Today’s edition of CQPolitics has a sobering article entitled “CQ Ratings Show South Remains GOP Firewall Against House Election Disaster.” According to the staff-written post, “Democrats’ opportunities for more Southern gains in 2008 are very limited.” The CQ study sees NC-8 and FL-13 being the Dems’ best shot at House pick-ups, with slim pickings beyond those two seats and Dems struggling to hold several of their southern seats.
Puzzling that Dems can’t do better in Southern House races, especially considering that Democrats currently hold majorities of both houses of the state legislatures in LA, MS, AL, AR, NC and WV, and one House each in TN and KY. One possible explanation: As Ed Kilgore has pointed out, “nearly half the region’s House seats are in three super-gerrymandered states, Texas, Florida and Georgia.”
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 22: Ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard Can’t Decide Which Bad Ticket She Wants to Join
One of the odder phenomena of the 2024 presidential election is a certain 2020 Democratic candidate who has strayed very far since then. I took a look at her options at New York:
A month ago, when ex-Democratic congresswoman and 2020 presidential wannabe Tulsi Gabbard showed up at a Mar-a-Lago event, I wrote about the logic that could make her a highly unconventional but not entirely implausible 2024 running mate for Donald Trump. Once a major backer of Bernie Sanders, Gabbard’s trajectory toward MAGA-land has been steady since she left the Democratic Party in the fall of 2022, a main course she served up with a side dish of jarring candidate endorsements (e.g., of J.D. Vance). Even when she was still a Democrat running for president, though, her orientation was more MAGA-adjacent than you might expect, as Geoffrey Skelley explained in 2019:
“Gabbard’s supporters … are more likely to have backed President Trump in 2016, hold conservative views or identify as Republican compared to voters backing the other candidates. …
“In fact, Gabbard has become a bit of a conservative media darling in the primary, with conservative commentators like Ann Coulter and pro-Trump social media personalities like Mike Cernovich complimenting her for her foreign policy views. In a primary in which some 2020 Democratic contenders have boycotted Fox News, Gabbard has regularly appeared on the network. Just last week, Gabbard even did an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, a far-right political outlet. She’s also made appeals outside the political mainstream by going on The Joe Rogan Experience — one of the most popular podcasts in the country and a favored outlet for members of the Intellectual Dark Web, whose purveyors don’t fit neatly into political camps but generally criticize concepts such as political correctness and identity politics.”
So her parting blast at Democrats as controlled by an “elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness” didn’t come out of nowhere.
But much as Gabbard might be an outside-the-box running mate for the 45th president, it does seem there is another 2024 presidential candidate whose extreme hostility to mainstream institutions and difficult-to-categorize views might make him a better match for her: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And sure enough, according to NBC News, the wiggy anti-vaxxer is interested in Gabbard:
“The four-term former member of Congress from Hawaii is now getting consideration for both former President Donald Trump’s and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tickets, two sources familiar with the candidates’ deliberations told NBC News.”
The prospect of choosing between these two politicians appears to have left Gabbard feeling she’s in the catbird seat:
“As one source said, Gabbard would be more likely to seriously consider running as Kennedy’s vice presidential nominee had she not been swept up by the possibility of serving with Trump. This person said Gabbard ‘was enticed’ by the chance of serving on Kennedy’s ticket but is now focused on the possibility that Trump will select her.
“’My understanding is that Tulsi is convinced that Trump is going to pick her,’ this person said. ‘Had that not been the case, she probably would have gone with Kennedy.’”
Since Kennedy has scheduled a running-mate reveal for March 26 in Oakland, we’ll know soon enough whether he chose Gabbard and Gabbard chose him. Others rumored to be on his short list include New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, and California entrepreneur and major RFK Jr. donor Nicole Shanahan.
As NBC notes, it’s more than a bit unusual for people to be considered for multiple presidential tickets:
“[I]t’s exceedingly rare for a politician to attract interest from more than one presidential ticket or party. (Ahead of the 1952 election, Democrats and Republicans led dueling efforts to draft another politically ambiguous veteran, Dwight Eisenhower, the former supreme Allied commander in Europe during World War II, for the presidential race.)”
It’s hard to say what Tulsi Gabbard would think of this comparison. After all, Ike was a bit of a warmonger.
Gerrymandering is a problem no matter whose ox is being gored. The way states handle redistricting is broken beyond repair.
There is one very easy solution: The states should combine their districts into big, three-member districts, open their general elections to the top three vote-getters from each party’s primary, and apportion seats to the top three vote-getters in the general election. This would make it much more difficult to gerrymander (because the states would essentially have fewer, bigger districts) and would be much more fair (because in most cases the districts would thereby elect two members from the most dominant party and one member from the lesser party, ensuring that the minority party still gets some say). There would have to be a few rules for the occasional one- or two-member district that would still come up in states whose congressional delegation was not a multiple of three, of course.
Of course, because this (a) makes sense, (b) provides the most meaningful way to elect centrists of both parties, and (c) threatens incumbents, Congress — which otherwise lets states handle redistricting however they want — has outlawed multi-member districts.
For many years the Southern Money Elite held the South in the grip of Fraud, Intimidation, and a wide variety of legality games and criminal enterprises.
The 1968 election overthrew that lock on the Democratic party, so the Southern Gang Of Pirates became Republican, but never lost their old ways. Rather they spread them across the country.
Now they need all the games to retain control, the loss of one could lose all. But Gerrymandering might be the biggest, and certainly the least understood.
By packing a few districts as 100% frequently voting Democrats (who are mostly black) into their own districts, they bleach the surrounding districts such that an area can vote 55% Democrat and still have that elect 4 Republicans and one Democrat to Congress. The Democrat wins by 95% without even trying and the Republicans win by 55%.
Until there are rules against Gerrymandering, or such voting districts are outlawed entirely, there will be little need to apply the other methods to House seats.
One of the reasons we will continue to have problems in South is that so many African-American males have been disenfranchised, in part because of crack vs. cocaine sentencing disparities and sentencing enhancements that were part of the Clinton 1994 Omnibus Crime bill.