Voting Rights Include Fair And Proportional Representation

This adds to the case that the 2018 mid- terms represented a big blue wave at the Congressional level:

Democrats received more than 8 million more votes than Republicans during the 2018 midterms, according to NBC pic.twitter.com/IHpbcM73dR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 20, 2018

Steve Benen notes:

...[T]he Democratic lead in the U.S. House popular vote now stands at 7.8%, up from 7.7% yesterday, and it may yet inch higher. For comparison purposes, note that in 2010 – which was widely seen as a GOP “wave” cycle – Republicans won the U.S. House popular vote by 6.6%. In 1994, which was seen as a Republican “revolution,” the GOP won the U.S. House popular vote by 7.1%.

Unfortunately, decades of Republican gerrymandering in State legislative districts has led to results like this (click on image to enlarge):

The gain of over 300 State legislative seats was a great beginning for Democrats this year -- but only just that, a beginning.  Tellingly, in Michigan and several other states voters supported initiatives to end gerrymandering through independent redistricting commissions. 

At the Federal level, the courts are taking up cases to end gerrymandering of Congressional districts. The Brennan Center for Justice provides a snapshot of those efforts here.

Voting rights -- including the rights of voters to be fairly and proportionally represented -- will be an ongoing battle as the Republican Party seeks to maintain reactionary (white) power in an increasingly hostile political and demographic environment.  In the past, Democrats have been accused of being asleep at the switch in these partisan redistricting battles.  But with the 2020 Census looming and new Democratic control of a number of key Statehouses (including key Secretary of State wins), we have an opportunity to begin to level the playing field, and we know what we need to do and how important it is that we do it.

BONUS:  Good question --

About 60 million people turned out to vote for Democrats for the House this year. That is a **crazy** number. (Republicans got 45m votes in the 2010 wave.)

And this was sort of missed. Why so many stories about Trump voters in truck stops and not so many about "the resistance"?

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 18, 2018

BONUS II:  Here's your answer. Sic transit gloria, America.

Republican Gerrymandering Quantified

The Associated Press conducted a study of U.S. House and State legislative races in 2016 and found, just as Donald "Rump" Trump said, the election was being rigged (but not in the way the dimbulb was suggesting):

The analysis found four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones. Among the two dozen most populated states that determine the vast majority of Congress, there were nearly three times as many with Republican-tilted U.S. House districts. 

Traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia were among those with significant Republican advantages in their U.S. or state House races. All had districts drawn by Republicans after the last Census in 2010. 

The AP analysis also found that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would have been expected based on the average vote share in congressional districts across the country. That helped provide the GOP with a comfortable majority that stood at 241-194 over Democrats after the 2016 elections — a 10 percentage point margin in seats, even though Republican candidates received just 1 percentage point more total votes nationwide. (our emphasis)

Not that this comes as a news flash, of course. Sam Wang identified the effort known as "Redmap" back in 2012:

Through artful drawing of district boundaries, it is possible to put large groups of voters on the losing side of every election. The Republican State Leadership Committee, a Washington-based political group dedicated to electing state officeholders, recently issued a progress report on Redmap, its multiyear plan to influence redistricting. The $30 million strategy consists of two steps for tilting the playing field: take over state legislatures before the decennial Census, then redraw state and Congressional districts to lock in partisan advantages. The plan was highly successful.

The Supreme Court is considering a case (Gill v. Whitford) of egregious partisan gerrymandering in Wisconsin, and other cases are awaiting Supreme Court review.  While the outcome of these cases may not affect the 2018 or 2020 elections, they will certainly determine how aggressively Republicans will try to use 2020 census data to rig future State and U.S. House elections wherever they can.  Along with voter suppression actions, that's pretty much their last line of defense against popular democracy.