Politics: Gerrymandering

I know that I don’t have time yet to do my huge planned posts on the 2020 presidential race. What I know is that you are going to hear a lot about gerrymandering throughout the years. We will keep hearing about it. And we are going to hear about it more this year as it relates to the whole redistricting concept that is happening.

Sometimes it seems that gerrymandering is turned into a scapegoat to be blamed for why one party doesn’t win when it logically should. Indeed, if a party gets over a million more votes, but the other party wins more seats, it is quite clear that the math doesn’t add up.

Of course, this is something that both sides exploit. The Democrats make it sound like a great evil that shouldn’t be done. They are right, but they also do it themselves. They want you to think that only Republicans do it and that’s how Democrats lose races that should rightfully be won by them. But they also engage in gerrymandering when they can and this is a problem.

What’s worth noting is just how much worse the Republicans are with this. I don’t believe that this can be solved. Gerrymandering has to be done away with. I have no idea if this is even possible to do and pull off. But it would be nice if there were always fair maps somehow.

I would have to look up all of the maps going into the elections this year and compare them to other maps and how they have measured up in the past. Some may look gerrymandered just by their appearance of looking very wonky. Others, you’d have to look more into to see what might be wrong with it. The big thing to look out for is whether people will have to fight against each other by putting multiple incumbents in one district. Sometimes, this is impossible not to happen. And they may have to fight against their own party. In West Virginia, for instance, all three of their current Congresspeople are Republicans. There will be only two districts after this year so two of them will have to fight off in the primary.

When I think about gerrymandering, I think that if there is a song that would describe it, it would be the Ed Sheeran song Shape of You. I won’t share it this time, but probably will when I get to covering some of the House races this year. I can’t think of what else there is to cover in this blog post so I will end it here.