Gerrymandering Competitive Districts to Near Extinction
14th August 2022
All told, there are now fewer competitive districts than at any point in the last 52 years. If the good news is that both parties emerged with reasonable opportunities in coming years to win control of a closely divided House, the bad news is that they will fight that battle on the narrowest of terrains under maps artificially engineered to reduce competition.
They say that like it was a bad thing. Competitive districts disfranchise the losers. Let me say that again. Competitive districts disfranchise the losers.
If you are interested in representative democracy at all, the ideal system is to put all of the voters from one side in the same districts, and all of the voters from the other in the same districts. That maximizes the number of people who are represented by the legislator that they agree with. (Oh, sure, politicians make a lot of mouth noise about ‘representing everybody in the district’, but only the simple-minded believe that rot.)
This is why courts are so fond of ruling that State X has to create another majority-minority district: They know that spreading out voters of a particular viewpoint so that they are the lesser number in a district means that they are effectively shut out. We’ve been fighting this fight since the Sixties.
The only people who profit from ‘competitive districts’ are the media outlets who get to report on elections as if they were horse races. “Can the dark-horse candidate come from behind and win? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT!” That’s why you’ll never read an article in any newspaper or hear any opinion on TV regarding the undoubted virtues of gerrymandering.