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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> the party in power will never allow this to make it to the floor of the House for a vote

The implication here is that the Democrats don't gerrymander. This is patently false. The Democrats are just pissed that the Republicans did a massively better job at it in the past decade.

In many ways, it was an arms race, and the Democrats chose not to focus on small and local districts and elections (instead, worrying about the "big picture"). As it turns out, politics trickles up, and small wins for Republicans eventually turned into big wins. To see a perfect exemplar of this, just look at Jon Ossoff's crushing loss last week.

There's an excellent NPR podcast about this very issue I listened to a few years ago.

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> > > the party in power will never allow this to make it to the floor of the House for a vote

> The implication here is that the Democrats don't gerrymander. This is patently false.

I don't think that's really the implication. At the moment it is pretty clear that the GOP currently overall benefits more from gerrymandering [1]. And they are in power, despite having lost the popular vote [2]. The GOP has control over the WH and both chambers, it'd therefore be political suicide to change the system now in a way that'd hurt them.

> The Democrats are just pissed that the Republicans did a massively better job at it in the past decade.

They've obviously also gerrymandered, I fail to see what that has to do with OPs point? Are you really arguing that to be able to be against the concept of gerrymandering, you've to give up any chance of ever actually being able to do anything about it?

[1]: https://www.apnews.com/fa6478e10cda4e9cbd75380e705bd380 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

> Are you really arguing that to be able to be against the concept of gerrymandering, you've to give up any chance of ever actually being able to do anything about it?

Not really. I'm arguing that most (in all honesty, probably all) gerrymandering complaints by Democrats are sour grapes because they got outplayed. In fact, Delaney himself was "first elected in a gerrymandered district created specifically for him," according to @mobilefriendly's linked sources.

Gerrymandering is generally not that big of a deal and cracking down on it doesn't solve much, as populations are naturally segmented[1]. I will say that sometimes, gerrymandering is racially- or religiously-motivated (SCOTUS heard a case on this a few months ago IIRC), so it can be very problematic in a few edge cases.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/ca...

> Gerrymandering is honestly not that big of a deal and cracking down on it doesn't solve much, as populations are naturally segmented[1].

Please provide more evidence for this claim. Just because it's true in CA doesn't necessarily mean it's true for the rest of the country.

> In fact, Delaney himself was "first elected in a gerrymandered district created specifically for him," according to @mobilefriendly's linked sources.

I fail to see how that's an argument for anything. Unless maybe, if you want to argue that Delaney is voting against his personal interest.

> Gerrymandering is generally not that big of a deal and cracking down on it doesn't solve much, as populations are naturally segmented[1]. > [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/ca....

That primarily seems to be an argument for it not being that a huge issue in CA. Or maybe that the mechanisms for redistricting weren't great in CA.

Given that a significant numbers of states have houses with significantly different party percentages than the popular vote suggests, this is a hard to understand argument.

California, New Jersey, and Washington state, big demotractic states, don't gerrymander by state law. California is a big state, and when they moved to a non partisan commission, the republicans picked up a few seats.

The only red states to also do this are Arizona and Idaho.

I think they meant any party in power won't allow it, because partly how they get in power, is gerrymandering.

There's some merit to this. Chances are the democratic leadership won't let this through. Doesn't hurt to try though.

The party is power is whichever party happens to have more votes at any given time. Whoever is in power won't change it because it got them elected so why would they risk doing something that might take them out of power?

> The party is power is whichever party happens to have more votes at any given time.

That's really not true in the political system of the US, even without partisan gerrymandering. Given that the entire point of partisan gerrymandering is to enlarge the distance between popular vote and gained seats, I'm not sure what you're trying to say?

> Whoever is in power won't change it because it got them elected so why would they risk doing something that might take them out of power?

You can win the electoral college / house / senate / whatever, despite being disadvantaged via gerrymandering (arguably e.g. the case for Obama in 2012). So that's not generally true.

> You can win the electoral college / house / senate / whatever, despite being disadvantaged via gerrymandering

Of course you can always still overcome gerrymandering with enough political momentum. Gerrymandering currently tips the scales slightly in the direction of one party or another. Fixing gerrymandering would level the playing field (in theory).

I liked every part of this comment up to "Jon Ossoff's crushing loss", which is crazymaking.

Unless I'm missing something very important, Ossoff was competing for a district that hadn't gone to a Republican by less than 20 points in the entire history of the district (it was redistricted sometime around ~2000).

Ossoff --- who is not a great candidate! --- took one of the most solidly Republican suburban districts in the country and turned it into a real horse race. What am I supposed to learn from that about Democratic strategic weakness?

The fact that the Democrats outspent the Republicans by a factor of 7[1] and still lost. But that's exactly my point: the Democrats tried to manufacture a candidate in a time of dire need instead of first going for school boards, local municipalities, etc.

For what it's worth, Handel was a pretty terrible candidate too. Just goes to show how weak the Democratic strategists are. Obama won because he was an excellent candidate. Here's a novel idea for Democrats: get more awesome people to run for office.

[1] http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2017/06/19/the-race-for-georgia...

Read the story carefully. It's not a factor of 7, or even close to that. A larger proportion of Handel's support came from outside the campaign.

Assuming the parent post hasn't been edited, it doesn't seem to say what you suggest it does (at least not by my reading).

So, before we succumb to knee-jerk reactions that continue the political dysfunction, can we all just put our energy and minds toward solutions? Revenge politics (they did it, so we will to! get them back!) hurts.

Probably not, no. Tit for tat is optimal prisoners dilemma strategy.

Cooperation can be optimal for an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma depending on prisoner's time preference (discount factor).

Interesting. But, prisoners dilemma assumes that there's an authority that is imposing rules and punishments. In democracy, we are the authority and we can change the rules.

The actual history of this decade of gerrymandering is that in 2010 Republicans were able to use anti-Obama tea party energy to capture a bunch of state houses right before the census redistricting. Republicans used that opportunity to lock-in control of the House probably until 2020. It's really just an accident of history. If the pattern repeats itself anti-Trump anger could give Democrats control of more state houses and lock in the next decade of redistricting. But democrats have been less ruthless on these kinds of things. For example by bringing up anti gerymandering initiatives like this one right before they gain power. Also I think Republicans seem to have more capacity for playing strategic long moves, for example, outside conservative money funded a California ballot measure a few years ago that made California's redistricting nonpartisan, thus taking away from Democrats the biggest state where they control redistricting, probably taking away 5-10 seats that Democrats could gerymander for themselves next cycle.

I also caught some discussion about it on NPR. One argument, even as I am just as cynical as above poster; is that the Republicans did such a good job gerrymandering that best case they can keep their status quo and more than likely; they will be worse off. This was iirc because they balanced the demographics do well with their support base and any restructuring will actually hurt them. Based on the NPR bit which seemed to make a reasonable argument to me; an uniformed person, potentially they could back something like this.

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