Tag Archives: United States

Beyond gerrymandering: Other geographic challenges for Democrats nationally

  By

I received some criticism for my suggestion earlier this year that Democrats’ top medium-term priority should be recapturing state legislatures before the next redistricting after the 2020 Census to prevent gerrymandering, on the basis that other factors were causing bigger problems for Democrats’ abilities to win legislative and Congressional districts. I still think gerrymandering plays a large role in current electoral hurdles facing Democrats across the country — and one that is being downplayed by some analyses — but I accept that there are other factors.

To that end, I wanted to pull together some extended passages from two recent articles that I think effectively discuss those political demographic challenges.

The first looks, mathematically, at how Democratic vote share and turnout can be increasing (which helps in presidential and Senate races) but Republicans can hold so many Congressional districts. This focuses on urban versus rural districts. Nate Cohn, NYT/The Upshot, “Why Democrats Can’t Win the House:”

The gap between staggering Democratic margins in cities and the somewhat smaller Republican margins in the rest of the country allows Democrats to win key states in presidential and Senate elections, like Florida and Michigan. But the expanded Democratic margins in metropolitan areas are all but wasted in the House, since most of these urban districts already voted for Democrats. The result is that Democrats have built national and statewide majorities by making Democratic-leaning congressional districts even more Democratic, not by winning new areas that might turn congressional districts from red to blue.
[…]
The role of partisan gerrymandering in all of this is hotly debated. It has indeed allowed Republicans to squeeze extra districts out of states like Michigan and Virginia, and strategically reinforce vulnerable incumbents. Those additional districts might make the difference between an insurmountable Republican advantage or a merely significant one. But gerrymandering is not responsible for the entire Republican edge in the House.

The political scientists Jowei Chen, of the University of Michigan, and Jonathan Rodden, of Stanford University, estimate that gerrymandering costs Democrats about six to eight seats in the House. Even so, “by far the most important factor contributing to the Republican advantage,” Mr. Chen says, “is the natural geographic factor of Democrats’ being overwhelmingly concentrated in these urban districts, especially in states like Michigan and Florida.”

To retake the House, Democrats would not just need another great election year, like 2006 or 2008; they would need to build a much broader coalition than the one they currently focus on in presidential elections. They would need to attract the voters that some liberals thought they could abandon: the conservative Democrats of the South and Appalachia, where the vanquished Blue Dogs once reigned.
[…]
If Democratic losses in that part of the country are irreversible, Democrats might be forced to wait for demographic and generational change to spread beyond urban centers and suburbs, giving the party a chance to build a more decisive majority. Until that happens, the long-anticipated Democratic majority has little chance of enacting the most ambitious elements of its agenda.

 
One puzzle not answered there: If districts are being drawn reasonably fairly and reasonably numerically evenly, why are urban voters (a group gaining strongly in size relative to rural voters) not getting more districts drawn in their areas? Are those districts simply voting more heavily than before, without actually gaining more residents? Seems unlikely.

On another note, Cohn repeatedly emphasizes that the Democratic Party focus on presidential politics and urban interests — and the unusual antipathy against President Obama specifically — has hurt downballot conservative Democrats in non-statewide-level races in rural areas.

On the one hand, I’m highly sympathetic to the criticism that the Democratic Party (and to a lesser extent the Republican Party) has become increasingly obsessed over the past half century with short-term, single-candidate-personality-centered presidential campaigns at the expense of strategic, broad-based, long-term party-building activities. (Read James MacGregor Burns’ book Running Alone: Presidential Leadership from JFK to Bush II for a history of how and why this came to be.) This has also made it more complicated than ever to define the party and what it stands for since any candidate can take the label and then run on his or her own personalized platform.

On the other hand, I also think that conservative Democrats have gotten more conservative in recent years, which is making it difficult for Democrats from those urban areas and more liberal-leaning states to get excited about helping them with volunteer effort or contributions. One could debate whether they have become more conservative out of sincere belief or to try to catch up to a general frame shift in what center-right voters consider acceptably conservative (much like Republican primaries endlessly drifting more and more toward the extreme right), but I don’t think those conservative Democrats have simply been left behind by the rest of the party liberalizing. Support for moderate healthcare reform and protection of Social Security and other government programs popular among older voters and Appalachian White voters used to be core planks even among more conservative Democrats. Some still support those positions/policies, but a lot of the remaining or new rural Southern Democrats have been running away from those old touchstones.

Again, the reasons are probably debatable, but as the overall Democratic Party trends more socially liberal and economically liberal and then watches these non-urban candidates not only not catch up but actively move backward on some of these issues, it becomes very difficult to explain how they are even members of the same party or whether they will even vote for the (liberal) rest of the party’s priorities if elected to be part of a majority together.

Obviously there are a lot more advantages to being in the majority than not, especially in the House where the minority gets almost no power even when the margin of seats is very close, but it’s frustrating to expend energy and money electing people who may not just vote against but actively block key priorities for the majority of the majority. And it’s true that’s not entirely a new problem either, given that rural Democrats famously blocked things like civil rights legislation for decades. But the country is also significantly more urban now than previously … yet the rural districts and rural members, who are increasingly out of step and falling behind the party’s internal majority, continue to wield a substantial veto.

The second article examines whether a hypothetical evolution/catching-up of non-urban voting patterns and issue beliefs — cited at the end of that Cohn article passage above — is actually likely to occur and thereby make Democrats nationally a stable majority. This focuses on the role of migration between red and blue states. Harry Enten and Nate Silver, Fivethirtyeight.com, “Migration Isn’t Turning Red States Blue:” Read more

Ferguson police occupation, community resistance continues

  By

A summary of major developments in Ferguson, Missouri from Tuesday through Thursday afternoon (August 12-13, 2014), as the community continues to peacefully resist occupation by militarized police presence.

Tuesday

New York Times home page prominently featured an examination of the U.S. media trend of automatically showing unflattering images of Black Americans when killed by the police. Black social media users were speculating whether their “respectable” photos would be used if they were gunned down or more casual photos from parties and the like, which could be misconstrued. (Everyone has a dichotomy of available photos like that, of course, but the media tends not to use the unflattering photos of White victims, or often even assailants.)

Screenshot from U.S. Edition of NYTimes.com home page at 1:15 PM ET on August 12, 2014

Screenshot from U.S. Edition of NYTimes.com home page at 1:15 PM ET on August 12, 2014

Beyond the racialization of it, I think it’s super creepy in general that the U.S. news media feels comfortable taking and using people’s Facebook profile pictures without permission for use in news reports.

We also saw British news media start to emerge as an important source of accurate reporting on the ground in Ferguson, particularly on the subject of what weapons were being used on unarmed civilians. The Guardian reported on Monday’s police crackdown with evidence photos in an article headlined: “Missouri police fired wooden bullets at crowd during protest over teen’s death”

Local news reporters and news bloggers from St. Louis and Ferguson, of course, also remained critical sources of news. A blogger for the Riverfront Times reported on a development from Monday night: Police in Ferguson Fire Tear Gas on Protesters Standing in Their Own Backyard

Photojournalists continued to capture countless examples of militarized police overreach in downtown Ferguson, which have rapidly gone viral. TIME posted this AP photo (which I’m using here due to its newsworthiness, despite the copyright).

Riot police walk toward a man with his hands raised in Ferguson, Mo. (Jeff Roberson—AP)

Riot police walk toward a man with his hands raised in Ferguson, Mo. (Jeff Roberson—AP)

On Tuesday night a second person was shot and critically injured by police in Ferguson. Police claimed he had been brandishing a handgun threateningly, but they also began making extremely fanciful claims about the circumstances surrounding the original shooting of Michael Brown (which was seen by multiple eyewitnesses), so it was not an easy claim to buy on face-value.

Wednesday and overnight to early Thursday morning

The Atlantic’s CityLab blog reported that the militarized and violent police presence was not only going against the FBI manual for defusing such situations but was also a very one-sided “clash” that could obviously not be deemed a “riot.”

Media outlets have used the word “riot” dozens of times, even hundreds of times, to describe the crisis in Ferguson. Yet despite last night’s violence, three days after the death of the unarmed 18-year-old resident, Ferguson does not yet resemble the notable riots from the 1960s to the present day. Rather, it is starting to look like an occupation.

 
On Wednesday night, the police response escalated yet again. It was already clear that they weren’t thinking logically or strategically, but then they arrested and assaulted a Washington Post reporter and the Huffington Post’s reporter for The Department of Justice beat, this is some next-level self-immolation. The two detained reporters were only released when a Los Angeles Times reporter called the local police chief to ask why they had been arrested, and he was surprised to learn of the information. The immortal quotation was “Oh God.”
Read more

Resistance against the police in Ferguson MO

  By

Over the weekend, a cop in Ferguson, Missouri (in St. Louis County) shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager in the back. The local Black community, which has borne the brunt of law enforcement activities in recent years (especially as the city has rapidly gone from almost 50-50 Black and White to being two-thirds Black), was quite understandably very angry about the situation and began protesting. Despite the FBI being brought in to take over the investigation of the case, the situation has continued to escalate as Ferguson’s police department mobilized very aggressively against the protesters.

After some property damage occurred yesterday (though most of the protests were peaceful and undeniably reasonable), the standoff being the police and protesters became even more tense until this evening when the police began corralling and attacking the assembled community members.

Below are some firsthand videos posted by a City of St. Louis Ward Alderman, Antonio French:

And here’s a report from NBC St. Louis:

This aggression toward the community they are supposed to be protecting is yet another demonstration of the terrible results of Department of Homeland Security handing out grant money like candy to provide military-grade equipment and riot gear to local police forces all over the country.

Meanwhile, the U.S. media seems hellbent on driving the narrative that this story isn’t about the cold-blooded street execution of an unarmed child — or about the wider problem of police aggression and occupation of American black populations, or about legitimate resistance to unfair and violent practices. Rather, they’re obsessed with the idea that there might be “looting” happening or that there is a “riot.”

Screen Shot 2014-08-11 at 12.10.30 AM

Here’s the reality of the situation: Unarmed Black American kids keep getting shot to death for no reason on the false assumption they’re packing, and there’s rarely any justice. Meanwhile, unhinged adult White American men with avowedly anti-government views can walk around unchallenged in public places with assault rifles, telling you all about their “rights” and how important those are.

Is this country ever going to stop perpetrating and ignoring outrageous daily violence against and extrajudicial executions of Black Americans?

And I don’t think the media gets to decide who has the right to decide who has the right to resist (or how) when police keep targeting and fatally misjudging a population and then refuse to uphold the First Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Voter fraud belief is sore-loserism

  By

Out of more than 1 billion ballots cast since 2000, researcher Justin Levitt has found that there were no more than 31 credible instances of voter impersonation in the United States.

Levitt argues that those Americans who believe (incorrectly) that there is a widespread problem of elections being “stolen” via such frauds will continue to remain convinced of that as long as their preferred candidates continue to lose, regardless of voter ID laws. This seem plausible given that an existing study found that the relative prevalence of the belief in widespread fraud remains undiminished, even when strict voter ID laws are implemented. In other words, it has a lot more to do with repeatedly losing with unelectable candidates than elections being “stolen” from those candidates. Surprise, surprise.

Worse, thousands of voters (probably overwhelmingly legitimate voters) have already been turned away in 4 states for not having IDs that comply with the law, despite what is essentially the non-existence of the problem. Meanwhile, the laws can’t even stop most of the purported forms of fraud, even as they prevent (or make more difficult) legitimate voting…

Election fraud happens. But ID laws are not aimed at the fraud you’ll actually hear about. Most current ID laws aren’t designed to stop fraud with absentee ballots (indeed, laws requiring ID at the polls push more people into the absentee system, where there are plenty of real dangers). Or vote buying. Or coercion. Or fake registration forms. Or voting from the wrong address. Or ballot box stuffing by officials in on the scam. In the 243-page document that Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel filed on Monday with evidence of allegedly illegal votes in the Mississippi Republican primary, there were no allegations of the kind of fraud that ID can stop.

Instead, requirements to show ID at the polls are designed for pretty much one thing: people showing up at the polls pretending to be somebody else in order to each cast one incremental fake ballot. This is a slow, clunky way to steal an election. Which is why it rarely happens.

 
And I don’t think that’s an argument for making other voting methods harder or for discouraging voter registration efforts. But it’s certainly an argument against making in-person voting harder and more expensive via voter ID laws that try to “solve” a problem that doesn’t exist.

Big Business is now creating chronic U.S. underemployment

  By

One of the perennial problems in accurately measuring the U.S. labor market is how to handle “underemployment” or involuntary part-time employment by people who want to be working full time. The official Bureau of Labor Statistics defines this category as follows:

Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

 
Those people, whether working 30 hours a week or 10 hours a week, even at or near minimum wage, are ineligible for unemployment insurance benefits or virtually any other program that would help someone who was completely jobless. Any paying work at all, even when it’s not enough to make ends meet, usually kicks people out of eligibility for such programs.

More than five years after the peak of the 2007 U.S. recession, many Americans find themselves in this category of being “employed part time for economic reasons.” The U6 measure of unemployment, which factors these people into the official rate, stood at 12.1% in June 2014 — just shy of being double the official unemployment rate. Almost 7 in 10 part-time workers right now would like to work full-time.

The decision to leave underemployed people out of the official unemployment figures, as I’ve been arguing for five years, has probably been a major factor in not recognizing the severity of many of the emerging structural problems in the part-time work arena that ripple back into the wider consumer economy negatively. Instead, we were busy congratulating ourselves for two decades on supposedly having much “lower” unemployment than Western European economies.

Those economies, which generally use comprehensive definitions of unemployment much closer to our U6 metric, were rarely substantially higher than our U6 rate of unemployed plus involuntarily underemployed persons. Moreover, their “unemployed” people were, in fact, often working part-time (legally or illegally) at rates the same as or higher than our labor force was. So their unemployed/underemployed populations were in far less dire straits than ours during the same period, even without getting into the differences in social safety nets.

Let’s examine one of the big emerging problems that such measurement definitions helped obscure: Involuntary part-time employment for corporate profit reasons, rather than genuine economic reasons.

Often, at least in the past, the “economic reasons” for the lack of full hours came in the form of hours cutbacks (in place of mass layoffs) or general economic belt-tightening, during economic contractions/slowdowns/recessions, by those in positions to be hiring. That’s especially true at the small-to-medium business level.

But a far more insidious and damaging trend has exploded on to the scene from the Big Business end of the spectrum, as huge American corporations not only decline to hire more and more of their hourly wage workforce for full workweeks but then demand these part-time workers be “on-call,” without compensation, to work at virtually any hour, day or night, seven days a week. The schedule changes from week to week and from day to day, at the discretion of the corporate managers.

Almost half of all part-time workers, according to the Times, now have one week or less of advanced notice on their schedule. Among 26-32 year olds working part time, that figure is 47%. Beyond young workers, this problem disproportionately affects women and non-white workers.

In an ongoing series of articles from the New York Times examining the prevalence and consequences of this pernicious staffing practice, we can read example after example of people being forced not only to work part-time but to be available full-time without pay to work the paid hours, which prevents workers from taking second jobs to supplement their hours or finding a better/full-time job or completing their education. Here is one testimonial:

“You had to be available every minute of every day, knowing you would be scheduled for no more than 29 hours per week and knowing there would be no normalcy to your schedule,” he wrote. “I told the person I would like to be scheduled for the same days every week so I could try to get another job to try to make ends meet. She immediately said, ‘Well, that will end our conversation right here. You have to be available every day for us.’

“I asked, ‘Even though I’m trying to get another job?’ ‘Yes.’ Then she just stared at me and asked me to leave. What kind of company does this? What kind of company will not even let you get another job?”

  Read more

Meanwhile in Libya…

  By

libya-flag

The gains by ISIS in Iraq may be hogging the headlines, but let’s not forget about the situation in Libya. When we last left the story, in May, General Khalifa Hifter was attempting a second coup (again unsuccessfully) and rallying the anti-Islamist militias and secular-leaning non-loyal troops and aircraft to his side in Benghazi, the major eastern city. Benghazi is an ideal recruiting ground since many of the best organized militias started there at the beginning of the Arab Spring uprising against Gaddafi. He was having less success in the capital, Tripoli, in the West.

Since then, the internal fighting has continued to widen between the major blocs. Hifter was initially making more headway in his attacks on the Islamist militias in Benghazi and was rallying more forces to his cause. But loosely affiliated western forces under the Zintan Brigade had already held the main airport in Tripoli. Islamist militias struck back at the airport this weekend causing flight disruptions as well as consternation among outsiders (i.e. Westerners), who seem to vaguely prefer Zintan control of the facilities and runways — or perhaps just stability in who is controlling them.

There was also a national general election near the end of June, which although partially disputed and less than ideal is on track to be resolved relatively smoothly in the next couple weeks. The anti-Islamist bloc dominated the results this time, unlike last election, which means the side most sympathetic to Hifter’s position is expected to gain power, while the backers of the Islamist militia will be relegated to a minority. Could that position General Hifter for a “democratic”-coated rise to power in Libya?
Read more

“…the several States and with the Indian Tribes…”

  By

The title above is a quotation from one the few passages of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 making any references whatsoever to the multitude of indigenous nations on the North American continent at the time. That sort of vague afterthought attitude probably encapsulates well the attitude of most of the Founding Fathers and Constitutional Framers, despite the hundreds of distinct native communities in just the northeast woodlands and southeast woodlands regions alone (i.e. the original U.S.).

The early national leaders and writers of those key documents were generally coastal elites without much direct contact with the American Indian nations that had already been cleared by war, disease, and expulsion from those areas. The backcountry mountain settlers, who had helped precipitate much of the events that spiraled into Revolution by repeatedly trying to cross the Appalachian Mountain “line in the sand” drawn by the British Crown, were neither represented in the circles that established the country nor under their authority most of the time. They generally just wandered off to attack indigenous communities when they felt like it — and then waited either for retroactive approval by the coast or substantial military reinforcements from the coast, if things got out of control. Even the rare treaties made in good faith by colonial and U.S. coastal governments were generally violated by factions who had not been involved in the negotiation process or did not consider themselves subject to those powers anyway. But the U.S. government rarely ever gave more than a slap on the wrist to the offenders.

In general, the country and its predecessor colonies had a very inconsistent and not systematically planned relationship with the American Indian nations — apart from the consistency of overall negativity and genocidal behaviors, and in particular of pushing them westward and into generally ever-smaller areas. That last pattern is tracked in the Lower 48, from the 1783 Treaty of Paris to 1892 and then 2010, in the eHistory video below:

This of course does not really get into the situations in Alaska or in Hawaii. It’s also really important to remember that the semi-systematic thoughtlessness toward and theft from Indian Country by the U.S. government is not some 18th century relic, but continues to present, as we discussed in a recent episode of the radio show.

A more rapid animated gif version of the video is below:
Read more