(10-06-2017 11:05 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: (10-06-2017 10:57 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote: (10-06-2017 06:19 AM)OptimisticOwl Wrote: The false myth that gerrymandering is responsible for Democratic losses doesn't hold much water when one realizes that gerrymandering starts with one party or the other winning enough seats to dominate the apportioning body.
It is definitely not a false myth. In 2012, Dems received 1 million more total votes in House races, yet the House was still retained by Republicans. The issue is a combination of gerrymandering and what Jonathan brought up.
I'd agree that there was no issue if the Reps kept holding the House the past few years and they were always on the receiving end of the total vote total. But since that isn't the case, you can't just discount these concerns as being false.
From what I've seen, the results in senate and house races pretty much mirrored those in the presidential races. Democrats won by huge margins in NY and CA, and that more than offset fairly substantial losses in the other 48 as a group. If that is mirrored in house races, then it has little to do with gerrymandering, unless one wants to claim that the state boundaries were gerrymandered.
How many states were there where one party got a majority of the house votes, but the other party got a majority of the seats? Asking for information, I really don't know. I know the answer for the senate--zero, because senators are elected on a statewide basis.
Here's a summary from FairVote. Don't know much about them or their proposal, but this passage would seem to support the idea that pretty much all of us are right to a degree. (Hey, when's the last time that happened?)
http://www.fairvote.org/votes_vs_seats_i...le_s_house
"Today, the root of the partisan skew is in geography. Democratic voters are increasingly clustered in population dense urban areas, while Republican voters are more efficiently distributed. The 50 most Democratic districts in the country have a median partisanship of 79% Democratic, whereas the 50 most Republican districts have a median partisanship of only 70% Republican. This directly shows how fewer Republican votes are wasted in safe districts than Democratic votes.
Although post 2010 intentional gerrymandering contributed to this trend, it is not the sole - or even the most significant - cause of it. For example, nobody has recently gerrymandered county lines, yet they demonstrate a similar skew. In 2012, Barack Obama won 52% of the national two-party vote, but he only carried 22% of counties. To see how much more severe this trend has become, consider that in 1988 Michael Dukakis carried 26.3% of counties, even while losing the national popular vote by almost eight percent.
Tonight, we can say with confidence that Republicans will maintain their majority in the House of Representatives, whether they win more votes or not. In addition, there will likely be multiple states in which more voters vote for one party, yet the other party wins more seats. In 2012, that boosted Republicans in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in districts drawn by Republican state lawmakers. Interestingly, it also happened in Arizona - in a plan drawn by an independent redistricting commission."