Now for your consideration,
here is a dyed in the wool leftist who fears that his party is in deep doo doo.
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Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble.
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/19/9565119/democrats-in-deep-trouble
Some of my favorite takeaways--
The presidency is extremely important, of course. But there are also thousands of critically important offices all the way down the ballot.And the vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress.
Not only have Republicans won most elections, but they have a perfectly reasonable plan for trying to recapture the White House. But Democrats have nothing at all in the works to redress their crippling weakness down the ballot.
The GOP might be in chaos, but Democrats are in a torpor.
No US state is so left-wing as to have created an environment in which business interests are economically or politically irrelevant. Vermont is not North Korea, in other words.
But the much more significant question facing the party isn't about the White House — it's about all the other offices in the land. The problem is that control of the presidency seems to have blinded progressive activists to the possibility of even having an argument about what to do about all of them. That will change if and when the GOP seizes the White House, too, and Democrats bottom out. But the truly striking thing is how close to bottom the party is already and how blind it seems to be to that fact.
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Whoa Nelly, Yglesias has stumbled upon the harsh truth!
I think it's funny how if any liberal put something up from Vox it would be "liberal media bias," yet when Vox criticizes the Democrats it's "completely reasonable." Not that I'm saying you ever did this, it's just something I've tended to notice. Anyhow, onto the article itself. A lot of times in many jurisdiction, and thanks to gerrymandering, there won't even be a Democrat candidate on the ballot, or Democrats are split up between largely Republican voting blocs that having a Democrat on the ticket wouldn't do a thing. For example, here we see Travis County in Texas:
Travis County is a rather infamous example because in 2002 it had a good Democratic showing. However in 2003 the Texas State legislature redrew the congressional district boundaries to incorporate more Republican voters thus diluting the Democratic votes to the point that Republicans were voted into office. However, in Texas, this was not the only place where this happened. In Texas alone, TX-1, TX-2, TX-4, TX-9, TX-10, TX-11, TX-17- TX-24, TX-25, and TX-29 were all redistricted. Max Sandlin (D) in TX-1 was defeated by Louie Gohmert (R) because of this, Jim Turner (D) did not seek reelection and Ted Poe (R) won, Ralph Hall switched from D to R and was reelected, Nick Lampson (D) of TX-9 lost his seat to Ted Poe (R) because of redistricting, went to the Sugar Land area and won in 2006 only to be defeated in 2008 by Pete Olson (R). Lloyd Dogget (D TX-10) was redistricted to TX-25 (the fajita strip in the picture above) and managed to actually keep his seat. Chet Edwards (D TX-11) was redistricted to TX-17 and was able to win in 2004, 2006, 2008 but due to the considerable amount and growing Republican influence in TX-17 he lost his seat to Bill Flores (R). Charlie Stenholm (D TX-17) was shifted into the heavily Republican TX-19 and lost to the incumbent from TX-19 Randy Neugebauer (R). Martin frost (D TX-24) saw his district redistricted into several other ones and had to change his residency to TX-32 where he lost to Pete Sessions (R) the incumbent, and his old seat which was redrawn was won by Kenny Marchant (R). The redistricting also protected Henry Bonilla of TX-23 who was facing a very strong challenge from Henry Cuellar (D) and also neutralized Ciro Rodriguez (D) by putting two Democrats in the same district and forcing them to run against each other.
Then there's the fact of the recorded conversation in Ohio between Republicans where they were caught discussing redistricting to favor Republican candidates as well as race being a factor in redistricting. In Ohio, African-Americans had backed Democrats, so the Republicans removed around 13,000 Africa-American voters from the district of Jim Raussen (R) in what was once a competitive district.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/15/americas-most-gerrymandered-congressional-districts/
Then when you look at this, you notice that the Washington Post even says "Gerrymandering is at least partly to blame for the lopsided Republican representation in the House. According to analysis I did last year, the Democrats are under-represented by about 18 seats in the House, relative to their vote share in the 2012 election. The way Republicans pulled that off was to draw some really, really funky-looking Congressional districts."
Then when we take this map:
And place it over the one from the Vox article,
You begin to notice a trend at how some of these gerrymandered districts swung Democrat to Republican. (I'd like to note though that in some areas the districts are actually gerrymandered the
opposite way, just for the sake of fairness. However, sometimes this is affirmative gerrymandering to give minorities increased representation.)
There are also other factors involved, which Bernie Sanders also called out by calling Republicans in Alabama a bunch of cowards. The new Voter ID Laws are part of the Republican plan to retake the White House: Suppress votes of low income people, working class, and minorities who predominately vote Democrat.
How do we solve this? Well, obviously we need to get Democrats to vote more in mid-term elections and to pay more attention to them. Why the White House has seen these recent Democrats and the Senate is that Democrats have a stronger showing during Presidential elections than mid-terms.