So...SCOTUS did it, they gutted a provision in the voting rights act that mandated that gerrymandering can't occur on the basis of denying a racial demographic the vote. This could allow republicans southern states to gain around 10-12 seats if they redraw their maps.
However, I'm seeing a lot of doomerism around this like it's over for the dems and they're not coming back from this. And I say BS. If anything, I'm gonna argue a controversial point, that this is some tough medicine that the democrats need to take to move into the seventh party system once and for all.
To understand why, let's revisit the last 6 decades of politics in a nutshell. In the 1960s, the voting rights act was passed. This gave blacks more representation, but it also backfired on the democrats and ended the new deal coalition. Since then, the democrats have cobbled together a coalition that's heavily racialized, in which they emphasize combining coastal urban interests with obnoxious identity politics. And that's been the defining features of the democrats in the 6th party system. This obnoxious condescension toward "flyover country" combined with obnoxious racial pandering. We saw in 2016 and 2020 how, when some of us wanted a more working class coalition, these same people would circlejerk about like, black voters in South carolina, and act like they're the "base" of the party. hell, I've seen centrists playing this weird definitional game with the idea of a party's "base" claiming that it isnt the most progressive voters who are "the base", but the most loyal voters, like black voters and urban centrist voters. Like they're the REAL base, progressives aren't the real base. Again, the democrats have been systemically ignoring working class voters for a while. It's the defining story of the 6th party system. The democrats abandoned working class voters, and as such, the working class voters abandoned the democrats. To the point that the "true democrats", those centrist 6th party system sycophants, dont even consider working class and progressive voters to be "real" democratic voters. No, they're just finnicky independents, and they dont care about them. Instead, their whole strategy is to rack up successes among minority voters by minmaxing demographics and appealing to suburbanite voters.
And that's where we are looking at a potential seventh party system. As it stands, democrats in 2016 traded white working class voters in the rust belt, for suburbanites down south. And this demographic shift of minority voters combined with growing suburbs is supposed to ultimately deliver the south to the democrats on a silver platter some time around the 2030s. We're seeing it with georgia, arizona, and north carolina, and we're seeing it with texas, potentially.
With me...I always HATED this strategy. Because it just allows the centrists to be centrist. It encourages the abandonment of the rust belt and places like michigan, wisconsin, and pennsylvania, as well as states like ohio and iowa. It encourages the democrats to focus on identity politics instead of class politics. And it encourages them to be the useless centrist party that they've been.
But...my own strategy was always different, more color blind. I have nothing against minority voters, I'm not racist after all, but I never gotten into this weird obsession with race the dems have. And people will say that's privilege, but that attitude in itself is part of the problem. They use it as a cudgel, and as an excuse not to do better. They'd rather divert from class issues to focus on race issues. They bashed Bernie Sanders in 2016 for not appealing to black voters, whose votes were overprioritized in the primaries, when in the general, Bernie would have wiped the floor with Trump. In 2020, the democrats relied on South Carolina as Biden's firewall to manufacture consent around him being the front runner, despite his ### being soundly kicked up to that point outside of south carolina. And in 2024, the democrats prioritized south carolina first instead of iowa or new hampshire because they knew that these old, conservative black voters would push the party in biden's direction.
And what did my own strategy look like? Take the obama map and hold it. Hold the rust belt, rely on the blue wall. I admit, by 2030, the blue wall might lose some importance due to population loss, but as long as the dems can hold like one swing state outside of it, they can still win an election. Georgia is going that direction anyway. Nevada's another possibility. And if we can win back Ohio and Iowa, while holding the rust belt trio deciding elections lately, yeah, we can just hold things in perpetuity. The problem was that MAGA and the dems going all southern suburbanite messed that up.
here's the thing, I never wanted the dems to pursue the south. That's "god's country." It's conservative. it's regressive. I hate having to rely on it to win anything, because that means our ideology is compromised, because guess what, it's full of conservative religious people. Even the minority voters there are conservative and religious, outside of race issues. They just vote democrat because the whites down there hate them. And again, you can see where I'm going with this. As long as these guys have an outsized influence in the party, the party will not be a working class party. It will be a conservative lite party that's instead obsessed with idpol.
So what should the democrats do to counter this? Well, I'll give you two answers: 1) bernie sanders, 2) Minnesota. Bernie Sanders is a socialist from Vermont. Vermont is rural AF but he was able to break through with voters up there in ways that seem abnormal for the rest of the country, given how racialized the politics of the rest of the country are. That's why the rest of the country rejected him in 2016. They didn't think he was hip enough with minority voters because ideas like social democracy aren't what matters, it's idpol. But if idpol becomes toxic to democrats because the VRA is struck down in this way, democrats are gonna have to go back to the drawing board and find new ways to win elections. And one way is to find ways to win rural voters. Not through cultural issues, but economic issues. And that brings me to the second example: Minnesota. Perhaps the state democratic party in the whole country I respect the most is the DFL of minnesota. Their democratic party isn't the rest of the country's democratic party. it's actually the "democratic farm and labor party". Farmers. Laborers. It's a hold over from the New Deal, in a state that didn't have the idpol of the rest of the country because Minnesota, like much of the upper midwest, is mostly white. So rather than adopt the weird sneering cultural progressivism combined with centrism, they actually had to get off their ###es and appeal to rural voters. Now, their influence has declined in recent decades and they've followed the same trends as the rest of the rust belt. BUT...they are still the die hards holding out in favor of the democratic party. And they've gone democrat every election since like 1972. They're literally one of the only states that can say that. Now, if we export that model and apply it to Iowa, and Wisconsin, and Michigan, and Ohio, and Pennsylvania, maybe we can still have a shot. We can counter a republican southern resurgence with a northern blue wall, just like I always wanted to to begin with.
Now, this isn't to say that the south is off limits entirely. This doesnt disenfranchise minority voters. it just screws over their congressional representation, allowing more gerrymandering. Well, to that, we in the north should gerrymander every single state we can get our hands on. This is, of course, a band aid. Long term I support the end of gerrymandering and the uncapping of the house of representatives, but that's also why I'm not sweating this. Gerrymandering has been functionally legal for every reason except race. And I personally HATE my current house representation. First, I was in some rural district that didnt represent me. Now I'm in some district full of suburbanites despite my politics being diametrically opposed to them. Of course, after trying to design my own maps, the problem is obvious, the districts are too big, and this unfairly favors rural voters. That's the core problem here with the house. Urban voters are underrepresented unless you live in a city that's too big to functionally gerrymander. It's why the dems are so attracted to suburbanites. They see it as "well we win in the cities, we lose in the country, let's win the suburban voters." But ultimately. That's why we need to rethink our entire strategy. Living in a small city, my issues arent the typical urban area's issues. Urban areas typically have stuff like jobs, and high cost of living. Here, the problems are the opposite, low cost of living, combined with crushing poverty from a weak job market. And let's face it, a lot of rural and semi rural america has the same issues. And the democrats just ignore that, because of those incentives.
So, as I see it, democrats need to change the game. They need to make more inroads with white working class voters in burnt out rust belt towns, and semi rural areas where the landscape is full of decaying main streets and blighted properties that have long since gone out of business and have never been repurposed into anything useful. And maybe this is the kick in the ### to do it. I don't know, maybe im wrong and this is entirely bad for democrats, but honestly, I think we can adjust and overcome this if only we change our electoral strategy, and I've been kinda wishing the dems had gone in a different direction that didn't involve insufferable identity politics for a while now. If this kills that strategy for good, then that's a silver lining here, and maybe democrats can start winning by being a genuine working class party again, instead one obsessed with minmaxing voter demographics.
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