Should the Democrats gerrymander ever state they have a trifecta in? Why should they put themselves at a disadvantage in the 2028 presidential elections?
Democrats now can remove all of the gerrymandering in the states they currently have control over. The districts would be redrawn by the state legislature to be more fair. They would remove all the GOP gerrymanders.
But if Trump and Republicans opposes the democrats legislation the democrats will heavily gerrymander all the states they currently have control over and change the retirement age of the state supreme courts.
So if Trump vetoes legislation Democrats heavily gerrymander one state. If he vetoes more legislation they gerrymander another state. If he vetoes more legislation they change the retirement age and appoint their own justices.
They could later negotiate with republicans to pass new Civil Rights Act banning all forms of gerrymandering and voter suppression.
They should use the fact that they now have the ability to gerrymander even harder as leverage to pass a constitutional amendment to ban gerrymandering.
A constitutional amendment can only pass if both sides have an incentive to do so. Democrats are generally in favor of banning gerrymandering just out of principle. Republicans’ only principal is self-interest. Now though it would actually be in Republicans’ best interest to ban it.
They should make it fully illegal, require non-partisan committees to oversee districts, and redistrict everything based upon that. I think the that needs to be done at the state level in every state, so it does nothing for states like Ohio that are a clusterfuck.
We should also axe the electoral college, move to proportional representation, STAR (or similar) voting, expand the house, and abolish the senate, IMO.
No one should gerrymander.
I think there would be a lot of support for passing laws requiring specific non-partisan or bi-partisan redistricting though. There are a bunch of states with systems in place like independent commissions that can prevent the worst abuses. I think preventing the worst abuses can only really help the Democrats.
Now, what we could and should ask for is for every democractic legislature to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. I’m pretty sure we have enough states now to make this happen.
Yes. Dem-conteoled states should pass National popular vote. And then they should gerrymander to the most extreme maps they can.
The Dems in Congress can draft a federal law banning gerrymandering nationwide, and the Republicans can either join in or die as a party.
National popular vote can and should happen but it has to be a state compact until it becomes an amendment. My big fear is that it isn’t hard enough to overturn once a new state legislature is in place in any given state.
NPV would be insulated from SCOTUS bullshit by an explicit authorizing act. USC 1 § 10:
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, … enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, …
There is some precedent suggesting that a compact which decreases the power of the states wouldn’t need it, but precedent also said abortion was a right, the 14th amendment was self-executing, and POTUS could forgive debts.
And interestingly, the NPVC apparently has text specifying how a state could withdraw.
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In the context of the current political landscape, I really do not agree.
I completely agree that gerrymandering is bad. But the Tribunal of Six has repeatedly reinforced that they think it’s perfectly fine and legal.
So, it’s time for malicious compliance. Do it so luridly, so grotesquely, so shamelessly, that the Six are forced to concede that they have concocted a strategy that leads to them losing if both sides resort to it, instead of only their side resorting to it.
And yeah, it’s totally possible that they’ll be stubborn, regressive fucks in such a committed way that they refuse to concede that point; so the other side of the coin is to use the effect that rampant Democratic gerrymandering will have (steamrolling republican representation) to wrest control of the Supreme Court away from the Nationalist Christian-aligned Six by either packing it, or just waiting for them to die and doing it the “normal” way. Then, and only then, will the Supreme Court be in such a state that it will be able to rationally conclude that political gerrymandering is unconstitutional and caustic to the very fabric of the country and its society. The cherry on top would be if the Democratic Party sued itself alongside the Republican Party and brought that all the way to the Supreme Court, just to make it abundantly clear that gerrymandering was absolutely never the end goal.
The third option is a non-fascist president having a monkey-paw moment and just shooting the Six dead as an “official act” (remember: the oath is to defend the union against enemies foreign and domestic), but that would surely cause just as many problems as it would solve.
No one should gerrymander.
Republicans gerry meandering is literally why we have such a huge House majority tho…
The way it works is you try to sink all your opponents in one district, and keep a thin margin everywhere else. I said at the time it would backfire, and it did.
Indiana was one of the few states “that stopped it”, but the thing is if it wasn’t stopped Republicans would have won a single seat in fucking Indiana.
the very obvious thing is
- re-pass the voting rights act (banning gerrymandering) with a non veto proof majority
- veto
- ok if you say so, get em boys
- re-pass the voting rights act
- incentive to maybe not veto
Should they- yes
Will they- look at Virginia. they did everything above board with a vote and didnt do shit.
I do think the GOP and its entire power based needs to be dismantled and investigated for treason, until then there is no law or justice in this country.
The people saying “no” care about process more than defeating fascism.
Republicans handed us the tools to destroy them forever. We would be stupid not to use them.
Uh, yeah, they should, and it should be done luridly and absurdly and grotesquely, because hey, it’s legal. The Tribunal of Six thinks political gerrymandering is perfectly fine, so let’s fucking go. And it’s not even hard to construct a rational narrative around it:
Democrats have, for decades, been trying to increase the fairness of the vote, very much including fighting gerrymandering. However, due to the increasingly blatant and indefensible ideological partisanship of the Supreme Court, the act of gerrymandering has been repeatedly reinforced as perfectly legal, so long as it is not done on the basis of a protected class. Thus, faced with a wildly and still increasingly unfair electoral landscape, the Democratic Party has been forced to effectively either concede defeat across vast swaths of the country, or resort to the same tactics. Resorting to gerrymandering, while absolutely not the end goal of our party’s policies, has now become an unfortunate - yet extremely necessary - component of our tactics on a national scale. Today we will begin resorting to those tactics.
But, to my Republican colleagues, know this: we are going to do it way more aggressively than you are, and way more aggressively than you can - because, as of 2025, there are 37.4 million registered Republicans in this country, and 44.1 million registered Democrats. Not to mention, scientists and engineers, as a demographic group, tend to skew to the left politically, so we will leverage that advantage in our own interests as well - and, not to mention, in the interests of broadening and deepening the small-d democratic process in the long term as well.
Ultimately, we are aiming to implement politically partisan gerrymandering in such a lurid and grotesque fashion with the intent of achieving either of the following two scenarios: that the current politically partisan and hyper conservative Supreme Court is forced to concede that political gerrymandering is not only deeply undemocratic, but unconstitutional, and thus outlaw it entirely; or, that the political landscape is changed so tectonically that we can simply pack the court with justices who are not only competent and rational, but meaningfully impartial and without any concern of political fallout, and then outlaw it entirely. Those of you who have served as enlisted members of the military, or who have friends or family that have, may recognize this as a particularly aggressive form of malicious compliance - and yes, that is precisely what it is.
Make no mistake: this is now, in a political sense, total war. But it is quite necessary to point out that you started all of this, and you started it a long, long time ago. You wanted gerrymandering. You will get gerrymandering until you cannot stand it any longer.
Edit: And yes, I did have fun writing that :)
Gerrymandering is not relevant to presidential elections.
Presidential elections are not relevant to this conversation.
Presidential election are literally in the bottom text of OP.
I’m not sure any state legislatures that have redistricting power changed enough with this election to give Dems any new power. They broke GOP super majorities in Ohio and NC but that’s not enough to do anything. Were there any others?
They control the Texas House and governorship. At the very least, it would be very easy to force a neutral gerrymander through. They have an enormous mandate and could make removal of the conservative gerrymander a condition for passing any legislation.
hey, GOP set the precedent for irregular redrawing of districts in off year. The Democrats would be fools not to do it too now.
Gerrymandering is required in order to give minority groups representation. Dems do it to help these groups and Republicans point at that and claim the Dems did it first. So you’ve got a bigger problem to solve first.
Gerrymandering is required in order to give minority groups representation.
The 2028 midterm election should refute that idea more thoroughly than the 1865 surrender refuted the idea that US states were sovereigns who could secede.
whichever party is in power always do so.
