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Health & Fitness

Gerrymandering, the Primary Cause of Congressional Gridlock, May Soon Infect the Electoral College and Decide Who Becomes President

Gerrymandered districts are the primary cause of gridlock in Congress and may soon spread to the Electoral College and decide Presidential elections.

I am not a big fan of gerrymandering, the manipulation of electoral districts to perputate partisan advantage in elections. After the 2010 census I lobbied hard to un-gerrymander the 150th and 151st legislative districts in Greenwich with mixed success; the 150th became more competitive and the 151st less competitive in terms of party registrations. Truth be told, the more balanced 150th was a biproduct of the Republican plan to stack 151 with more registered Republicans to solidify its registration advantage in a district that came within 132 votes of being lost to a Democrat in the 2006 election for the first time since 1912.

The gridlock in the U.S. Congress can be traced to a massive effort to gerrymander congressional districts after the 2010 election. 2010 marked the rise of the Tea Party, which dominated Republican primaries that season in races for the U.S. Congress and gubernatorial and legislative races in many states. We now know that many of these races were well-funded by a few donors fronting phony "grass roots" organizations, known as "AstroTurf", who centralized the take over of state governments before the 2010 census. They were successful in electing many new Republican Congressmen, Governors and State Legislators, which set the stage for the Great Gerrymander of 2012, according to the NY Times.

The 2012 election was in many ways a substantial Democratic victory. President Obama was re-elected in an Electoral College landslide and the Democrats nearly ran the board on closely contested Senatorial races and retained nominal control of the Senate. However, in the races for the House of Representatives the Republicans retained control by 33 seats despite a 1.5 million advantage nationwide of Democratic candidates, largely because of the success of their strategy of seizing control of redistricting by taking over statehouses, including blue states like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, in the 2010 election and then gerrymander congressional districts to insulate otherwise vulnerable incumbents, as boasted in the Republican State Leadership Committee's report.The technique is simple, you take advantage of the higher concentration of minorities and other Democratic constituents in urban and suburban areas by consolidating them in a single district surrounded by majority Republican districts. Another technique is to spread your opponent's registered voters among several districts and dilute the vote. Sophisticated redistricting computer programs have greatly assisted gerrymanders to achieve the preferred electoral results. 

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Comparing the result of statewide results in the Presidential race with the congressional races in key states like Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania,Wisconsin and Michigan demonstrates the effectiveness of gerrymandering; although all these states except North Carolina (lost by 2 %) were won by the President, the congressional races provided Speaker Boehner with his majority, as Mother Jones reports.

The striking success of congressional gerrymandering has emboldened some Republicans to advocate that the electoral college votes in these blue states be allocated by the gerrymandered congressional district rather than statewide. Of course, the red states would remain winner-take-all electors. If this plan were in effect in 2012 Mitt Romney would have been elected President by an electoral vote of 277 to 261 if all states were changed, or 270 t0 268 if only the six largest states listed above were to change, as the NY Times reported, despite Romney having lost the popular vote nationwide by nearly five million votes. These efforts to gerrymander the electoral college have already started in some states and may change the way we elect our President. 

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