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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Not really. New Jersey is deep blue even in elections that favor Republicans overall.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
State of Mind
Not sure if that is constitutional though.
"What a century this week has been." - Seung Min Kim
Figure of Hourai
I mean, who's on the ballot isn't a top-down affair...
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The Mod with the Migraine
The problem is that we don't have evidence that these Russian operations had any substantive weight. We know they did happen but not that their scale was important. And yet people immediately jumped to "Russian trolls", and not for the first time either. So it looks like - similar to Hillary's emails - the Russians-Sanders thing is getting undue attention.
I also belatedly noticed that the Gallup poll wasn't counting "African Americans" but "nonwhites" so I'll need to look for that metric.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
One Winged Egret
2016 was a close election, so the effect of the Russian meddling doesn't need to be huge to have had an effect.
Wouldn't it get lost in statistical noise?
They only need to influence key areas in a small way. You'd only know if you were looking for it, and it's relatively recently we started finding out how those bots amplified different messages.
Si Vis Pacem, Para Perkele
No, that's not quite close enough. It's far from clear that the "Russian operation" did even reach 1% of all similar traffic, to say nothing that many voters are not online.
In these terms, the private server was probably the deciding factor. Russian trolls probably weren't as the few numbers about their proportional impact we see are smaller than the vote margin.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
reluctant author, willing misanthrope
State-level elections often end up different than the national ones. 3 of the last 6 governors of Illinois were Republican. 5 if you take Pat Quinn out since he took over for Blagojevich after he was removed.
Edited by Cris_Meyers on Feb 23rd 2019 at 10:20:19 AM
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Oh, I don't think they tipped anything. It's just the tactic they used that was interesting.
Si Vis Pacem, Para Perkele
These Agents certainly succeeded in promoting Paranoia.
A couple of stories I found on https://currentstatus.io/
Judge tosses North Carolina mandatory voter ID amendment citing gerrymandering – A judge in North Carolina on Friday tossed out the state's constitutional amendment requiring a voter ID, citing prevalent gerrymandering in the state's General Assembly.
Health Care and Insurance Industries Mobilize to Kill ‘Medicare for All’ – Doctors, hospitals, drug companies and insurers have a simple message: The Affordable Care Act works reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed or replaced with a big new public program.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/us/politics/medicare-for-all-lobbyists.html
Edited by sgamer82 on Feb 23rd 2019 at 1:50:10 PM
Disasturbator
Now if only they could outlaw gerrymandering itself,but that's a fight you won't win easily,I'm not sure its even possible
New theme music also a box
The problem with making Gerrymandering illegal, I imagine, is that it's hard to define specifically what it is in a truly objective sense. I'd suggest instead rewriting the rules of how the district lines and such are drawn, in a way that makes it hard to Gerrymander, or to give the duty over to people with no incentive to do so or something like that.
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Captain of the Dead City
Proving that someone is indeed gerrymandering is borderline impossible though. You'd have to prove intent, and good luck with that.
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She/her
That’s not how gerrymandering law works at all.
And it’s often pretty obvious- packing (cramming all of a racial, ethnic, or political population into one district so their influence is limited) and cracking (splitting all of a racial, ethnic, or political population into several districts so their votes are overwhelmed) are both pretty easy to identify when you put the electoral map over the demographic maps.
And if a state population is 60A/40B between two parties A and B, yet the representatives are 80A/20B, or even 60B/40A... it’s also pretty obvious what’s going on.
Edited by wisewillow on Feb 23rd 2019 at 4:10:50 AM
The best solution is to remove the entire process from political hands (which a few states, and most liberal democracies, already do) and give it to an independent body that works based on census data, etc.
Not perfect (everyone is biased) but with enough safeguards the system does work, and its a lot better than letting politicians choose their voters.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
Untrustworthy
Exactly- quibbling over exact legal definitions and proving intent is a red herring- all you actually need to do is make sure that the people who would benefit from gerrymandering aren't the ones drawing the district.
"Canada Day is over, and now begins the endless dark of the Canada Night."
Isn't the best solution to change the system so gerrymandering itself becomes impossible? The concept of a single person representing an arbitrary region is becoming more and more outdated with time. Far gone are the times where you could expect a person's interest to significantly overlap with their neighbors. As long as region elected a single representative, there will awakens be local minorities being ignored.
It is not like you need to eliminate local representation altogether either. Mixed systems exist, as do the possibility of a single electoral range electing multiple representatives. There are many options that would eliminate or severely undermine garrymandering.
wouldn’t that would require a fundamental change in the constitution, since it’s such a drastic change in representation?
Edited by megaeliz on Feb 23rd 2019 at 5:12:17 AM
The constitution requires no such thing, unless you want to change the Senate.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
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3 dead after a Boeing 767 cargo jet crashes in Trinity Bay east of Houston.
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Er... how is that politics?
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I mean, he wouldn't win New Jersey anyway, so I don't know if he'd care.
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