Districts themselves are the problem. They can be more "fair" than they are currently, but they can't overcome the fact that common interests and voting alignment are not exclusively geographic.
Removing districts, or enlarging them so the borders barely matter, and implementing ranked choice voting and proportional representation is a far, far better solution.
You have to be very cautious with this approach. The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office, but an individual that you hold personally accountable for their political actions.
Removing districts means that you are moving to statewide elections, and then it becomes a statewide office rather than a local office, which is not the intent.
The better solution is to make the scarce resource less so; limit districts to 60k people (i.e. pre-Reapportionment Act levels) and expand the house of representatives correspondingly. Then this problem mostly becomes moot.
The other problem, of having ~5000 people in the house of representatives, presents additional challenges, naturally, but the house has the power to set its rules so it can put more work on committees (which can have additional specialization levels) and less work on floors.
> The intent is not that you are nominating a faceless member of a party to the office
The "intent"? Whose intent?
Regardless, that's not how modern elections work. The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation. Candidates (on both sides!) who are known for exceptional constituent services are regularly voted out for faceless party hacks. When people do switch their votes, it's a consistent shift up and down the ballot. The days when representatives carefully pursued their local constituents' interest are long gone: consider how Californian Republican representatives voted to hike their own property owning constituents' taxes in 2017.
It doesn't make sense to have local elections, because politics isn't local now.
> The strongest predictor of vote, by a wide margin, is partisan affiliation
I mean, I guess I think this is a problem, rather than something that we should encode structurally into the system.
I personally would prefer reforms that push back in the local direction. Right now there is a very small number of heterodox senators (Manchin, maybe Sanders, any others?) and a larger number of heterodox reps. To lower those barriers to make it more feasible for people to run for national office as a representative would be a vast improvement.
I don't disagree that creating a much larger House would lead to better representation and better constituent services. It's also probably one of the most feasible approaches we could take to electoral reform. So, pragmatically we see eye to eye.
I predict it wouldn't change the tendency toward governance by party hacks, though. That's an effect, not a cause. The root cause is that residents of geographically contiguous regions don't represent a shared interest in the same way they did in the past: there are different dividing lines nowadays.
You may be interested in the cube root rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_rule) which strikes a nice balance between number of people represented and number of people in the House.
PR seems like the ultimate end goal. Especially for assemblies. Ideally, eliminating districts.
Because of path dependencies (the legal version of technical debt), we gotta start where we're at. So I support any and all reforms that move us in that direction.
I've long advocated approval voting for executive and single member districts. But since I support any move away from FPTP, I support my friends working on RCV. (Don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough.)
I'm newly curious about multimember districts. I don't really get the math (details) yet. I read that Illinois' state house had multimember districts and that it was more effective and less polarized today. And this reform might be an easier lift.
I'm also newly curious about unicameral legislatures. Especially at the state level. Meaning no upper houses aka senates. Or maybe giving the senates different responsibilities. Like the lower house controls the budget and appropriations whereas the upper house does more meta stuff like democratic and governmental reforms. I like the notion of a fast changing lower house and a slower changing upper house. One of the stated intents of the US Senate. But without a more clear division of labor (balance of powers), it hasn't seemed to work out.
Then where you draw the district lines doesn't matter nearly as much because no matter where you put them, the candidate that pleases more of the voters in their district has the advantage, which makes it hard to disenfranchise anybody.
By removing spoilers from the equation you can have two highly similar candidates running against each other without splitting the vote and both losing, so a candidate that satisfies more of the district defeats one that disregards the concerns of 49% of the voters.
It also makes it much harder to gerrymander for the advantage of a particular party because it would make third party candidates and independents viable, and shifting voters around would have hard to predict results on party balance. Moving some Democrats you "didn't need" from a Democratic district to one that used to go to the Republicans might make the first district go to the Libertarians and the second to the Greens.
Colorado is an interesting case because it accidentally reveals a degenerate solution. Geography and population form boundaries in the denser areas, but not the sparser ones.
A voting system which leads to more proportional outcomes is probably the correct solution here, but there is a "hack" which could fix gerrymandering specifically (if implemented) without changing the ballots, the size of districts, or the counting process.
The idea is to look, after an election, at the proportion of seats won by each party, and the proportion of votes won (in aggregate) by each party, and ask "Could these two sets of proportions be brought more into line by appointing a different winner in one of the districts?".
If a change to some winner could improve the proportionality, then a rule would say that this change to the results should be imposed (on the district where the losing party came closest to winning).
Of course, overriding the true result in a district would be hugely controversial, but the idea is that the rule would act as a deterrent and never need to be invoked, because the districts would be drawn in a proportional way to begin with.
That's at-large FPTP elections, which basically guarantee the statewide plurality gets all the seats.
At-large STV, guaranteeing that a faction which got floor(1/n+1)+1 votes in a district with n seats (to make balloting manageable, you probably want 3≤n≤7) provide representation to significant minority interests regardless of geographical distribution.
I think that similar "kingmaking" problems can exist in non-PR systems, but the effect is obscured by how unrepresentative the parties are.
For example, instead of a small party forcing one unpopular policy on a coalition, you end up with a single large party that only 25% of the population voted for, running the government without any accountability (because of "safe" gerrymandered seats).
Moreover, these large parties usually contain multiple competing wings, and so are effectively coalitions themselves, except their "coalition agreements" are done behind the scenes, and then internal party discipline mechanisms are used to force all the politicians in that party to follow the party line, even if that party line is set by a minority of a minority.
The Greens actually had little parliamentary influence then: the CDU could have counted on the support of their coalition partners, the pro-nuclear FDP, at the time. Merkel went with massive anti-nuclear sentiment post-Fukushima to pass legislation with over 80% Bundestag support to phase out nuclear power.
It depends on the voting system. Some methods like Proportional Approval Voting are less prone to this kind of gaming in PR/MMD settings: https://electionscience.org/problem-solution/
Horribly. States borders are one of the worst districting systems imaginable, and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Senate makes it a huge, and basically insurmountable, problem.
States aren't supposed to be districting systems though - they're meant to be independent governing bodies that work under a set of shared constraints for a shared repbublic. The entire point of the Sentate is to give a representation to the need of the state as its own entity - not as a representation to the people in the state. It wasn't even intended to be an elected body.
It may feel unfair, but it's intentional, and it does help ensure overall stability of the nation. The entire philosophy behind the US, right down to the the name of the nation, revolves around the fact that states are the fundamental unit and they have long-term needs which are not always understood or valued by the people. The house of reps is for the the needs of the people, not the Senate. This is why the US is a democratic republic, not a pure democratic state.
The concept of "a state as its own entity - not [ ... ] the people in the state" is so broken as to almost need no remark.
What on earth does that even mean? How does a Senator represent "the state as its own entity - not [ ... ] the people in the state" ? Presumably the Senator responds to legislative proposals based on how their perceive them to affect the state, but what can it mean to say "how it affects the state" if that doesn't actually mean "how it affects the people of the state" ?
Well, I'll suggest how: it makes sense only if you reinterpret "the state as its own entity - not [ ... ] the people in the state" as meaning "the existing distribution of power and resources within the state". That is, the role of the Senator from state XX is to ensure that the existing power structure of the state remains in place.
I cannot imagine any other intepretation of "the state as its own entity" that can be offered. Do you have one?
Also, this notion of "the states as the fundamental unit" is a concept that was certainly in place at the time of the DoI. It simply isn't how most Americans experience their citizenship or lives, and arguably it suffered a fatal blow post-civil war. You can argue, if you wish to, that the Constitution still reflects the old arrangement (there are some smart folk who will disagree with you). The de facto situation on the ground, however, is that Americans conceive of themselves living in a single nation with differences in laws and regulations from state to state.
Perhaps I'm an idealist, but I see nothing broken about my understanding of statehood and it's more than an the existing distribution of power. If we're using the dictionary definition, a state is:
"a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government."
Which is exactly which each US State is. My home state, NC, is a territory which has a distinct culture and community, and it's own governing body. I'm a 10th generation North Carolinian, and I respect that fact that NC existed before I was born - and will continue existing after I'm dead. A state is more than the people who are currently residing in it or it's current power distribution - it's a long-standing culture, governing body and community of people that are inextricably tied to their own geography and their own decisions, past and future.
I don't care about preserving the current power structure for future generations - but you can bet I care about preserving NC's culture, environment, and state sovereignty for future generations. Those things are all bigger than any individual, and I certainly still believe they are worth fighting for. NC has the world's first public university and an amazing state university system in general. We have amazing food and BBQ culture, we have 3 different unique dialects of American English, we have our own tradition of folk music, we have our own religious traditions and our own way of going through our lives.
Also, FWIW - if you think Americans think of themselves as a single nation with minor variations - you really haven't spent enough time in the South.
I appreciate the concept of a state as a culture. But like the concept of a state as a community, that means nothing without people. I grew up in a country (long, long ago [0]) that takes it culture so seriously that it frequently forgets this association, and believes that culture has some kind of existence above and beyond the people who might (or might not) share it. NC, relative to the UK, is a young place, and it should not make that mistake. This is how you block change, this is how you oppress the future, this is how you become irrelevant.
But I also think that your connection between the concept of a state and its culture in a political context seems odd, to put it mildly. What possible decision can the US Senate make that has any real bearing on any of what you consider NC's "culture" to be? I mean, I suppose that if they were to ban BBQ (to use one of your examples), it would be a problem, but this is hardly the work of the Senate. There's really nothing about a state as a culture and/or community that the Senate makes decisions on. So when a NC Senator takes their seat in DC, what is it that is driving their decision making process? It's not voting for a particular folk music tradition. What are they voting to defend? To maintain? To extend? It's not your dialectical plurality, I assure you.
Next: your NC traditions have a history that goes back much further than the founding of NC. To imagine that they are somehow the unique property of NC is quite a stretch. Just yesterday, I watched an incredible documentary [1] about how southern baptist and presbyterian "line singing" is almost certainly a continuation of a presbyterian (read scottish) religious song form. And a great book [2] talks at length about how 4 British "folkways" (you have to read it to understand what is meant) form the basis of the majority (not all, obviously) of white culture in North America. Picking the declaration of independence and/or creation of NC as a state as some definitive breaking point with history is, IMO, not reflective of how human cultures work.
At the same time, those traditions do not stop at the borders of NC, but twist and change across the state and across state lines.
> if you think Americans think of themselves as a single nation with minor variations - you really haven't spent enough time in the South.
Possibly not. 7 years in Seattle, 23 in Philadelphia, 2 in Santa Fe. And I do acknowledge that an overriding impression I have of Texas where I've spent several months is that the people there consider themselves Texan's first and Americans second. Nevertheless, I would posit that with the level of migratory behavior in the US today (still not huge - the median American lives 18 miles from their mother, apparently), for an awful lot of people this sort of strong state level association has become much weaker. When you have children spread to the 4 corners of the country, which is quite common these days, it's hard to view their home states as "the other" with quite the same vehemence.
[0] please don't accuse me of not "getting" the US by virtue of being an immigrant. There's a reasonably good chance, based purely on the demographics of HN, that I've lived here longer than you :)
I think people underestimate how much state ties people have. My wife’s family has been in Oregon for 150 years. They all still pretty much live there, a couple of hours from where their family homestead used to be. There’s a strong separatist (secessionist) streak in Oregon too.
Even here in Annapolis, an hour from DC, it seems like everyone is from here.
Even in England, which nobody would dispute is "one nation" (note that I used England here, not the UK), you can travel around to various regions and find exactly the same level of regionalism as you're describing. People from (say) Cornwall (extreme southwest) feel a distinctly different identity for themselves compared with (say) the far north east, and particularly with the southeast. We're talking across distances of just a few hundred miles.
So I don't think that this has anything inherently to do with "states" per se. People like to feel affiliated with a region and/or a community that they feel they can get their hearts and minds around. In the US, for so many reasons, "states" tend to be the natural attractor for such feelings. But even then, as you note, the "95ers" versus eastern OR is still a thing.
Culture is such an interesting topic. I do think cultures do exist and have an impact even after they've lost their community (ie, how the great works from hellenistic culture and Roman culture continued to influence later scholars in the west), but you're right that they must ultimately be able to co-exist and progress with their own community to be relevant. That said, I happen to think that NC Culture has managed to progress and has the capacity to remain meaningful.
The fact that our culture is young and highly syncretic (as many cultures are) does not delegitimize it at all. The Scottish have an influence over certain elements - but so do the descendants of various African cultures, the English, German Moravian settlers, and local tribes like the Cherokee. It doesn't matter when my ancestors first decided that the label of "North Carolinian" suffices to encompass all that and more - it just matters that it happened - or rather, it matters that we believed it happened and acted accordingly.
As far as impact the US Senate can make on the state of NC, here are a few I can think of:
- Federal laws about cigarette labeling were very impactful to NC, since our tobacco industry was historically a huge piece of economy (and it remains significant today, though not as powerful).
- Laws that relate to climate change and rising sea levels - The NC outer banks is a fragile ecosystem and is already eroding.
- Funding for interstate transportation infrastructure - which cities should have priority to be put on future interstate routes? This is huge for tourism.
- Rural Broadband expansion - there are parts on the NC mountains, such as where my grandparents live, that STILL don't have high speed internet connection. In fact, the crazy pants representative my district just elected (Madison Cawthorn), despite being a "small government republican", made rural broadband core to his platform - because it's that important here. If NC can ally with other states that have underserved populations on this, then maybe we can get an "internet new deal".
Fwiw, your examples of Texans being Texan first, and American second is exactly the norm in the south that I'm talking about. I didn't even grow up in a particularly southern-culture dominant part of the south, but I only lasted for 5 years in Seattle before I got my behind back to NC. It wasn't just that I missed the trappings of home (though I did), but I still felt that I couldn't relate to how most people there were thinking and acting, and I felt like an outsider. I could have tried harder to change myself to be more like them I guess, but I don't think I would have liked myself as much. The other part of it was, the state of NC played such a big role in making me who I am - that I do feel that I have the duty to help NC as well.
I totally see what you're getting at and respect it - but it's just not in line with how I'm tuned to operate. As I said before, I'm probably just a hopeless idealist :)
Some great examples there. But let's dissect them a little.
But first, let me just that I had no intent to try to "delegitimize" NC culture at all. If anything I was more trying to just move the boundaries a bit, and insist that it is bigger than that description suggests. I see it as more like some sort of set theoretic thing: any given culture anywhere on earth is a complex set of overlapping previously-existing cultures, gathered from across time and space, and the exact mixture will vary if not inch-by-inch then probably mile by mile. My sister- and brother-in-law live are OBX'ers and from many visits with them combined with a few to friends in the NC mountains, one could scarcely imagine they even live in the same timezone let alone the same state.
Tobacco: a huge piece of the economy measured in terms of dollars, but measured in terms the percentage of the population directly involved in it, not so much. So on the one hand, we have an industry that made and keeps a small number of people very wealthy, and on the other we have an industry that provided nothing more than a regular wage to many others PLUS doing substantial harm to those who smoke, both in NC and elsewhere. Thus ... when a Senator from NC votes on tobacco related issues, I would insist that what they are generally voting for is to preserve the existing distribution of power and wealth within the state.
Now, with rural broadband, one could argue that this goes the other way. Surely, one might say, universal (and affordable) access to reliable high speed internet service changes things a lot, in ways that actually threaten to change the existing distribution of power and wealth in NC (and obviously elsewhere too). I don't think that this is wrong, but I think it's very important to dig deeper into such proposals. Why? Because so often when someone bothers to do this, we find all kinds of nefarious self-interest still at work, hidden under what is almost certainly excellent public policy. Does it matter if someone who is already among NC's "landed gentry" (they would never call themselves that, of course) gets a bit richer while a process that gives everyone functioning Netflix occurs? Maybe, maybe not. I'd just be curious to see how Cawthorn sells this idea to his wealthier donors compared to his more public facing version.
I am not surprised by your reaction to Seattle. As I mentioned in another comment here, most people want to feel part of a group of "similar" folks that is of a size that they can wrap their hearts and minds around. I was reading something this morning that mentioned an area of Manhattan called "Alphabet City" - a relatively tiny area but one that still contains enough people for its residents to think of themselves as living some aspects of life with shared experiences and goals. So this sort of association/community/culture building goes on everywhere and at all times.
I don't think your a hopeless idealist. I think your experience and outlook is probably much closer to that of a majority of Americans than mine.
One, Delaware existed prior to the founding of the United States of America, so your general point about small states is not carried by this WY-specific comment about the process whereby territories become states. And besides, there were people in WY before it formally became a state. Do you also believe that doctors don't exist before they graduate from medical school? lol
Two, during that debate about Delaware in 1787, Elbridge Gerry made the same exact argument that you are making here. It wasn't a convincing argument then, and in fact he is now best known for the term "gerrymandering" that was named for him.
The Tenth Amendment limits the rights of the federal government and requires the federal government to respect and protect the rights of the states, something that the Supreme Court has repeatedly done. So even if WY did not and could not exist independently, the fact that it is a state makes it CA's equal in some respects, including upper-house representation. This design was not an accident, but rather a thoughtful and intentional check upon the tyranny of the majority.
> there were people in WY before it formally became a state
I believe I addressed this in the rest of this sub-thread.
> a thoughtful and intentional check upon the tyranny of the majority
That's an interpretation. There are others, including that it's a thoughtful and intentional way to preserve and even magnify the interests of those who own land.
That seems... like a creative way of putting it. Wyoming may not have existed as a state entity, but the people sure did. And they had their reasons for joining the federation - this is one of them.
>The region acquired the name Wyoming by 1865, when Representative James Mitchell Ashley of Ohio introduced a bill to Congress to provide a "temporary government for the territory of Wyoming".
> The region's population grew steadily after the Union Pacific Railroad reached the town of Cheyenne in 1867, and the federal government established the Wyoming Territory on July 25, 1868
> Once government-sponsored expeditions to the Yellowstone country began, reports by Colter and Bridger, previously believed to be apocryphal, were found to be true. That led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park, which became the world's first national park in 1872. Nearly all of Yellowstone National Park lies within the far northwestern borders of Wyoming.
> In August 1886, the U.S. Army was given administration of the park
> Democrats and Republicans alike in Wyoming Territory agreed by the late 1880s that it was time their territory became a state. Statehood was attractive to the territory’s businessmen and politicians, as it offered them much more local control over land and water issues
> Gov. Warren called a special election for Nov. 5, 1889. The Constitution passed overwhelmingly by a vote of 6,272 in favor to 1,903 against. [ this at a time where the total population of the state was around 60,000 ]
>Cheyenne businessman and rancher Francis E. Warren, was appointed to a second stint as territorial governor in 1889, replacing Moonlight. Warren strongly supported statehood. [...] (Territorial governors and other top officials were appointed by the president.
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I don't find your view of Wyoming's history persuasive. The territories were created and managed by the US federal government, with every expectation that they would either become states or simply remain US-controlled territory. They were never independent pseudo-states, and if they remained a territory, they had even less control over their own destiny than if they became a state.
You're certainly more educated on the history than I am. My main point is that the smaller states would have never agreed to a representative democracy which made their desires 100% irrelevant.
There's enough small states like that to get some leverage. WY is one example, but there's many more. And as we saw in the civil war, states and people were willing to go to war to defend their interests, whatever those interests were.
I simply can't imagine the feds trying to conquer Wyoming. There are no cities to burn. There would be a rifle behind every shrub-brush, and the casualties would be so massive, and so demoralizing, that they would be forced to allow those states to form their own federation. It would be a high-desert Vietnam situation.
edit: I'm actually so ignorant on the history that I didn't realize WY became a state in 1890. The Great Compromise was in 1787. So this matter was already long settled by the time they had a chance to become a state - this nation was clearly intended to be a federation of states with independent control.
> this nation was clearly intended to be a federation of states with independent control
Appeals to history like that don't work for me. You could just as easily say:
"this nation was clearly intended to be a place where only white men got to vote"
or
"this nation was clearly intended to be a place where slavery was legal and a slave was counted as 3/5 of a human being"
The emancipation proclamation, and later civil rights movements have changed those things in an explicit way. But I would argue (and I'm not alone in this) that many other legislative and judicials changes since the end of the civil war have undermined the historical notion of "a federation of states with independent control".
I don't disagree that it would be better if we were to explicitly modify the constitution to reflect these changes. But modifying the constitution is very tricky to do (a major defect in the constitution IMO), and so for now we have to deal a de-facto situation rather than one necessarily reflected in the words of an amendment or three.
The feds have never (so far) been faced with "trying to conquer Wyoming". As outlined in the quotes I gave last time, the federal government created the Wyoming territory, appointed its territorial governors, voted on whether to allow it to become a state. The federal government owns most of the land in Wyoming too. This story repeats for more or less the entirety of the western states. It is purely an imagined fiction that these were once sovereign independent nations that finally decided to join the continental union. They were paid for and controlled by the union until they decided to be states instead of territories, at which time they had more self-determination in many important ways (but less in others).
This process is more or less unrelated to the formation of the states that existed at the time of the DoI. These states had already existed for 40-100 years in various ways, and had never been part of anything other than the dominion of the British monarchy.
I would wager that even had the constitution not granted WY it's 2 senators for its 60k people, the handful of those who voted in 1889 would still have decided to become a state (the alernative was not some glorious independent future, but simply remaining as a territory).
Nice chatting with you, thanks for humoring me. If we don't modify the constitution legally, how do you propose we do it? I am aware that the constitution doesn't mean much of anything in the courts these days. But how is this different from the law of the west? The powerful make the rules with no accountability.
Historically, people have burned the government to the ground and started with a brand new document. I suppose that's what most people are advocating when they wish to change the constitution in a way which it does not allow.
If not by law, how is it decided? Can I decide? I suppose I can if I become a supreme court justice or someone like Bill Gates.
The founding fathers certainly knew that the constitution would be hard to change - that's the whole point. They saw what happened to past governments with wimpy foundations. I really can't see the point of keeping the constitution at all if we are going to violate it due to "current sentiments" - it's all a sham.
Perhaps they would have voted for becoming a state even without their 2 senators, but that seems far from certain to me. Like the American Revolution itself, I just can't see Wyoming people sitting down and taking what's given to them.
Of course, my predictions about the future of America are different from most. I think we've only just begun to hear the rumblings of a deep conflict. This election was not the climax, but the prologue.
States are also drawn to serve the drawer. Why do we have a North Dakota and a South Dakota? It's not because we had a North Dakota Territory and a South Dakota Territory; it was because they would enter the Union as solidly Republican states, cementing Republican dominance in the Senate and in the Presidency, and admitting two states instead of one doubles the effect.
There's no particular reason to treat the current boundaries as holy writ.
There is a reason, which is that regardless of how and why states were created, they are legally sovereign entities with their own separate governments.
A bunch of countries in the world were drawn on a map with boundaries set by the UN or the British. That doesn’t make them any less sovereign entities.
Removing districts, or enlarging them so the borders barely matter, and implementing ranked choice voting and proportional representation is a far, far better solution.