Kevin Drum has a good piece in Mother Jones on the old and new strategies for defunding the left. The widely-recognized old strategy is eliminating private-sector unions, tort reform and overwhelmingly majority minority districts:
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Republican strategists approached the NAACP with offers of free mapping software to help them create majority-minority congressional districts that would be more likely to elect black and Hispanic members of Congress. But this tactic, dubbed “Project Ratfuck” by one of its chief architects, had nothing to do with increasing minority representation. Rather, it was designed to pack lots of liberal-leaning minority voters into a single district, leaving the surrounding districts as easy pickings for Republican challengers.
Tort reform didn’t work. Private-sector unions have been greatly diminished, Democrats know it, and Republicans are following up with an effort to crush public sector unions. But I don’t think Democrats are really aware of the damage that’s been done to the party and to cities by 90% Democratic urban House districts.
cleek
∀ X: I don’t think Democrats are really aware of X
Observer
So: Democrats are stupid. Tell us something we didn’t already know.
Next?
liberal
Sure they’re aware. It’s the downside of identity politics.
I read an article recently maybe in deadtree WashPost about Hispanics in TX wanting districts in the upcoming redistricting efforts.
EconWatcher
Why do they seem to be so much better at politics than we are?
When you think about it, we should be cleaning up. There was a poll in this week’s Economist that made me sit up: The percentage of Americans who say the free market system is the best has declined from 80% in 2002 to 59% in 2010. The US figure is now substantially lower than in Social Democratic Germany. Check it out. economist.com/node/18527446
And of course, our side is not proposing to replace the free-market system (at least the vast majority of us); we just want a decent safety net, some reliable restraints on financial pirates, and some environmental protection.
How can we be losing? I think populist calls to hit the rich have sometimes backfired in the past, and that may explain some of Obama’s caution. But really, I think he’s misreading the mood. There’s a lot of pent up anger out there. If we don’t harness it for our side, they’ll harness it for theirs.
David in NY
@EconWatcher:
Had not thought of it that way. I think Obama probably believes (as do many others) that if the economy just gets better, the anger will dissipate. I guess the problem is that there is a long “in the meantime” in which somebody is going to benefit from that anger — and so far it’s entirely been the Republicans. No reason O can’t push back on regulation, unions, etc. to capture a little of it.
Geek, Esq.
And, of course, the most ardent defenders of racially gerrymandered districts are . . . members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Sigh.
Geek, Esq.
@David in NY:
This is one of the really frustrating things about Obama the political figure–he simply refuses to acknowledge the utility and the legitimacy of anger within the political process. He’d rather let the Tea Party pigeonhole him as a stooge of Wall Street than issue some standard red meat bashing Wall Street.
He sometimes takes this unity/inclusiveness crap to absurd ends.
Omnes Omnibus
@EconWatcher:
Our side is nowhere near as willing to complete disconnect from reality and flat out lie. “Tax cuts increase revenue.” Isn’t it pretty to think so?
low-tech cyclist
Go to the Cook PVI Wikipedia page, and click the button that ranks the Congressional districts by PVI, which is a measure of how Democratic or Republican a district votes.
There are 35 districts with a PVI of D+25 or more, which means these districts typically vote Democratic by a margin of 25% or more.
There are 8 districts with a PVI or R+25 or more.
This means we’re wasting a lot more votes than they are, by having them packed into districts that we have already easily won. It sucks. If we’d done better this past November, we might’ve been in a position to rectify this. But we took the same beating at the state level that we did in Congress, so the GOP will be in a position to play these same games when we redistrict.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I live in Texas. I know exactly what these types of things cost.
jwb
@low-tech cyclist: We took a worse beating at the state level than we did in Congress, so the redistricting is going to be miserable. On the upside, the more districts redistricting attempts to pick off, the easier it gets to flip: a PVI of R+5 is much easier to turn Dem than is a PVI of R+25. So one hope is the Goopers are greedy in their redistricting. Then, too, Tom Delay set the precedent for between-census redistricting, so if Dems manage to take back any of the state legislatures and governorships they can revisit the issue.
Roger Moore
There’s a serious question about how much this is a clever Republican ploy and how much is an inevitable result of population distribution. Big cities tilt strongly Democratic but they are, as their name says, big. That means it’s hard to carve them up into districts in any way that doesn’t give you at least a few districts that are overwhelmingly Democratic. The Republicans may think they’re clever for encouraging racial gerrymandering, but some of that would happen with any sensible districting scheme because that’s the way the population already is.
Mandramas
Who cares? In any case, poor people don’t vote in the American voting system. They can’t afford to lose a labor day.
mistermix
@Roger Moore: If you think of a district as a pie slice, each urban center should be the skinny part and the widest part is the rural border of the city. This is better than segregated blobs, IMO.
NonyNony
@Geek, Esq.:
Expecting Democrats to be angry is like expecting the sky to turn purple. Democratic voters in the aggregate don’t like politicians who fly off the handle and get angry – they like politicians who are calm and get shit done.
Did you see the poll the other day about who liked the compromise and who didn’t? Republicans walked away with what I consider big victories and yet the Republican voters were the most upset because they didn’t get everything they wanted. Democrats gave away far too much in my opinion and yet Democratic voters were by a large margin happy with the compromise. Because they expect their politicians to compromise on important things and not grandstand.
If Obama were out there whipping up anger at various institutions it would just piss off a large portion of the Democratic voting bloc who don’t see anger as “reasonable”. Will this change in the future? My guess is probably not in the near term.
(And this is even before we get into the whole discussion about imaging, and the “angry black guy” image that Obama has been very very careful his whole political life to avoid…)
Dennis SGMM
This is one of the reasons (Force of habit being the other) that I work for Democratic candidates in our city elections and state elections. These things matter.
Disclaimer: I live in CA26 so it’s more hope than experience.
@Roger Moore:
I think you have something there. These days, population shifts are happening much more quickly than they did in the past. While I am willing to believe that the R’s are capable of any sort of skulduggery, Occam’s Razor suggests that demographic shifts are the assignable cause.
It could be worse. In my fair state of California, the Republicans and Democrats reached across the aisle just long enough to gerrymander the state into safe seats for both sides. That, plus term limits, pretty much guarantees that our state Assembly is made up of hard-core, inexperienced, partisan wankers.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@NonyNony:
Unfortunately, this seems to scream to me that way too many folks believe the GOP is actually negotiating in good faith, or actually believe that the Dems really are further out on the limb than the GOP.
Identity Politics and Hippie Punching win again.
PeakVT
But I don’t think Democrats are really aware of the damage that’s been done to the party and to cities by 90% Democratic urban House districts.
I think Democrats are aware of it (I have been since the 1990s) but what can they do about it? If white Democratic leaders fight majority-minority districts it will blow up the Democratic coalition. And minority Democratic leaders are happy with the situation because it’s the only way most of them can get elected. So everybody ignores the problem.
Napoleon
This has long been something that has driven me crazy, the minority majority districts. It has been perfectly obvious since day one that in reality it hurts the party and by extension minorities, but it puts you in a box as a Democrat because you are stuck making an argument to a large segment of the base, African Americans, that amounts to “trust us white people this time, forget about the last 450 years”.
Napoleon
PS, one hope I had with Obama becoming President is that maybe it would become easier to reason with AA politions that we need to water down the deep blue districts so that we could get more, and just as important better Dems into Congress.
Poopyman
@Omnes Omnibus: Thanks for saving me having to type this. That’s it exactly.
ETA: And as an example, here’s a repost of what I put on TimF’s Morning Thread a while ago:
Linnaeus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yep. The GOP has a much higher proportion of political Keyser Sözes, and that creates an advantage of sorts.
Roger Moore
@Dennis SGMM:
Sure, the gerrymandering was bad, but a lot of it was inevitable anyway. As long as you try to respect existing political boundaries, you’re going to wind up with a lot of safe districts. You can carve up Los Angeles any way you like, but you’re still going to get a bunch of districts where the Greens are a bigger threat to the Democrats than the Republicans are. And the Central Valley districts are likely to be as far to the right as the LA districts are to the left. The new redistricting commission may make some difference, but it’s a good bet that we’ll still have a lot of safe districts for both parties.
Dennis SGMM
@Roger Moore:
Good points. I live in the San Gabriel Valley so I wait with bated breath for someone to run to the right of David Dreier.
As fir the Central Valley, this old hippy sees that as “Children of the Corn” territory.
someofparts
That is so exactly what they have done in Atlanta.
Brachiator
In California, both parties used this tactic to create perpetual safe seats. The GOP didn’t even mind that this meant that they would become a permanent minority.
But if Democrats are not aware of the problems this has caused overall, then they are a hopeless bunch of dopes who deserve the butt kicking they are getting.
Roger Moore
@Dennis SGMM:
Yeah, I live in Pasadena so I’m in Adam Schiff’s district, but I’d be in Dreier’s district if I lived across the street. Dreier and Schiff look like they really do owe their safe districts to gerrymandering- it would make a lot more sense to move La Canada and La Crescenta into Schiff’s district and Pasadena into Dreier’s, though there would have to be some other juggling to get the populations to even out- so it’ll be interesting to see how the districts are structured after the new commission does its work.
catclub
@Geek, Esq.: Yeah, just look at how far he has gotten as an angry black man.
Unlike Al Sharpton and Louis Farrahkan who acted like unthreatening black men in the Bill Cosby mold.
Slowbama
Here in Georgia the Dem Party — which actually should be fairly competitive given that a third of the population is African American — was made totally irrelevant by majority/minority districts. Republicans openly brag that they cooperated with black Democrats to screw white liberals. In some cases there is very obvious collusion between the two sides.
joe from Lowell
The Democrats in Congress are perfectly aware of the harm these districts are causing.
But do you want to be the white DC politician who crosses some black Congressman who gets 92% of the vote in his district? Being in these uber-safe districts makes these people heavy hitters, often with serious seniority, and it also all-but-guarantees that they will be, by virtue of winning the primaries in those districts, extreme effective at us-vs-them appeals aimed at black voters.
Woodorw L. Goode, IV
I can’t speak for Democrats as a whole, but I can absolutely comment on the black political strategists in my local area (a large midwestern city– large enough that it has at least one MBL, NFL, NBA or NHL team).
They’re morons. Dumb as a box of rocks. Don’t know a thing about politics– don’t care.
The black political strategy here is “set up a small number of political teats that are 100% safe– that a white or latino couldn’t possibly win– and let us grab onto them and suck as hard as we can. Do that and we’ll ignore everything else that goes on.”
They have one congressional seat that has all the black districts– it’s gerrymandered to collect every single one. There are two “leans blue”– meaning the reps have to work every single time to hold it, and can’t get too crazy– and two deep reds.
Same deal with the state reps and state senate districts. This area has nearly 40% of the state’s population and is 2/3 blue. But only 55% of the seats from the region are blue, because the blacks have to win 95-5 or run unopposed, while the wingnuts are more than happy to win 60-40.
There are a couple of county offices that are reserved for black candidates and a few more where the officeholder can be white, but all his or her employees must be black.
The central city is set up so that 50% of council districts are majority black, 25% are white-black-latino and 25% solidly white. Most of the money goes into the black districts, and it’s almost impossible for a white candidate to become mayor unless the black power brokers line up behind a white as a compromise choice.
20 years ago, when I pointed out (loudly) that this strategy would create corruption and non-responsive government– and drive people out of the city, or out of the county or out of the region, I got told that I didn’t understand politics, and especially not the concerns of the black community. I got a private sector job just before I was fired
Of course what’s happened. The MSA is a lot smaller, the central county is smaller and the city is smaller. And because the blue voters are concentrated in a few districts, they have no impact in the legislative bodies. The red legislators routinely pass stuff that kills us, in an effort to drive out more blue voters.
And the powerbrokers I fought with then– who now realize they don’t get nearly as much milk as they used to– are angry about being screwed, but can’t figure out what happened. The only thing they feel good about? “We’ve still got our districts.”
It’s real simple. If being a big fish in a small pond isn’t even good enough– when you need to be a whale in a puddle to feel safe– it’s real easy to get marginalized. I know I sound racist, but I;’m too old and too tired to use euphemisms and the facts are the facts. The black leaders I worked with in the 60’s wanted to integrate; the ones around now don’t mind ghettoes as long as they’re in charge.
Kenneth Fair
If by “didn’t work,” you meant “didn’t lower malpractice insurance rates or increase economic activity,” then this statement is correct.
If by “didn’t work,” you meant “didn’t protect corporate malfeasors from being held liable to the people they injure,” then this statement is most assuredly false.
Don
A sensible way out of jerrymandering would be to elect representatives from multi-member districts, with a voting system (e.g. Hare) that ensures proportional representation. Then in a state like Iowa, with four House seats available, anybody who can corral 25% of the votes statewide wins, with no votes wasted by an accident of geography.
The only people who have a reason NOT to like this idea, are incumbents in safe districts.
NaveenM
@Kenneth Fair: I think he means it never passed.
4jkb4ia
I live in a VRA district, but not one that is 90% yet. Because of the effects of segregation it is more logical to give Clay more areas in the county than in the city when you are making sure that there is a minority district. I think there is a tradeoff between making sure of the very liberal voting records that these people have, so there is still a Democratic left of some size in the House, and a) these people being free to concentrate more on personal machine-building than actually competing for the seat and b) having more swing House districts.
4jkb4ia
Crisitunity ran the numbers on population growth by district a few weeks ago and had another post on changing racial composition yesterday, which I haven’t read with any attention yet.
4jkb4ia
But I can say that I looked at the NYT results for election 2010 and there are only 8 districts at most where the candidate got 85% of the vote or greater. Even Conyers got 79%. 3 of them were in NYC so mistermix’s perspective is understandable (does mistermix in fact live in upstate NY? I am not sure)
You can think about the damage to the party through the lens of why Republicans would want it that way. If blacks and Latinos need only the votes of blacks and Latinos, whites are not used to being part of cross-racial coalitions to elect blacks and Latinos to represent them. Republicans can then use racial resentment and the idea of Democrats being the party of blacks to pick off some of those suburban whites. The racial resentment is concentrated as much as the minority vote is concentrated. Of course for Obama this didn’t work as planned.
Republicans can also sometimes be successful electing a black House candidate in a majority white district so the cross-racial coalition works for them in a sense.
4jkb4ia
@low-tech cyclist:
And I have to admit this is a good comment.