Is Gerrymandering Such a Problem?

Maybe. Or maybe most folks do not understand how Congressional Representation actually works 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Oh no, you can't gerrymander by race anymore. Now you have to gerrymander by something else. Which I suppose they can find a way to squeeze around. Anyway, so there's this big whole hole baloo about the gerrymandering thing and how you can no longer set up your zones by racial things. So I actually had to do a little bit of looking into it, and this being a uh podcast, I cannot, of course, show you things. But um, maybe here's a couple things to think about in the course of Congress people, representatives in the House of Representatives. The Senate is apportioned out that each state gets two senators. That means that Texas and California and Alaska and Hawaii and Maine and Wisconsin all have the same amount of power when it comes to getting things into and through the Senate. This means that one population center cannot overcome another. However, in the House of Representatives, you do focus on things which will, if affected at a federal level, affect your total population. That's why we have zones and districts and that. Because I can tell you, as a guy who lives neither in Milwaukee nor in Madison, my concerns are not the same as people who live in Milwaukee or Madison. And so when I think about a Congress person that I want elected for representing me as a portion of the population, I'm fine if big urban centers have somebody that represents their big urban interests. I personally would like somebody who recognizes and fights for the interests of my little small town mid-Wiscons interests. Again, our interests are not the same, but things passed at a federal level will affect all of us. Now, a gerrymander district is supposed to be an answer to a question. What do you do when your interest groups are split up very geographically? I'm gonna give you just a sample illustration and to illustrate the principle, even if I don't have the examples on hand, although I think you could look at it. Let's say that a state, 40% of the population total, votes for Republicans. Okay. So you might think that's 40% of the state ought to be represented in their Congresspeople. So if your state has enough population, that's another thing, enough population for 10 Congresspeople, four of them ought to be Republicans to represent your 40% Republicans. Now, if you then say we're gonna split up the population of this very heavily Democrat city so that like one slice of the pizza pie is you know 60% now Democrat voters, and the other is 40% Republican voters, what happens in that particular district is that the 60% of people will overwhelm the 40% of people, and that means that your 40% of people are now represented by the big city interests. Instead of us getting our own interests and you know, representative the city by sheer dint of population overwhelms that and now we don't have any representation at all. And that's the trick about gerrymandering. Now, the big hullos made about Virginia splitting up all of the heavily, heavily voting, heavily populated Democrat centers and stretching them out so that they can still, by sheer dint of voting number, overwhelm the Republican voters. I do not believe that is a just use of the system, even though if you are apportioning it by population, it might very well be a concern version of just selection. Because if you are going strictly by population and 60% of your population lives in the cities, then your cities are going to outnumber the districts around them. But again, city di city interests are not the same as small town interests. So you are allotted congresspeople in your state by your population. If then you split up your congresspeople by population and try to get an equitable split, and again, if you're voting 60-40 Democrat Republican, but you get like ten congressional seats, if all ten congressional districts are overwhelming by number, the number of like if every district is cut up so that it has sixty percent Democrats, 40% Republicans, you can say you're still voting, but then you aren't actually representing the 40% because all 10 of them are gonna end up with a Democrat representative elected by the people in the big cities. Is that actually just instead? I do respect more what the Republicans try to do, which is make your vote in districts by blocks of areas, so that even though you might have fewer people voting in one area and more people voting in another area, the area's interests are represented. So that's one big side to it. Because people's interests are more split up by the areas they live than by the color of their skin. Another thing I would like to point out here, one final thing, is that principally speaking, if you can no longer count on getting a whole race of people to vote for your party, and now you have to vote based on the people in your region, you can no longer cater to just one people and say, hey, we're gonna help you get ahead, because obviously no one else will. You can no longer say that. You instead have to say we need to get this whole region to vote for us, so we need to promise to this whole region good things that will come if they vote for us. The idea that it is the two different philosophies. One says there's only so much pie, and you can only get so much of it, and anybody who has more must have taken from somebody who had less. That is one philosophy. The other philosophy I've heard called rising tide raises all ships. Big ships and small ships alike. And that does seem to be the more functional philosophy as far as uh as far as regional economies go. Yeah, some people get richer faster, and some people get richer, but everybody gets better off if a policy is passed that properly helps that region. The region, everybody in that region, so yeah, maybe the new anti-gerrymandering or non-racist gerrymandering thing is misupplying the concept of representative government represented by population, or maybe just maybe, it's actually a better reflection of what people need to focus on regions instead of races. Cheers.