WAIT THE CRAZIES OUT?

Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor recognizes that the punishment cycles of the grim strategy outcome are playing out with the state legislatures engaging in unprecedented reapportionments of their Congressional districts.

It is an honest and disturbing sign of the times that there isn’t even a token attempt at justifying this behavior. Trump demands more seats; the party provides.

This will likely spark other states to follow suit. In the abstract, I don’t think any of this is good for the health of American democracy, but I also fear we have crossed a threshold in which tit-for-tat is unavoidable.

I am normatively opposed to this kind of manipulation and empirically think it is bad for representative democracy. The next likely move is by California, which will require a referendum to amend the state’s constitution.

It should be noted that the core problem with US House elections is that, for a number of reasons, they are not competitive, but are instead foregone conclusions on balance (only about 10% of seats in 2024 were truly competitive). This is a huge problem for American democracy, to the point that even without this mid-cycle manipulation, there are days when I wonder how democratic things are/have been. Making elections even more predestination instead of competitive takes us in the wrong direction on that count.

One of these days there will be a political scientist who looks at all the ways in which legislatures can go wrong, and how those ways proliferate as the population being governed increases, and come out with a vigorous endorsement of those Ninth and Tenth Amendment powers wherever possible?  Once the punishment cycles start, getting out, as he notes, is hard.  But he has his pet remedy (is there an academician, anywhere, who does not?)

The issue on the table to me, at this point, is not a debate about what is the best way to district; it is a question of whether one party should be allowed to further manipulate the system while the other party unilaterally disarms out of a sense of principle. And the context here is that the party seeking to further manipulate the system is actively supporting an authoritarian agenda.

As such, do voters in CA stand by and allow the pro-authoritarian party to further consolidate power, or do the voters of CA provide a somewhat anemic push to forestall that consolidation?

Given that Trump will have two full years to govern after the midterms, the question is, what can be done to at least slow him down? Democrats winning control of the House is probably the closest thing to a bulwark that can be generated against his onslaught on the system. Making an already highly flawed system to elect the House even more flawed, but in a way that fights authoritarianism and hopefully increases representativeness on the national level (even as it damages it on the state level), is worth the price, in my view.

Of course, I ultimately would prefer we move to multi-seat districts and [proportional representation] elections.

I'm waiting for the Fans of Parliament Caucus in the American Political Science Association to endorse an Article V Convention of the States in order to debate a resolution favoring such a restructuring of Congress.  That convention might be even more fun if the cube root rule came up.

Again, this is not new and is one of many problems with single-seat districts. There is no incentive for an elected representative to actually represent all of their constituents. Ironically, one of the arguments deployed against multi-seat districts is that citizens won’t know who “their” representative is, but the reality of winner-take-all single-seat districts is that the winner only feels the political need to represent their co-partisans (or, worse, just the faction that can re-nominate them in the primary). There is a reason, for example, as to why so many Republicans see no need to hold town halls these days.

Another aspect of the piece that should be raised, the authors ignore the fact that prior to the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” the Democratic Party was a far broader coalition of liberals and conservatives, and was dispersed geographically in ways that are no longer the case.

Expand the House, get more Lauren Boeberts and more Ilhan Omars.

On the other hand, all these legislatures creating ever-more favorable districts run the risk of doing so by creating more potential swing districts.  Michael Barone has been paying attention for years.

As a close student of every redistricting cycle since the 1960 Census, I have observed how the equal population standard severely limits the political gains for even the most partisan redistricters.

You can only jam so many opposition voters into a limited number of districts. And suppose you create too many 53% districts for your own side. In that case, you risk losing the whole bunch when opinion generally or within specific voting segments 5% the other way, which tends to happen at least once every 10-year interval between censuses.

And Congress, he frets, might want to leave well enough alone.

Congress could choose, as it did in 1929, between equally valid formulas translating Census population results into integer numbers of House seats. But it doesn't seem eager to address an issue that might put in play proposals to increase its seats from the not-constitutionally-required 435.

There's a case where gerrymandering doesn't make much difference. The 10 largest states elect a majority of House members and are currently the only venues where partisan redistricting can switch more than one or two seats. One hundred and ten Republicans and 125 Democrats currently represent them. The Texas change would switch that to 115-120. That would be 49% of those states' seats, the same as the 49% of their popular votes won by Donald Trump there in 2024.

Maybe the Framers got it right when they opted for the equal population principle as the key to fair representation.

Yes, in a quarter millennium maybe the Framers got it more right than wrong, no matter what the normative political scientists might draw up in the seminar room.