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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (5864)	1/12/2017 3:17:36 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 368334

At the moment yes, they have more ability to gerrymander because they control more states. But that's hardly a permanent thing, they controlled fewer states in the past and probably will control fewer against at some point in the future. Its also not that they are worse its that both parties are somewhat bad here and the Republicans have more power to exercise their ability to be bad here at the moment. The Republicans currently do get some net benefit from gerrymandering, but they probably get more from the geographical distribution of voters. Democratic voters are more concentrated geographically, not just that they are in cities (although that does mean there are more together in one place) but also that there are more votes in areas that they totally dominate (80 percent plus, even 90 percent plus) then there are votes in similar areas for Republicans. Even with "natural" compact gerrymandered districts Republicans would have an advantage because the Democrats would "waste" more votes dominating certain districts. That also applies in the Senate. States aren't gerrymandered districts for the Republican party, many were created before there was a Republican party (as was the rule giving each state 2 senators. But even though the rules and the states were not set up to give Republicans an advantage, currently they do (this hasn't always been the case even in modern times, post WWII the Democrats tended to control both houses of congress even when a Republican was elected president).