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[scriver]

If the Texas splits into five, do they become states 51-55? How will they decide who gets to keep Texas number?

[Dostoevsky]

Technically speaking they don't split into five so much as they spin off four new states from the land, meaning Texas+4 instead of just Texas.

I believe the state legislature/government would pick how it goes down and which portion remains 'Texas', though the question itself has been pretty divisive within state politics/culture over the decades.

[Rolan7]

That's pretty interesting.  I assume the new states wouldn't have automatic US statehood, so would have to petition and likely become territories.  I could research this myself but somehow I suspect that if Texans could get 10 senators, they would have done so long ago.
(our system of representation is so fucked)

[Dostoevsky]

Under the statute (again, assuming it's still valid and other weirdnesses aside) they would have automatic statehood -- congress et al. basically pre-approved Texas+4.

From what I've heard (speaking to a Texan with some knowledge, reading around a bit) Texas likes being big ol' Texas and doesn't want to split up -- getting a few extra Senators hasn't been worth the downsides to local/state politics, and it could actually hurt Republicans in the electoral college. E.g. the governor of Texas doesn't want to be the governor of some little slice of ex-Texas.

[RedKing]

Not to mention the absolute best they could manage would be four red Texii and one blue one (The People's Republic of Austin). Though from what I've seen demographically, the border counties could become a second blue state. Double points if they name it Pandora.

[Dostoevsky]

Yeah, they could attempt some real gerrymander craziness to reduce/negate the effect, but realistically there'd a 4-1 or 3-2 R-D split meaning not much of a 'gain' for Republicans these days.

(Also committing gerrymander hell for Senators is less likely when it'd make state governance of the gerrymander pretty screwed up.)

[Max™]

Well, though I feel no real connection to the panhandle shitkickers, packing the Metroplex into a state with them would completely neutralize their ability to exert their stupid over the rest of us.

Give the eastern chunk to Houston, pack as many of the hill country redneck votes in with Austin as you can safely fit without them taking over, give the Rio Grande and San Antonio region a big chunk of the dried brain morons out the Llano Estacado, and leave El Paso a chunk to cancel out.

From one purple state at risk of getting bluer every day to 5 blue states with liberal modern cores and red fringes of loud impotent morons!

If you chop up Texas in any way which doesn't have all the backwoods redneck shitkicking morons packed in with the liberal regions it's gonna fuck over republicans in the area hard, hence why it doesn't get suggested much. We're aware of it, I think it could actually happen with dems holding the federal government and dems taking over the state government, but check out a map of shit like the districts around Austin to see why that is OUT THERE currently.

Why do Austin and San Antonio share a district?

Why is it shaped like a skinny impossible to read signature scribble?

Why are there big weird districts hanging off the other parts of Austin and San Antonio?

How did Dallas and Ft. Worth end up sharing a district that runs through Arlington I think?

Republifuckery!

Shit, this is pretty damn close actually, look at the way the districts that went blue are HARD blue and populous, and damn near all the other districts are big, red and EMPTY.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Dostoevsky]

Republifuckery!

Not that I want to go into a broader discussion of gerrymanders, but just a reminder that Rs aren't the only guilty parties for the practice. MD is by some accounts the worst gerrymandered state and that's thanks to the state Democratic supermajority.

(Though if you're talking just TX, then yeah that quote is accurate.)

[Max™]

Yeah, and at this point I'm absolutely fine with banishing republicans into the wilderness until they learn to stop being cunts. They can't be trusted with power anymore, fucking ruin their shit, set it on fire, kick their asses out the door and chain it shut.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Gerrymandering is a difficult framework to disrupt/correct. I think that if we as a nation were to change it across the board, we might be better served by replacing it with a more objective process--and I acknowledge there will always be some bias, but perhaps we'd all have a fairer go of it in a more scientific approach to dividing up the geography of electoral districts?

[Rolan7]

Oh the Dems are largely guilty of "playing the game", including being in the pocket of large corporations and all the other Republican stuff.  They just promise good things like mitigating the ecological crisis and securing basic human rights for all humans (emphasis on basic).  Some of them definitely even want those things, and the rest can be convinced with relative ease to support their supposed platforms.  If they betray us too much, we vote third party or (evidently) stay home.  They have to be coerced, but to some extent it works.

That's mostly for downballot elections, though.  It's important to vote strategically for president in order to determine the Supreme Court, as we're seeing.  Biden and Harris aren't going to force people to gestate babies, or repeal gay marriage, through their SC picks.  The endless wars won't end by changing the President, only by changing Congress.

Biden (and Harris, who will be largely in charge) will face a lot of criticism from the Left in the coming term.   But it's important that they be sitting in the hotseat instead of an actual, literal fascist whose opinion on Qanon yesterday was that they hate pedophilia.  (so they worship a likely pedophile as their god-king)

[JoshuaFH]

Gerrymandering is a difficult framework to disrupt/correct. I think that if we as a nation were to change it across the board, we might be better served by replacing it with a more objective process--and I acknowledge there will always be some bias, but perhaps we'd all have a fairer go of it in a more scientific approach to dividing up the geography of electoral districts?

Gerrymandering is only possible under a broken two party/first past the post system. Ranked choice voting would render almost all gerrymandering impossible. I watched this video recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJoVFrBkBTw&ab_channel=SecondThought

Or in other words, gerrymandering when when only 2 parties are viable is possible and probably inevitable; gerrymandering when even just one more party is viable becomes much harder, and nigh-impossible with 4 or 5 viable parties. That's my assumption at least, I haven't had the luxury of getting to see real democracy at work even once in my life.

[RedKing]

Yeah, and at this point I'm absolutely fine with banishing republicans into the wilderness until they learn to stop being cunts. They can't be trusted with power anymore, fucking ruin their shit, set it on fire, kick their asses out the door and chain it shut.

Hence the hashtag I posted earlier, #GOPDelendaEst. It's gaining in popularity as people lock onto the sentiment that there should be no bipartisanship for the sake of civility, no olive branches, no "divided government works best". No "maybe now they'll do some soul-searching and reform their party" -- they've had several opportunities for that over the last 30 years and every time they chose to double-down on the crazy. The GOP needs to be destroyed and the earth it once stood on salted. Let the Trumpers continue on with a rump social conservative/nativist party, and let the sane fiscal conservatives build a new party.

Anywho, it's time for the weekly number-crunching.

I'm having something of a crisis on which numbers to use.
RCP is distinctly more negative on Biden this week, but they're also omitting a lot of polls from their average, while including R-friendly contrarian pollsters like Trafalgar Group, which skews the average (up to 3 points in some cases). They also give equal weight to all polls, regardless of age or past accuracy of the pollster. This makes it easy to game them (which is honestly what I think Trafalgar Group is being paid to do at this point).

538 includes a lot more polls, and weights them on a number of factors, including polling method, sample size, margin of error, age, and pollster rating. They also have poll data for ALL states, not just the close ones. But those states are almost entirely based on SurveyMonkey, which is only marginally more accurate than a REAL monkey. They're accounting for that in their aggregate by dropping Biden's support about 5 points from what the SM polls show, but still...
My concern is that by using their numbers, I'm essentially incorporating noted warlock Nate Silver's special sauce without fully understanding it.

So I've been tracking both sets of numbers since last week, and instead of listing raw data I'll just post the data where it's relevant.

On the whole, we're seeing what I would expect to see at this point, and probably the remaining weeks of the election -- a reversion to the mean in most swing states, and a further strengthening in many of the bastion states. In layman's terms, close races are getting closer, races that aren't even close are getting further apart.

That said, even with RCP's decidely unfriendly numbers, they still show Biden with a 357-198 win, as they have Georgia, Florida, Iowa and North Carolina all in the D camp. Of the true swing states, only Ohio is shown going to Trump, and that one is R+0.5, which is well within MOE. Of slightly more concern is the weakening of Dem advantage in a number of battleground states.


Florida down from 3.7 to 1.4 (although this is heavily skewed by one of those Trafalgar polls)
Michigan down from 7 to 6.8 (another Trafalgar poll)
Minnesota down from 9 to 6.6
Nevada down from 6 to 5.2
Ohio down from D+0.6 to R+0.5
Pennsylvania down from 7.1 to 4.4 (yet another Trafalgar poll)
Wisconsin down from 6.1 to 6

If we look at the 538 numbers (and their change from last week) for the same states:
FL -- down from 4.5 to 3.9
MI - down from 8.1 to 7.9
MN - down from 9.3 to 9.1
NV - down from 6.9 to 6.3
OH - down from D0.7 to R0.4
PA - down from 7.2 to 6.7
WI - down from 7.7 to 7.3

So the poll aggregates agree on the general tightening of these races (and the Ohio flip), and in some cases agree on the magnitude of change (MI, OH) but in other cases (FL, MN, NV, PA) disagree by up to a full 2 percent on the magnitude.


On the plus side for the Democrats, both aggregates show North Carolina and Georgia moving in their direction, with RCP flipping Georgia from R to D while 538 already had it in the D column.

One of the more interesting bits with the 538 numbers is that Nebraska suddenly becomes a potential battleground, with Trump at +6.3, down from +11 a week ago. Whether this has anything to do with Trump's weekend pissing match with Nebraska senator Ben Sasse is hard to say at this point. Kansas is also at +6.5, enough to raise an eyebrow at, but inconsequential unless it continues to narrow and quickly.

Since we were just talking about it, Texas remains largely unchanged. RCP has it at R4.4, unchanged from last week. 538 has it at R1.3, a drop of 0.2 from last week. Given Sen. John Cornyn's recent remarks about the GOP's relation with Trump being like "a woman who marries a guy thinking she can change him", it'll be interesting to see what impact that has on both the statewide Presidential race *and* Cornyn's own race. But given that over 4 million Texans have already voted, Cornyn may have made the shrewd calculus that enough of his supporters have voted that any Trump-driven outrage would have minimal effect. OTOH, recent polls have shown MJ Hegar as close as one point away from Cornyn, so he may be doing this to try and steal a few conservative Dem votes for himself. Given that his opponent is a decorated Air Force major, I have strong doubts that'll work.

[Dostoevsky]

Gerrymandering is only possible under a broken two party/first past the post system. Ranked choice voting would render almost all gerrymandering impossible. I watched this video recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJoVFrBkBTw&ab_channel=SecondThought

Or in other words, gerrymandering when when only 2 parties are viable is possible and probably inevitable; gerrymandering when even just one more party is viable becomes much harder, and nigh-impossible with 4 or 5 viable parties. That's my assumption at least, I haven't had the luxury of getting to see real democracy at work even once in my life.

Haven't watched the video, so feel free to just quote this and say "wrong" in the case I'm making my assumption wrong, but changing ranked choice shouldn't affect gerrymandering's effects on federal House races. [Belated edit: I should probably say why I think so... in short, there's only one rep per race and one race per rep, so ranked choice wouldn't change much at that level. And gerrymandering is largely a federal thing for House reps.]

More parties would make it tricky as you say, though that'd largely hold true only if voters become less monolithically loyal/predictable in who they vote for. The name of the game in gerrymandering is crafting the narrowest and most reliable wins possible (edit: obviously the second of these requirements is the most important for the manderer; the first lets one spread the victories as widely as possible). A two party system with largely loyal party members makes that much easier.

Gerrymandering is a difficult framework to disrupt/correct. I think that if we as a nation were to change it across the board, we might be better served by replacing it with a more objective process--and I acknowledge there will always be some bias, but perhaps we'd all have a fairer go of it in a more scientific approach to dividing up the geography of electoral districts?

There are a number of proposals out there to make it either more technocratically-led or straight-up automatic/math-based. Some states have even moved to the more technocratic method, but it remains a state-by-state choice meaning that the most partisan states aren't exactly moving that direction.

[Latest breakdown]

Thanks, I've found myself waiting for your posts instead of drinking from the hose of polling news.

[nenjin]

Democratic Nebraskans found themselves in the surprising position of nodding their heads to what Ben Sasse was saying, for once.