Governor reveals election rigging response act to counter Trump’s push to gain five extra seats in Texas midterms
Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, said on Thursday state Democratic lawmakers would move forward with a redistricting plan to counter the Republican-led map-drawing effort in Texas aimed at securing a House majority after the midterm elections.
Newsom, joined by congressional Democrats and legislative leaders, unveiled a plan, known as the election rigging response act, that would override California’s independent redistricting commission and draw new congressional lines – a direct counter to a Texas effort, sought by Donald Trump, to push through mid-cycle maps that could hand Republicans five extra US House seats. The governor vowed the move would “neuter and neutralize” Texas’s proposal.
“Today is liberation day in the state of California,” Newsom declared at a rally in Los Angeles, in which he formally called for a 4 November special election to approve a new congressional map. “We can’t stand back and watch this democracy disappear district by district all across the country.”
Republicans are geographically dispersed while Democrats are generally packed into urban areas. We lose 100% of the time if we try the same gerrymandering tactics. We need to be smarter, not play their games.
If you think I’m wrong, show me a single state we could flip from red to blue by gerrymandering. You need to show your work though. You can’t just say X state, you have to show HOW you could flip the state by gerrymandering.
You could make the maps do anything. You could make every district in the state pass through one city.
You will have more democrat representatives in congress…
is there anything preventing the usual cracking/packing tactics from being used? Create enormous completely red districts consisting of large swaths of rural areas, and then split the urban areas amongst their surrounding rural areas just enough to have a relatively safe win. Yes, the districts would be ugly as hell (and vary hugely in size), but assuming we’re okay with gerrymandering that was probably to be expected already
No. The strategy can work perfectly fine both ways.
The entire point of gerrymandering is to make the geography irrelevant.
If you have a large, reliably blue city where 80 percent vote Democrat you can split that into districts that go 60 percent Democrat so that Democrats win more seats but by smaller margins…
If you wanted to gerrymander in favor of Republicans, you would fracture the city even more so that you disperse those Democrat voters over more districts.
that’s what I thought