent election where they won 48%, and less than the other party, in terms of seats. That's pretty obviously the result of gerrymandering. If this race hadn't been gerrymandered, it would've been basically a coinflip. The Republicans hold their position due to gerrymandering, not due to the will of the American people, and they should resign their seats in shame.
 
if you look at the map in your own link, no matter how you change the districts <-- that is important - pubs still would have won.

300px-US_House_2012.svg.png
 
It's weird that gerrymandering is even allowed. It's pretty anti-what we're about as a country, or should be about.

Way too many protected seats in the House.
 
cannabis said:
do you not see the hypocrisy and irony of your post?

why did you fail to address the post i made after this one? is it because it was on topic and that would prove you're just a whiny liar?
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No, because you'd already lowered the bar right off the bat with your petty attack.
 
cannabis said:
then how would you create districts?
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Non-partisan districting commissions that usually go by sensisble geographic markers and established community boundaries. That's what nearly every other country in the world that uses this system does. The US is alone in allowing the legislators to choose their voters through gerrymandering.
 
cannabis said:
if you look at the map in your own link, no matter how you change the districts <-- that is important - pubs still would have won.

300px-US_House_2012.svg.png
Click to expand...

What on Earth are you talking about? If you gave me free reign over the whole countries districts, I could give the Democrats a 100 seat landslide just by changing up the districts.
 
Fluttershy said:
What on Earth are you talking about? If you gave me free reign over the whole countries districts, I could give the Democrats a 100 seat landslide just by changing up the districts.
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oh, so you need to gerrymander in an unfair fashion to win...thanks.

explain to me how you would accomplish this. just look at the map watermark.
 
Fluttershy said:
Non-partisan districting commissions that usually go by sensisble geographic markers and established community boundaries. That's what nearly every other country in the world that uses this system does. The US is alone in allowing the legislators to choose their voters through gerrymandering.
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America deserves competitive house elections, and a real choice in every election. It's embarassing how the rules have been exploited to create so many protected seats, where Congressmen & women are basically given terms for as long as they want.
 
Fluttershy said:
Non-partisan districting commissions that usually go by sensisble geographic markers and established community boundaries. That's what nearly every other country in the world that uses this system does. The US is alone in allowing the legislators to choose their voters through gerrymandering.
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that wouldn't necessarily prevent the popular vote winners from not getting as many seats. said lines are still just as arbitrary, they just lack intention.
 
cannabis said:
oh, so you need to gerrymander in an unfair fashion to win...thanks.

explain to me how you would accomplish this. just look at the map watermark.
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just because the map is red doesn't mean there is some inherent redness that couldn't be broken by gerrymandering.

Lets have an example. Say you live in a state with a 2-1 ratio of (D)emocrats to (R)epublicans

D-D-D-D-D
D-D-D-D-D
R-R-R-R-R

and you want five districts. One way you could divide the districts is as follows:

|D| |D| |D| |D| |D|
|D| |D| |D| |D| |D|
|R| |R| |R| |R| -|R|

(where the columns are each a district). So now we have 5 districts, each with a 2-1 ratio of democrats to republicans. Democrats are pretty much going to crush republicans with this setup, right?

Unlessss we gerrymander! Instead we can draw it out like this:

_________
|D D D D D |
|D D D D D | <--- one big ass district containing all the democrats
-------------

|R| |R| |R| |RR| <--- 4 small districts ruled by republicans.

Bam. Republicans have gone from 0 seats because of the 2-1 ratio to now having 4 of them with the dems only having one

And look at how redddd that map is!
 
A white moon's hot said:
that wouldn't necessarily prevent the popular vote winners from not getting as many seats. said lines are still just as arbitrary, they just lack intention.
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Without some sort of specific intention to gerrymander one way or the other, the bias one way or the other is generally going to be roughly random. And, on the whole, the randomness one way or the other in each district will usually more or less cancel itself out on the whole, only really mattering in very tight elections, and significant deviations will generally be incredibly unlikely. It's sort of like flipping a coin 435 times and averaging the results; it's extraordinarily unlikely that you're going to get a result that deviates significantly from 0.5.

With house districts, sometimes local factors come into play, but it's extremely unlikely that the Republicans just happened to get a shitload of excellent candidates running in tight districts while the Democrats got no such luck, or that the Democrats ran a bunch of extremely good candidates in otherwise safely Democratic seats while the Republicans rarely did so. No, local factors such as the quality of candidates in key districts are essentially random on an overall level as well, and shouldn't show some sort of general bias towards one party or the other.

In general, a good model of how many seats a party should win, given the swing in the national popular vote from one party to another, is to simply take the results in each district, apply the same swing to them, and tally who wins and loses given that. Of course, this model often doesn't predict which seats will actually change hands very well, because, again, that's often due to local factors, but it does predict the overall number of seats for each party with a high degree of accuracy, because, again, local factors are mostly random, and cancel themselves out on the grand scale of things.

So, taking 2010:

R: 51.4% - 55.6% seats
D: 44.8% - 44.4% seats
Margin: 6.6% R - 11.2% R

And 2011:

R: 48.5% vote - 54.6% seats
D: 48.8% vote - 45.3% seats
Margin: 0.3% D - 9.3% R

Swing: 6.9% D - 1.9% D

It is naive to assume that this is due to random local factors being very unlucky for Democrats, or the random drawing of largely unintentionally biased districts randomly happening to favor Republicans. Since we know there are different districts in one election than the other, we can largely just attribute it to the bias in the districts - roughly 5% more biased towards the Republicans than the old ones. So, the Democrats would need to win a substantial majority to even break even with the Republicans, given the current state of the districts.
 
A white moon's hot said:
just because the map is red doesn't mean there is some inherent redness that couldn't be broken by gerrymandering.

Lets have an example. Say you live in a state with a 2-1 ratio of (D)emocrats to (R)epublicans

D-D-D-D-D
D-D-D-D-D
R-R-R-R-R

and you want five districts. One way you could divide the districts is as follows:

|D| |D| |D| |D| |D|
|D| |D| |D| |D| |D|
|R| |R| |R| |R| -|R|

(where the columns are each a district). So now we have 5 districts, each with a 2-1 ratio of democrats to republicans. Democrats are pretty much going to crush republicans with this setup, right?

Unlessss we gerrymander! Instead we can draw it out like this:

_________
|D D D D D |
|D D D D D | <--- one big ass district containing all the democrats
-------------

|R| |R| |R| |RR| <--- 4 small districts ruled by republicans.

Bam. Republicans have gone from 0 seats because of the 2-1 ratio to now having 4 of them with the dems only having one

And look at how redddd that map is!
Click to expand...

Districts need to be roughly equal in population though, and geographically contiguous. You could still do something with those requirement, though it's obviously not as easy.
___________________
| D : D | D : D | D |
| D | D | D | D | R |
| R : R | R : R | R |
---------------------

|'s and underlines mark district boundaries, while :'s and the lack of underline marks a contiguous district. I had to switch one of the R's to D's, but overall, 60% of the districts are majority Republican while only 40% of the voters are Republicans, a reversal. Of course, I was restricted in what I could do by the fact that I had to make Republican districts with a 2/3 majority, because there are only 15 voters and, after all, I can't split them in two. If I could go lower than that, say 3/5 or 55%, I could make still safe Republican districts and give them maybe 4/5 or even all of the seats.
 
I guess it is ashame that libtards never gerrymandered districts. Must be a new fangled Tea Party phenomenon

Maybe if the demalquedacrats hadn't gotten their asses kicked in 2010 they wouldnt be all bitter right now
 
Thing1 said:
America deserves competitive house elections, and a real choice in every election. It's embarassing how the rules have been exploited to create so many protected seats, where Congressmen & women are basically given terms for as long as they want.
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If every seat were drawn to be competitive, then you'd often get landslide elections election where one party wins 55% of the vote and almost 100% of the seats. Anyway, it's impossible to draw every seat competitive. Take Mississippi, for instance. If you drew four districts that roughly split the political factions in Mississippi evenly throughout, you'd get four super-Republican district. You could maybe split the african-american majority district up and create two competitive district and two Republican ones, but I doubt the african-american community would like that.

No, just follow geographical and community boundaries, it will naturally create districts that will usually span roughly evenly from one end of competitiveness to the other on the national scale, giving a good number of competitive seats and also having redoubts which prevent one party from landsliding the other.
 
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