Thursday, March 31, 2022

New house map looks more fair to both parties

 This is just a blurb, but it's worth discussing, apparently we have a better idea of the 2022 map for congress and it's looking a lot less gerrymandered than the previous 2012-2020 cycle maps, which had a high republican bias. Now we're only looking at R+1 rather than R+5. To put things in perspective, that means in terms of how I calculate percentages republicans go from a roughly 89% chance of holding the house at any given time, to only around 60%.

Still, given the fact that 2022 is looking to be a very red year, I still expect democrats to lose seats this time. Still. They should be able to more quickly gain them back once momentum starts going the other way again. 

It also looks like there's more competitive districts in general, which is a reversal from the country's districts looking increasingly polarized and biased toward one direction or another. It's crazy how polarized things have gotten over the past few decades. And I don't think it's healthy either. Even though I'm biased toward one direction, the current state of increased partisanship isn't healthy. Because it seems to come more down to things like racial demographics and the urban/rural divide than actual ideology. It makes it impossible to run an impassioned campaign on the issues, but instead to just cynically pander to "your demographics" at the expense of "their demographics". This has actually led to why our politics are so awful and dominated by culture wars nonsense. Also makes it hard for people with actual ideas to win within the democratic party, since idpol is such a deciding factor these days. 

So, if we can reverse such trends, that would be great.

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