> What Texas did wasn’t right, but that doesn’t mean that in picking a fight over it, Democrats actually come out ahead.
What a terrible argument. Doing nothing results in Texas picking up 3-5 seats with nothing from the Dem side. Is this winning? For the California redistricting to have been the right choice, it just has to be better than not doing it and not necessarily result in a net positive, and this article did a poor job arguing on that front.
You can easily argue that Republicans not facing any repercussions on their action results in them becoming emboldened. This article is strictly relying on the idea that California's actions will be some magical motivator for Republican states redistricting, not the actual concrete motivator, which has been the Trump administration threatening primaries and withholding funding. And you can also argue that Prop 50 being such a blowout win will embolden other Dem states to do the same.
Gerrymandering being bad is obvious. But writing a whole article to state that and dooming around Dems doing what is both politically smart and took a lot of good politicking the very day after is just dooming for the sake of dooming. And you might hate Newsom or whatever, but I'm glad he's in charge and not some inane moralist.
Yeah, I'm also just questioning the priorities at this point where the first reaction to a landslide victory is to try and kneecap an objectively impressive political win just because she doesn't like Newsom (hence the loaded title). Because I don't see for what other reason this needed to be written - no one (including Newsom) claimed Prop 50 was going to cure all ills.
Maybe because certain people who write these articles are chronically online or in spaces like Twitter that they think they represent the majority of normie vies? That is the only reason I can think of why they can argue against strawman policies or ideas. If the priority is winning elections that should be the big deal. In a normal world, I definitely think how we win is just as important as winning, but at some point we have to just be happy with the W and be better in the future.
I think Piper's article here is the only one that actually show concern about whether the Dems win or lose *in the long run*. That means whether Dems are competitive in the Senate and Electoral College.
Yesterday was a good night, but even carrying the performance forward to next year, that would probably not have been enough to win back the Senate. And that's still a problem.
These are entirely separate conversations. Who was arguing that Prop 50 was the only thing required to address all the country's ills? It's just basic common sense that gerrymandering has no impact on state or nation level races. It's like complaining that Prop 50 didn't also fix inflation.
And this article also ignores that Prop 50 acknowledges in its own wording a commitment to national independent redistricting. You can say that's just words, but that's literally all Democrats can do as long they are not in power.
I’m getting DINO vibes. Kelsey just follow Bari Weiss if you refuse to be constructive. Mississippi might be a better fit because obviously they are totally crushing it compared to California…. Right 🤣
“Pie-in-the-sky electoral reforms aside, the Democrats could have simply banned gerrymandering in 2021 or 2022”
This is a very misleading way of describing what happened. Technically they could have, but only if they had abolished the filibuster. More accurate would be to say “Manchin and Sinema cared more about the filibuster than banning gerrymandering”. I agree that’s bad, but we need to be clear that banning partisan gerrymandering, in practice, will require abolishing the filibuster.
This framing also implies the Republicans might have supported a clean, anti-gerrymandering-only bill. I see no evidence for that. In fact, Senate Democrats proposed such a bill in 2021, the Freedom to Vote Act, and every Republican voted against it (Schumer flipped to voting “No” for procedural reasons, given that it failed to get the required 60 votes): https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00420.htm
I was wondering what this meant as well, my (maybe poor?) assumption is you could say cloture stands as it however now there is a narrow carveout for a definition of competitive districts or trying to ape at proportional national elections in the legislature via multimember districts.
Damn. It's been less than 24 hours since a resounding Democratic victory, and we are already back to the hand-wringing and panic. You're not wrong, but goddam can we PLEASE allow ourselves a moment to breathe and refill the tank for the next fight?!
The only way gerrymandering will stop is if it’s banned nationally. That will only happen on a bipartisan basis because it will either need 60 votes or if the filibuster is eliminated and Democrats pass their own legislation Republicans will undo it the first chance they get. The only way it will gain enduring bipartisan support is if Republicans become convinced that it no longer benefits them. Right now that won’t happen because they do benefit from it largely because blue states got high on their own supply and took away their ability to draw districts. That has to stop and Prop 50 is a big step towards it. States controlled by Democrats should be every bit as ruthless about it as states controlled by Republicans. It’s a race to the bottom but it’s the only way gerrymandering will ever end. Things will have to get worse before they get better but they can get better eventually. It’s not guaranteed that things will get better but the current arrangement where Republicans gerrymander to their heart’s content while Democrats don’t is guaranteed to keep us in this bad state of affairs.
I hate gerrymandering but I’m thrilled that Prop 50 passed and am very glad to see Democrats everywhere recognize the need to play by the same rules. Namby pamby idealism doesn’t work and nobody gets brownie points for “doing the right thing.”
Yeah, I don't understand why she said Dem's could've passed a federal law for it. Did they have 60 votes anytime in the Senate over the past 10 years that I'm unaware of?
They couldn’t have. They passed some of election reforms with bipartisan support but they were mostly geared towards preventing a future president from trying to overturn an election. The House passed something on gerrymandering but it was on a party line vote. Plenty of House Republicans have complained about gerrymandering being done to them but basically none of them oppose it per se.
I typically appreciate Kelsey's commentary quite a lot, but this piece feels kind of lazy. If your thesis is "Prop 50 is insufficient to defeat Trump, we also need to do X" then just write about what X is and why we should do it! No one is out there claiming that retaliatory gerrymandering alone will save democracy. We obviously need other strategies too, and I would love to see the Argument explore those rather than knocking down strawmen. I'm particularly interested in analysis of how Democrats should prepare to fight back against a serious attempt to rig the 2028 election or subvert its outcome, given that Trump seems very likely to attempt that and is much less constrained than the last time he tried.
I do not believe it is true that Democrats could have banned gerrymandering in 2021 if they scaled back their voting rights asks. Manchin and Sinema refused to break the filibuster for any legislation, not just the H.R. 1 as passed. Sinema said that removing the 60-vote threshold would "deepen our divisions and risk repeated radical reversals in federal policy, cementing uncertainty and further eroding confidence in our government." Seems pretty clear cut to me.
The race to the bottom is bad and it'd be better that no one did any mid decade redistricting, but Democrats couldn't just sit on their hands while the Republicans draw maps that make it much more difficult to take back the House in 2026. Its distasteful but there's no other real option.
Polarization means we can no longer change the rules using abstract system design principles. Therefore we are stuck with the garbage rules we have. The rules allow for gerrymandering so you have to gerrymander. That's the endgame, it sucks, but there is nothing to do.
> that doesn’t mean that in picking a fight over it, Democrats actually come out ahead.
This wasn't picking a fight this was punching back. Very obviously. I agree that we should abolish the filibuster and ban gerrymandering altogether. Gotta win first.
The thing is, if only one party does gerrymanders that is actually less representative, then if both parties do it because then their efforts kind of cancel out, and so the result is closer to public opinion. It is kind of like a court room where it is better for both lawyers to play fast and lose with the rules than it is for only one lawyer to. A world where say democrats lose 10 seats that they should have gotten but win a comparable number of seats that they should not have gotten and similarly for the Republicans is much more democratic compare to the alternative of the democrats losing 10 seats that they should have gotten but winning zero seats that they should not have gotten.
You argue that proposition 50 makes it likely that Republicans will do more gerrymanders. in making this argument, you clearly think that knowing that the opposing party will respond to something with a gerrymander makes people less likely to do the thing in the first place. But proposition 50 is the democratic party responding to a gerrymander with a gerrymander. Won’t seeing this, make it less likely for Republicans to do a gerrymander for approximately the same reasons that you think your argument is likely to persuade us to be against proposition 50. The whole reason why tit for tat is a winning strategy is because it makes it less likely for the other party to defect in the first place. And again, I think that a situation where both parties have gerrymandered is probably better than a situation where only one party has done this. If perhaps on a smaller scale leading to them, having say 20 or 30 extra seats which is equivalent to around a 10 to 15% swing in the House in terms of the percentage of seats occupied by the parties.
So after a great night for Dems, we've got Piper hand-wringing about the Democrat AG winning, Prop 50 winning to tit-for-tat R mid-decade gerrymandering, and whatever this is,
"However, I’m worried about the Democratic Party getting complacent. In lower-turnout off-year elections, Democrats win! Great! That won’t retake the Senate and it won’t put the party on a footing to contest every state, as it desperately needs to.
Do you like the feeling of winning? Time to buckle down and figure out how to have policy offerings that win in Republican states and higher-turnout elections too." -Kelsey
You begin to wonder if she's even a Dem at all, but rather an embarrassed Romney R. Or maybe the Liz Bruenig of the Centrists.
Expand the Supreme Court so we get a liberal majority that can overturn Rucho v. Common Cause and impose a federal ban on gerrymandering. And how do you expand the Supreme Court? Congressional majorities, which are more likely now that Prop 50 has passed.
Multi member districts or any type of actual big government reform would require actual consensus which will never happen again. Besides getting rid of the filibuster which I think the republicans will do soon, there will never ever be another large scale change in the electoral system.
Also I understand The Argument wants to maintain some level of nonpartisan editorial views but the republicans started this and California and the democrats are responding. Yes gerrymandering has happened on both sides but between this and getting rid of the voting rights act this is just another Republican power grab to kill representation in our country and shut out democrats because of our stupid electoral college.
California made sure its residents could vote on the redistricting. Texas did not. Gerrymandering is a tool of minority rule which has allowed for the authoritarian takeover by MAGA.
An important clarification about the Utah maps: they’re court-ordered. Back in August, a Utah judge ordered the Legislature to draw new maps, as a result of a lawsuit brought by several groups, which was itself a response to a sneaky maneuver by the Legislature to circumvent a ballot initiative that passed in 2018 requiring an independent redistricting commission to prevent partisan gerrymandering. After a very contentious debate over where to put the new lines, the GOP-controlled Legislature submitted a new map (which many still claim is unfair) to the judge, who’s expected to rule on it within a week. All of which is to say that, even with anti-gerrymandering legislation in place, it’s still effectively impossible to draw neutral maps. A strange game—it seems the only winning move is not to have single-member congressional districts. Maybe this arms race will eventually get us to that realization.
I'm borderline annoyed by this article.
> What Texas did wasn’t right, but that doesn’t mean that in picking a fight over it, Democrats actually come out ahead.
What a terrible argument. Doing nothing results in Texas picking up 3-5 seats with nothing from the Dem side. Is this winning? For the California redistricting to have been the right choice, it just has to be better than not doing it and not necessarily result in a net positive, and this article did a poor job arguing on that front.
You can easily argue that Republicans not facing any repercussions on their action results in them becoming emboldened. This article is strictly relying on the idea that California's actions will be some magical motivator for Republican states redistricting, not the actual concrete motivator, which has been the Trump administration threatening primaries and withholding funding. And you can also argue that Prop 50 being such a blowout win will embolden other Dem states to do the same.
Gerrymandering being bad is obvious. But writing a whole article to state that and dooming around Dems doing what is both politically smart and took a lot of good politicking the very day after is just dooming for the sake of dooming. And you might hate Newsom or whatever, but I'm glad he's in charge and not some inane moralist.
I'm starting to wonder if Kelsey cares if Dems win or lose... idk at this point.
Yeah, I'm also just questioning the priorities at this point where the first reaction to a landslide victory is to try and kneecap an objectively impressive political win just because she doesn't like Newsom (hence the loaded title). Because I don't see for what other reason this needed to be written - no one (including Newsom) claimed Prop 50 was going to cure all ills.
Maybe because certain people who write these articles are chronically online or in spaces like Twitter that they think they represent the majority of normie vies? That is the only reason I can think of why they can argue against strawman policies or ideas. If the priority is winning elections that should be the big deal. In a normal world, I definitely think how we win is just as important as winning, but at some point we have to just be happy with the W and be better in the future.
I think Piper's article here is the only one that actually show concern about whether the Dems win or lose *in the long run*. That means whether Dems are competitive in the Senate and Electoral College.
Yesterday was a good night, but even carrying the performance forward to next year, that would probably not have been enough to win back the Senate. And that's still a problem.
These are entirely separate conversations. Who was arguing that Prop 50 was the only thing required to address all the country's ills? It's just basic common sense that gerrymandering has no impact on state or nation level races. It's like complaining that Prop 50 didn't also fix inflation.
And this article also ignores that Prop 50 acknowledges in its own wording a commitment to national independent redistricting. You can say that's just words, but that's literally all Democrats can do as long they are not in power.
I’m getting DINO vibes. Kelsey just follow Bari Weiss if you refuse to be constructive. Mississippi might be a better fit because obviously they are totally crushing it compared to California…. Right 🤣
“Pie-in-the-sky electoral reforms aside, the Democrats could have simply banned gerrymandering in 2021 or 2022”
This is a very misleading way of describing what happened. Technically they could have, but only if they had abolished the filibuster. More accurate would be to say “Manchin and Sinema cared more about the filibuster than banning gerrymandering”. I agree that’s bad, but we need to be clear that banning partisan gerrymandering, in practice, will require abolishing the filibuster.
This framing also implies the Republicans might have supported a clean, anti-gerrymandering-only bill. I see no evidence for that. In fact, Senate Democrats proposed such a bill in 2021, the Freedom to Vote Act, and every Republican voted against it (Schumer flipped to voting “No” for procedural reasons, given that it failed to get the required 60 votes): https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00420.htm
I was wondering what this meant as well, my (maybe poor?) assumption is you could say cloture stands as it however now there is a narrow carveout for a definition of competitive districts or trying to ape at proportional national elections in the legislature via multimember districts.
“I don’t have a tactical playbook to get there.” Well, there you go. Could have just stopped writing.
Damn. It's been less than 24 hours since a resounding Democratic victory, and we are already back to the hand-wringing and panic. You're not wrong, but goddam can we PLEASE allow ourselves a moment to breathe and refill the tank for the next fight?!
The only way gerrymandering will stop is if it’s banned nationally. That will only happen on a bipartisan basis because it will either need 60 votes or if the filibuster is eliminated and Democrats pass their own legislation Republicans will undo it the first chance they get. The only way it will gain enduring bipartisan support is if Republicans become convinced that it no longer benefits them. Right now that won’t happen because they do benefit from it largely because blue states got high on their own supply and took away their ability to draw districts. That has to stop and Prop 50 is a big step towards it. States controlled by Democrats should be every bit as ruthless about it as states controlled by Republicans. It’s a race to the bottom but it’s the only way gerrymandering will ever end. Things will have to get worse before they get better but they can get better eventually. It’s not guaranteed that things will get better but the current arrangement where Republicans gerrymander to their heart’s content while Democrats don’t is guaranteed to keep us in this bad state of affairs.
I hate gerrymandering but I’m thrilled that Prop 50 passed and am very glad to see Democrats everywhere recognize the need to play by the same rules. Namby pamby idealism doesn’t work and nobody gets brownie points for “doing the right thing.”
Yeah, I don't understand why she said Dem's could've passed a federal law for it. Did they have 60 votes anytime in the Senate over the past 10 years that I'm unaware of?
They couldn’t have. They passed some of election reforms with bipartisan support but they were mostly geared towards preventing a future president from trying to overturn an election. The House passed something on gerrymandering but it was on a party line vote. Plenty of House Republicans have complained about gerrymandering being done to them but basically none of them oppose it per se.
I typically appreciate Kelsey's commentary quite a lot, but this piece feels kind of lazy. If your thesis is "Prop 50 is insufficient to defeat Trump, we also need to do X" then just write about what X is and why we should do it! No one is out there claiming that retaliatory gerrymandering alone will save democracy. We obviously need other strategies too, and I would love to see the Argument explore those rather than knocking down strawmen. I'm particularly interested in analysis of how Democrats should prepare to fight back against a serious attempt to rig the 2028 election or subvert its outcome, given that Trump seems very likely to attempt that and is much less constrained than the last time he tried.
Yeah, the whole knocking down strawmen is getting exhausting... It is also intellectually lazy.
I do not believe it is true that Democrats could have banned gerrymandering in 2021 if they scaled back their voting rights asks. Manchin and Sinema refused to break the filibuster for any legislation, not just the H.R. 1 as passed. Sinema said that removing the 60-vote threshold would "deepen our divisions and risk repeated radical reversals in federal policy, cementing uncertainty and further eroding confidence in our government." Seems pretty clear cut to me.
The race to the bottom is bad and it'd be better that no one did any mid decade redistricting, but Democrats couldn't just sit on their hands while the Republicans draw maps that make it much more difficult to take back the House in 2026. Its distasteful but there's no other real option.
Polarization means we can no longer change the rules using abstract system design principles. Therefore we are stuck with the garbage rules we have. The rules allow for gerrymandering so you have to gerrymander. That's the endgame, it sucks, but there is nothing to do.
> that doesn’t mean that in picking a fight over it, Democrats actually come out ahead.
This wasn't picking a fight this was punching back. Very obviously. I agree that we should abolish the filibuster and ban gerrymandering altogether. Gotta win first.
The thing is, if only one party does gerrymanders that is actually less representative, then if both parties do it because then their efforts kind of cancel out, and so the result is closer to public opinion. It is kind of like a court room where it is better for both lawyers to play fast and lose with the rules than it is for only one lawyer to. A world where say democrats lose 10 seats that they should have gotten but win a comparable number of seats that they should not have gotten and similarly for the Republicans is much more democratic compare to the alternative of the democrats losing 10 seats that they should have gotten but winning zero seats that they should not have gotten.
You argue that proposition 50 makes it likely that Republicans will do more gerrymanders. in making this argument, you clearly think that knowing that the opposing party will respond to something with a gerrymander makes people less likely to do the thing in the first place. But proposition 50 is the democratic party responding to a gerrymander with a gerrymander. Won’t seeing this, make it less likely for Republicans to do a gerrymander for approximately the same reasons that you think your argument is likely to persuade us to be against proposition 50. The whole reason why tit for tat is a winning strategy is because it makes it less likely for the other party to defect in the first place. And again, I think that a situation where both parties have gerrymandered is probably better than a situation where only one party has done this. If perhaps on a smaller scale leading to them, having say 20 or 30 extra seats which is equivalent to around a 10 to 15% swing in the House in terms of the percentage of seats occupied by the parties.
It works as game theory
So after a great night for Dems, we've got Piper hand-wringing about the Democrat AG winning, Prop 50 winning to tit-for-tat R mid-decade gerrymandering, and whatever this is,
"However, I’m worried about the Democratic Party getting complacent. In lower-turnout off-year elections, Democrats win! Great! That won’t retake the Senate and it won’t put the party on a footing to contest every state, as it desperately needs to.
Do you like the feeling of winning? Time to buckle down and figure out how to have policy offerings that win in Republican states and higher-turnout elections too." -Kelsey
You begin to wonder if she's even a Dem at all, but rather an embarrassed Romney R. Or maybe the Liz Bruenig of the Centrists.
The answer seems obvious to me:
Expand the Supreme Court so we get a liberal majority that can overturn Rucho v. Common Cause and impose a federal ban on gerrymandering. And how do you expand the Supreme Court? Congressional majorities, which are more likely now that Prop 50 has passed.
Multi member districts or any type of actual big government reform would require actual consensus which will never happen again. Besides getting rid of the filibuster which I think the republicans will do soon, there will never ever be another large scale change in the electoral system.
Also I understand The Argument wants to maintain some level of nonpartisan editorial views but the republicans started this and California and the democrats are responding. Yes gerrymandering has happened on both sides but between this and getting rid of the voting rights act this is just another Republican power grab to kill representation in our country and shut out democrats because of our stupid electoral college.
California made sure its residents could vote on the redistricting. Texas did not. Gerrymandering is a tool of minority rule which has allowed for the authoritarian takeover by MAGA.
Big diff
An important clarification about the Utah maps: they’re court-ordered. Back in August, a Utah judge ordered the Legislature to draw new maps, as a result of a lawsuit brought by several groups, which was itself a response to a sneaky maneuver by the Legislature to circumvent a ballot initiative that passed in 2018 requiring an independent redistricting commission to prevent partisan gerrymandering. After a very contentious debate over where to put the new lines, the GOP-controlled Legislature submitted a new map (which many still claim is unfair) to the judge, who’s expected to rule on it within a week. All of which is to say that, even with anti-gerrymandering legislation in place, it’s still effectively impossible to draw neutral maps. A strange game—it seems the only winning move is not to have single-member congressional districts. Maybe this arms race will eventually get us to that realization.