Saturday, May 06, 2023

Clyburn - Racial Gerrymandering in South Carolina?

 Pro Publica.

UPDATE: Aside from Clyburn, Intelligencer, mid-item:

The gerrymander of 2011 built such a firewall around GOP control of the House that when Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, Democratic congressional candidates earned 1.4 million more votes than Republicans, but the GOP retained a 234-201 majority. You might even argue it worked too well, creating the solid conservative districts that gave rise to the renegade House Freedom Caucus, forced Speaker John Boehner out of office, and fomented the grass-roots anger that fueled Donald Trump’s ascent and punctured the GOP establishment.

DWT, after quoting much of the ProPublica item about SC6,

 The 5 other worst examples of this kind of extreme packing are in Mississippi (MS-02— Democratic partisan lean of +23), Alabama (AL-07— Democratic partisan lean of +29), Florida (FL-20— Democratic partisan lean of +49, specifically drawn by DeSantis last year to keep Brian Mast’s seat red), Georgia (GA-13— Democratic partisan lean of +52, which keeps Marjorie Traitor Greene’s seat so ridiculously safe for the KKK) and, worst of all, Louisiana (LA-02— Democratic partisan lean of +56).

Politics can have strange bipartisanship dimensions, ones of questionable merit.