So, as we saw in my last post, the house of representatives seems to be more biased toward the GOP than other institutions of government. I know that there are problems with the senate, and the electoral college, which are relatively undemocratic, but generally speaking, the house seems to present unique challenges that impact, say, Pennsylvania, a relatively purple state, in ways that lead to the outcome more red. While state wide elections are generally down the middle or have a slight blue bias overall, house elections tend to lead to much redder outcomes. The fact is, house elections come down to land. We have 435 members of the house of representatives, and seats are apportioned to states based on population. PA gets 17 seats under this system. But despite us having a statewide environment that is leading to blue outcomes overall, the house is biased toward the republicans, and this is with a relatively fair and ungerrymandered map. Of the 17 districts, 6 are blue, 8 are red, and 3 are purple and competitive. We also have an issue on the state level where our state house is heavily republican controlled, but the democrats can win governorships. So, what's the problem with this? To a large extent, it's a problem of geography.
Politics is very localized these days. By this, I mean that urban areas lean a certain way, rural areas lean another, and the parties are left to fight over suburbs, with suburbs closer to cities leaning blue, and ones further away leaning red. And this actually sums up why the democrats seem so hell bent on pandering to suburbanites around philly, to the point of saying "for every working class voter we lose, we will pick up two moderate republicans in the suburbs of philadelphia." While it doesnt matter what voters they win for state wide or nationwide elections, the house forces the democrats to appeal to suburbanites to win districts. Because look at above. It doesn't matter if republicans win more city dwellers or democrats more rural votes. It doesn't matter if they lose those areas by 30 points or 40-50. They still lose. So, democrats seem to pursue their suburban strategy that shackles our politics specifically because it's what they need to do to win house districts.
Look at the house map above for PA. It makes sense. They can win district located in philly and pittsburgh very strongly, but they struggle otherwise. They struggle to win in the Lehigh Valley, or up by Wikes-Barre and Scranton corridor, regardless of there being several medium sized urban areas there. Because the areas in between those areas are deep red. But, where can they win? Philly suburbs in chester, montgomery, and bucks county.
To some extent, this is a flaw with the house system. Our system limited the number of representatives to 435 back in 1929. And ironically, this was because rural representatives feared losing power to cities, as things were becoming increasingly urbanized back then. The problem is this has made our house of representatives...increasingly unrepresentative. Back when this was done, the typical district represented 210,000 people or so. Now it's 747,000. And that's the whole reason why house districts are increasingly republican leaning. Democrats are incentivized to cloister themselves in major cities with many hundreds of thousands or millions of people, while ignoring smaller cities throughout PA like, say, Allentown, or Reading, or Wilkes Barre, or Harrisburg. Because it can't win there. Those cities have maybe 50-100k people or so each, and they're surrounded by several hundred thousand people who lives in rural areas. SO when they draw a district, guess what? You're getting little islands of blue surrounded by a sea of red. This is why the democrats are incentivized to ignore the plight of people in smaller cities like PA, in favor of the larger cities. Which...describes my personal disaffected with the democratic party. I live in one of those smaller cities. And my city is an economic dumpster fire. But democrats don't care. The only way a democrat can even represent my city is if my district is attached to Philly suburbs, like, say, District 6, where Reading is basically attached to the same district representing wealthy suburbanites. But, when you get a city like Reading, with a bad economy lumped in with philly suburbs, you end up getting a district that is neoliberal. And that's the best case scenario for it. Southeastern PA, prior to 2018, was subject to horrific gerrymandering by republicans, with extremely irregularly shaped districts that carved our urban areas and suburbs in ways to deny them ANY representation at all, allowing the rural areas to dominate everything.
Essentially, the districts are too big, and they're too big, explicitly because rural representives in the 1920s decided to limit the size of the house of representatives to preserve their power. But now, they have outsized power, in which people who live in cities that aren't big enough to warrant districts of their own end up being swallowed in a sea of red. If a city is 100,000 people, and a district is 747,000, well, guess what, that city isn't going to get fair representation, is it?
The point of the house of representatives, if I'm not mistaken, is to represent communities. Geographical areas were assumed to think relatively the same, and vote in blocs, and it made sense to represent an area with a district led by a representative for that community. But, districts are too big these days. They are impersonal. Your relatively small community is completely outvoted by a much larger geographic area. The fact is, there's too many people in districts to represent people.
And this seems to be why the democrats have abandoned large swaths of the population, to focus on certain urban populations and people who live in affluent suburbs. Because that's the only way they can win. They are incentivized to ignore communities like mine, leaving us to the GOP, while selling out their ideals to get elected by suburbanites that they can't win. Sure, if they focus on nationwide or statewide elections, they can win pretty decently, and if they were incentivized to think about elections in that way, they could probably be more workers' rights or economically centric. They could support a higher minimum wage, medicare for all, UBI, etc. But, if they have to focus on winning these weirdly shaped districts that tend to favor rural areas, well, they have to do this weird shuffle that leads to their weird centrist politics, where they have to appeal to both the urban poor and the suburban wealthy.
And this is yet another reason why our politics is so screwed.
So what's the solution? Well, we should remove the reapportionment act of 1929 and raise the cap. I was originally thinking 1000 members or so, but the above article mentions we would actually need 1156 to have the same proportion as 1929. So, we should probably aim for that, at least.
Of course, the right would fight this like hell, because doing this would destroy their electoral advantage. But that's the point. This electoral advantage is unfair, and like many other legacy aspects of our constitution like the electoral college and or the senate, tends to favor more conservative and rural areas. And because the rule limiting things to 435 is an act of congress, rather than a part of the constitution, we could literally just repeal this right now, while the democrats control congress. The GOP would try to reimplement it if they retake congress, but this idea, if successful, would probably end the republican bias in congress, leading to a situation where congressional districts actually are more representative of what the people want. And it would allow the parties to finally realign themselves in which we don't have to choose between the borderline fascists and the crappy neolibs. Our antiquated social systems are actually one of the reasons politics are realigning in such a horrifying way, and fixing those institutions would allow things to change more naturally, and more healthily. Honestly, Yang and the forward party should get on this. He seems to be getting interested in political reform, and this could be as important as the likes of ranked choice voting.
Another potential solution would be to do away with legislative districts altogether and to implement a form of proportional representation in congress. Essentially, this amounts to a form of ranked choice voting for congressional districts, breaking the two party system altogether. Essentially, people vote for the party they want, and then seats are apportioned to parties in proportion to how people vote. So say we have 17 legislative districts. Well, within the two party system, given how pennsylvanians vote (generally a slight dem advantage), you would typically have 9 districts go to democrats and 8 go to republicans. But wait, it gets better. Third party voting would no longer be a "waste of vote". So if you have a system where the democrats get 35% of votes, the GOP 30%, the libertarians 20%, the greens 8%, and the forward party 7%, we would end up with a system where the greens and the forward party get 1 representative each, the libertarians get 3, the GOP gets 5, and the dems get 7 or something.
And this would just get rid of all gerrymandering, all lack of representation, no need to even have districts, just, the people vote for what they want, and then they get it. This actually would be better in some ways than having districts based on land. We wouldnt need to worry about rural representation, and urban representation. Every person gets one vote, they vote for the party they like best, and assuming a reasonable amount of people also support that party, they get a representative. It actually seems like it would be better, especially when combined with the above changes to increase the size of the house of representatives. More representatives means the results translate better to the population. With 17 representatives representing PA, each representative would represent roughly 6% of the vote. But if we tripled the size of the house of representatives to around 1200, and PA got say, 50, then well, then each representative would represent 2% of the vote. This would give representation a little more granularity.
All in all, I want to look into these ideas more. I actually could be onto something here. Even just repealing and replacing the reapportionment act of 1929 could be huge. It could demolish the parties' existing strategies in winning districts in the house of representatives, allowing the democrats to support economic progressivism more, and essentially destroying the GOP, which seems to only be allowed to exist in its current form because it is able to abuse the district system to give itself outsized representation. And it could likely be done without needing a full on constitutional amendment. Proportional representation would be harder and might require a constitutional amendment so it might just remain on my wish list, but yeah. I really think forward should look into this. This could be a relatively easy and simple change to accomplish.
EDIT: So, I talked these ideas over with some forwardists, and there's a few things I would like to add.
I didn't think of it at the time, but this plan would actually help fix the electoral college too, because the number of electors is based on the size of congress. So expanding the house from 435 members to 1156 would give us 1259 electors in the electoral college. This would allow the institutions to scale better with the number of voters in each state, and diminish the institutional advantage of small, rural states.
Also, apparently, it would be possible to pass the proportional representation with an act of congress as well, but it would require removing some other laws already in place such as 2 USC 2. Still, if we control congress and could remove the reapportionment act of 1929, I assume removing or amending this act would be possible too. The point is these are workable ideas that could be passed through congress without a constitutional amendment.
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