People, Personas, and Politics 21 – The Red Map
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): People, Personas, and Politics
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/09
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Rick Rosner: The Red Map was Republican Party realizing that by flipping state races, which are cheaper to win than national races, they could gerrymander the states and make sure Republicans are disproportionately represented in the national House of Representatives. So it has only been since 2010 that things have gotten really, really bad.
Though things have been trending worse and more towards polarization, political polarization for probably 30 years. Where there almost no centrist politicians left in our national political bodies, Congress and the presidency and even the Supreme Court, where there are some leftover centrist justices, but it may become impossible to get those people onto the court in the future.
Where if it turns out that only when the Senate and the presidency are owned by the same political party, as now, that you can get a Supreme Court justice onto the court, which might not be the case. We only have one example so far, Gorsuch, but if that turns out to be the case.
Then the Supreme Court will – not that it isn’t polarized now – become just as polarized as the presidency and Congress. The gerrymandering this, which is – gerrymandering is where – every party in the House of Representatives have states divided into districts, congressional districts, that are members of their respective parties.
For the party in power, it ends up with more safe seats for them than the opposition party. In a state like Virginia, I don’t know how many they have. But let’s say they have 12. The Republicans in charge of gerrymandering figure out how to divide the states so that you have 9 safe Republican districts.
They consistently win by 55-45% margins and 3 safe democratic party districts, where the democratic candidate wins by a margin of like 70/30. It’s like ghettoes for the democrats. They’re crammed into these districts.
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