The Economist on Gerrymandering
incompetence or bias?
Not that Republicans in Indiana oppose gerrymandering in the abstract. In fact, they are experts at it: 20 years ago Democrats held five of the state’s nine congressional seats. Today they hold two even as their vote share is 38%. (The Economist)
In the latest presidential election, 36% of the vote in Massachusetts went to the Republican candidate. The state’s congressional delegation is nine Democrats, no Republicans.
That is evidence not of gerrymandering but of the effect of winner-take-all elections, which one would expect an author for The Economist to understand. There is no county in Massachusetts with a Republican majority, almost no precinct or municipality. It would probably be possible to combine dispersed Republican plurality precincts to create a congressional district with a Republican majority but it would not be easy and the map would be a very odd one.
It might be almost as odd as Louisiana’s 6th congressional district, gerrymandered under court orders to produce a second black majority district.
That interpretation of the Voting Rights Act — as not merely permitting but requiring racial gerrymandering — has now been reversed by the Supreme Court.
On which subject the Economist author writes:
Certainly other red states will plough ahead, aided by the Supreme Court’s gutting on April 29th of the Voting Rights Act, which had kept gerrymandering in check. (The Economist, italics mine.)
I am reminded of the same journal’s obituary for Mao:
“In the final reckoning, Mao must be accepted as one of history’s great achievers: for devising a peasant-centered revolutionary strategy which enabled China’s Communist Party to seize power, against Marx’s prescriptions, from bases in the countryside; for directing the transformation of China from a feudal society, wracked by war and bled by corruption, into a unified, egalitarian state where nobody starves; and for reviving national pride and confidence so that China could, in Mao’s words, ‘stand up’ among the great powers.” (The Economist on Mao’s death, 1976, emphasis mine)
My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else
Past posts, sorted by topic
A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing
A draft of my next book, Consequences of Climate Change, webbed for comments.
In all fairness, if the obituary writer relied solely on official documents, how would he know any better? And why would one even consider unofficial documents, since the official documents called them lies? Once one starts questioning official documents, one might as well question the legitimacy of the regime itself, and that would lead to anarchy, chaos, and people ignoring the government!
The Economist is misnamed.