recovering hipster

Sharing for the headline, as the article itself is pretty awful. In what should be a pretty non-partisan story reporting the election returns, The Philadelphia Inquirer falls prey to the false equivalency.

You see, the fact that Romney performed so poorly in these majority-black, majority-Democratic voting divisions is giving Republicans a big case of butthurt. They just can’t seem to wrap their heads around why black voters might not flock toward the rich white guy who wants to gut the social safety net, likes to fire people, and who also happens to be a bishop in a Church that up until 1978 said that being black was a punishment from God. He also did this.

So in an attempt to appear objective, the Inquirer published a whole article filled with unsubstantiated claims and insinuations because GOPers were shocked, shocked! to find out that President Obama (aka the enormously popular incumbent who also happens to be our first African-American president) performed really, really well in majority-black districts.

On the other side of this issue, the article quotes political scientists and election officials who say things like “duh”* and “ya think?”* (*not direct quotes)

It’s not until the the 39th graf that the article mentions casually that in 2008, there were 57 voting divisions that didn’t record a single vote for John McCain. For those of you doing the math at home, that’s just two fewer divisions. Or, to put it another way… pretty much the exact same figure, once you realize that Philadelphia has 1,687 voting divisions, and these voting divisions represent only about 3% of the total.

This is irresponsible journalism, stoking the fires of voter-fraud allegations and racial resentment by giving GOP conspiracy theorists a platform to repeat their lies and portraying their fantasies as being worthy of equal consideration to reality.The Philadelphia Inquirer should know better.

(Source: farorescourage)

Although a small number of ballots remain to be counted, as of this writing, votes for a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives outweigh votes for Republican candidates. Based on ThinkProgress’ review of all ballots counted so far, 53,952,240 votes were cast for a Democratic candidate for the House and only 53,402,643 were cast for a Republican — meaning that Democratic votes exceed Republican votes by more than half a million.

Two caveats are necessary in considering these numbers. The first is that all ballots have not been counted, so these numbers will change somewhat as more returns trickle in. (Because the remaining ballots are more likely to be from Democratic-leaning west coast states, it is likely that the Democrats’ margin will increase somewhat over time.) The second caveat is that these numbers include several California districts where two members of the same party ran against each other, and they do not include districts where a single candidate ran unopposed. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the nation is very closely divided over which party should control the House, with Democrats appearing to enjoy a slight edge.

The actual partisan breakdown of the 113th Congress will be very different, however. Currently, Republicans enjoy a 233-192 advantage over Democrats, with 10 seats remaining undecided. That means that, in a year when Republicans earned less than half the popular vote, they will control a little under 54 percent of the House even if Democrats run the table on the undecided seats.

There is a simple explanation for how this happened: Republicans won several key state legislatures and governors’ mansions in the election cycle before redistricting, and they gerrymandered those states within an inch of their lives. President Obama won Pennsylvania by more than 5 points, but Democrats carried only 5 of the state’s 18 congressional seats:

On election night, I was wondering if there was a way to tally all the votes in every congressional race and see what the generic R/D total would look like on a national level.

This is just one of the reasons that midterms matter. In the first election since the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting, Democrats had an exceptionally good year. Not only was the president re-elected, but a number of Democratic senators won tough races, and several ballot initiatives went to the liberal side.

Unfortunately, because Republicans controlled several state legislatures, they got to draw up the congressional districts and gerrymandered them in their favor. As a result, a clear mandate for the Democrats is portrayed in the media as a split decision (nb: I do recognize that some of the vote differential is due to differences in voter turnout in blue/red districts, but I believe my broader point is true as well).

So what’s the solution? Instituting a parliamentary system is probably out of the question because it would be too radical of a change for most people, but what about something along the lines of what my former representative, John Tanner, proposed? Instead of letting politicians in state legislatures control this process, have each state create a nonpartisan redistricting board that would redraw the map, using national standards for contiguity and compactness and making sure that congressional districts represent actual communities by using traditional boundaries like city limits whenever possible.

There are a couple issues with this, the chief one being that its unsure how this would affect “majority-minority” districts like NC-12, AZ-02, etc. On the whole, however, I think it’s a pretty good idea that could be tweaked into something that would do our country a lot of good. Good luck with it getting any serious consideration, though.

Call the President:
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“Hi, my name is _____________, and I live in _________. I just wanted to call and congratulate the President on his re-election and express my view that the use of drone strikes is an unacceptable policy that kills innocent men, women, and children and the time to end this policy is now. Furthermore, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war must be irrefutably denounced. Thank you for noting my views and may God guide you through these next 4 years.”

Email the President: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments

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Do this.

(Source: whatiremembered)