Election 2018

[pbrower2a]

Gerrymanders can fail. They are done with overkill, as when the Ohio state legislature created a district that had Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur having to run against each other in the nect election. One Representative was from Greater Cleveland and the other was from Greater Toledo.

Gerrymandering allows one party to 'pack and sack', creating hyper-partisan, ultra-safe seats in districts hostile to the winning party for a small number of members of the losing party (let us say a D+30 district in a heavily-black part of Cleveland) while diluting the rest of the vote in R+4 or so districts. The winning party gets safe seats for a time, but eventually

(1) the extremists win R+5 or so seats, even making gains against their party's moderates
(2) the extremists create hostility among moderates
(3) the party with the advantage from gerrymandering promotes increasingly-extreme policies and special-interest legislation
(4) the quality of legislation decreases.

When the side that wins the gerrymander gets a president who shares its agenda, the popular discontent rises.

This could be severe in 2018. As examples:

Quote:In North Carolina, Rep. Ted Budd was the beneficiary of the state’s blatant gerrymander, but he’s only polling at 40 percent against attorney Kathy Manning in a district rated by the Cook Partisan Voting Index as R+6. In Ohio, Rep. Steve Chabot returned to Congress in a newly-drawn safe seat outside Cincinnati, but he’s now seriously threatened by Aftab Pureval, a 35-year-old county clerk of courts inspired by former President Obama to run for office.

In Texas, a Republican-friendly map didn’t account for the anti-Trump backlash in the affluent suburbs. That’s putting Reps. Pete Sessions and John Culberson in a tough position despite representing traditionally conservative seats. And in next month’s Ohio special election, a seat that was redrawn to protect then-GOP Rep. Patrick Tiberi looks like a genuine toss-up despite the Republican Party’s best efforts.

To be sure, it shouldn’t take a political landslide to ensure a critical mass of competitive House elections. But given our country’s increasingly partisan voting behavior, the expectation of a midterm wave against the party in power has become the new normal. And counterintuitively, under such circumstances, the odds of defeating an unprepared incumbent in a safer seat aren’t significantly better than defeating a well-prepared incumbent in a more-competitive seat. Look at the 2006 midterms, when many skilled GOP moderates retained Democratic-friendly seats, while hard-liners in more-favorable districts got swept out of office.

Cited material from the National Journal, and the rest is a paraphrase.