the house would be a lot better if there were ~100x the current number of representatives, with way, way smaller staff for each office. Smaller number of constituents means they actually have the ability, if they want to, to do significant constituent relations/outreach and that many representatives would also dilute corporate money’s ability to flood the zone and effectively buy all the candidates.
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House of rep numbers were supposed to increase with population originally
nah, I have it on the highest authority that the founders were omniscient and infallible and the current number is perfect no matter how many states or citizens there are
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Also what happened to dc statehood? Let’s go joe you useless fuck
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I go back and forth on this because more house seats also means more precise gerrymandering, but I think more ultimately is better just to dilute the power of existing reps. I’d strongly prefer a parliamentary system but that ain’t happening.
Anyway, increasing house size was slated to be one of the original amendments passed but because of some fuck-up in Connecticut it didn’t pass enough states in time and by the time they fixed it I guess we added more states and they never got around to ratifying it. I think it’s still pending though with no expiration if we could get the 25+ states to ratify it now. I think it was something like 1 house seat per 40k in population.
nah it’s actually harder to gerrymander if you have more seats
With that attitude, sure. There would definitely be a whole lot of 90/10 seats on both sides, but I have faith in the Rs to figure out how to game any system.
They’ve got BIG PLANS for Joe’s second term. Vote harder next time!
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Just look at the breakdown of Dem/GOP seats in state senates (fewer seats) vs. state houses (more seats). More seats = harder to gerrymander.
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even harder to gerrymander: 100x as many reps, but only 10x the number of districts. 10 reps per district, proportionally divided.
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:vince2:
I dunno, PA has 203 house districts and they did a pretty fucking good job gerrymandering it for the last 3 decades or whatever.
GOP has 58% of the state senate and 56% of the state house in PA.
Imagine if they made one district for each residence in PA. That would be a pretty tough gerrymander.
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But the important thing is that none of them disrupted his lunch out in a restaurant.
Seriously though, the left and center suck at this game. Imagine if Ted Cruz had voicemails like that from liberals. I know the doesn’t, because Fox News would go nuts about it, then they’d trash CNN for not covering it until CNN when nuts about it, they’d ask Biden in every presser why he didn’t condemn his supporters threatening Ted Cruz, then if he did, Fox News would run stories about BIDEN SUPPORTERS THREATENING REPUBLICANS LIVES!
But the left and center are like, nah, let’s just tweet it out.
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This coming off the last two elections when the GOP took 44% and 52% of the statewide vote in House races.
By the way, the fact that the GOP took 52% of the state house in 2020 while Biden won is a testament to Joe Biden kind of leaving the party behind by running to the center. I guess there’s no way to prove he would have had the same likelihood of winning while running further left and trading those votes for more left-wing votes, but it kind of left the party out to dry in a lot of other races because of split ballots.
Fetterman so far is proof that you can compete in and likely win Pennsylvania while running pretty far left.
There must be serious mathematical inquiry into this question, but I think it’s a question more of the limitations of practicality/computation/sanity than anything else.
I believe these are true for any value of n:
- With 50%+n voting for GOP, there exists a theoretical map such that n districts will be won by the GOP and zero by dems.
- With x%+n voting for GOP where x<50%, there exists a theoretical map such that 2 * x% * n seats can be won by the GOP and the remainder by dems.
As n gets much larger, it starts to become more difficult (since the “+n” part of both equations gets bigger in absolute terms), but n will almost certainly always be modest in comparison with the general population. For instance, if it’s 1 district per 100 residents, it means that the second formula now implies a 40% GOP vote could win 78% of the districts, rather than a theoretical maximum 80% of districts.
But, like I said, gerrymandering slivers of neighborhoods with wildly distant areas based on optimal voting ratios starts to become untenable, which is probably why more reps > better proportionality overall.
Not sure if I followed that, but just to point out that most states also have supermajority thresholds that can be just as significant as pure majority (i.e. in a 50/50 state you can build a supermajority gerrymander with 1 rep per 100k residents that you couldn’t with 1 rep per 20k residents).
https://twitter.com/RyanShead/status/1544385572331892736?s=20&t=0SIYfwUdTpZnDdpZefmHeg
“I would do anything, anything to protect my 5 grandchildren. Including, as a last resort, shooting them if I had to…”
Grandmother of the year candidate right here, folks.
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Ughhhhhh. That’s my rep!