This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 19 May 2026, by Bob Geer.
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19 May 26
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broadly, in the 2019 decision, the Supreme Court gave a green light to partisan gerrymandering.
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So any guardrails that might have come from the Constitution or the courts have been bulldozed over the past decade.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
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There are some estimates that Republican-controlled legislatures across the South could target as many as 19 majority-minority districts, all held by Democrats.
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Which is eliminating a huge amount of Black representation in Congress.
Yes.
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It basically means we’re turning the House into the Electoral College, in that whichever party controls the state legislature and is the majority party in the state, no matter how narrow, they’re going to maximize the seats that they can get.
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we’ll have no competitive elections. I think the latest analysis suggests we’ll only have 15 meaningful toss-ups in this November election, out of 435.
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Twenty years ago, it was closer to 50.
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20 years ago, 2006. You had Blue Dog Democrats who were winning in a lot of districts that are now completely safe Republican districts.
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There’s been this increasing nationalization of partisanship. I think I remember a book by a guy named Ezra Klein. He wrote a book about this polarization thing that has been happening to America.
Great book. [Laughs.] Great book. Gets more relevant every day, unfortunately.
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if the other side is doing it, aren’t you an idiot to not do it, as well?
Yes, you would be an idiot. [Laughs.] That’s the logic of our trench warfare politics.
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I’m just going to say it: This system is a disaster and broken.
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What could be built to replace it?
You are an advocate for something called proportional representation. What is that?
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This is your intuitive sense of proportionality, which is that a party that gets 40 percent of the votes in a state should get 40 percent of the seats.
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in a proportional representation system, proportionality is generally achieved by having larger districts that elect multiple members, typically through party lists.
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So you could imagine New York State, instead of being 26 districts, maybe being three districts, split between the north, the mid and the New York City area.
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. And then parties would put forward lists of candidates.
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under the current system, if you get 51 percent, you get 100 percent of the representation. Under a proportional system, if you get 51 percent of the vote, you get 50 percent of the representation,
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There are a bunch of different ways to do proportional representation, and there are better ways to do it and worse ways
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The most commonly used form of proportional representation is an open list party system, and I think that’s probably the best system.
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What that means practically is that you go into the voting booth, and the Democratic Party has a list of candidates and the Republican Party has a list of candidates. And you can choose the candidate from the party that you like.
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All of the candidates are essentially running together. Their votes get added together, and that’s the party’s vote share, and then the party gets seats in the legislature in proportion to its vote share.
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you’re voting for a candidate on a party list. You’re getting to choose the party and the candidate.
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But you still only have one vote.
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OK. I have a couple of questions about this.
First, who is choosing this list of party candidates? If Democrats are now running in this eight-seat district, I assume they’re running eight candidates — something like that?
Yes, they probably run eight candidates. Maybe fewer, depending.
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There are a few ways that parties under this system choose their candidates. One is to have some sort of convention. Two is if you’re a party member, you get to vote.
You could have a primary in which the top seven or eight finishers go on to the general election. But this sort of obviates the need for a primary.
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I don’t understand at all why this would obviate the need for a primary. In the situation you’re talking about, it seems incredibly important who ends up on the party list and who is choosing.
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that’s a lot of power moving to the party structure.
It is.
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Candidates would put themselves forward, and then whoever is part of that convention would say: These are the candidates we want.
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If we’re sticking within the two-party framework for now, and I’m the local Democratic Party, I want to appeal to a lot of different people. I want somebody who’s going to appeal to progressives and somebody who’s going to appeal to moderates.
So I don’t want to load it with just moderates or just progressives. I want to run candidates who are going to appeal to different groups within the electorate because I want to maximize the total vote for the party.
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OK. What happens in a state like California, where you currently have more than 50 districts?
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Can you just gerrymander that?
I mean, you can. But if you’re drawing a five-member district where Republicans have 40 percent, well, they still have two seats.
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The whole idea that anything over 50 percent gives you 100 percent and everything under 50 percent gives you zero goes away. The results are going to be proportional within those districts, so you can’t marginalize the opposition party.
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they should be drawn by an independent redistricting commission, the consequences of drawing those lines become less predictable and less clearly partisan.
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all of a sudden, it does begin to matter whether or not you appeal to people who are skeptical of you, who are not totally sold. And conversely, the minority party is not competing ineffectually.
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It actually matters for them if they get 30 percent of the vote, 40 percent of the vote, 45 percent of the vote. It creates competition for voters who are currently disenfranchised.
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