There’s been a lot of talk of G.O.P. “dummymanders” in states like North Carolina, where Republicans drew very aggressive maps that spread their voters too thin and got swamped in the Dem tsunami. Far be it from me to defend election-rigging shenanigans, but I don’t think we should characterize this kind of map as “dumb.”
It’s certainly true that the North Carolina map was not optimal for maximizing G.O.P. seats in a D+13 national environment. But why would you optimize for that? There’s no saving a party that does that poorly and the exact margin in the House isn’t very important. What these nasty partisan gerrymanders do is maximize your seats in the face of a mildly hostile climate.
To take a Democratic example, the party retained a comfortable majority in 2024 with 46 percent of the vote in the lower house of the Nevada legislature. The way this works is that they won a ton of seats in the Vegas suburbs narrowly while the G.O.P. won a bunch of rural seats by Assad-like margins. The same logic applies nationally. If Dems had done 10 points worse, they’d have gotten crushed on the congressional map. These gerrymanders undermine political accountability by making politicians feel immune to normal-sized swings in opinion, and that’s bad.
Person with Internet Access: One of your many Twitter fights this week, was about whether James Talarico was a moderate or progressive, with both sides trying to claim him. Is this more a case of success has many fathers, or an Obama like charisma that , according to Milan’s earlier poll, leads Democratic factions to see what they want in him. And what’s your empirical case for Talarico moderation?
Skillful, charismatic politicians get different kinds of people to like them. But that’s not really what factional politics is about. Rank-and-file progressive Democrats loved Barack Obama, but that didn’t mean progressive movement leaders agreed with them — part of what those leaders hated about Obama was precisely that he was so well-liked by their base. The entire purpose of the Progressive Establishment organizing project is to prevent the emergence of another Obama-like figure who connects with the mass base of the Democratic Party and puts the groups back in the veal pen.