House/POTUS Good News (In a Sense)

A reply to my least favorite Dorf on Law contributor annoyed me, but also flagged something useful. Now, it is unclear how helpful it is to his overall sentiments, which multiple replies suggest are somewhat scattered.  Still useful.  So, maybe I owe the person thanks.  Not too much. No one reads this anyway.

My reply also slipped up and made a silly mistake but it didn't really hurt my case in the long run.  Just a nod that online comments (and more edited fare!) will slip up sometimes.  Take the whole content, not just slip ups.  A last bit --  Michael Dorf (his wife recently nicely thanked me for supporting her work in another entry) argued the reference to gerrymandering was specific.  Comments do at times latch on to something without addressing the specific argument.  But, comments can be addressed as is too. 

Partisan gerrymandering has been a subject at many blogs and overall I think it a bad thing. How does it fall?  Well, given Republicans now control state legislatures as a whole, you would think it would benefit them as a whole at the moment.  Likewise, conservatives on the Supreme Court oppose usage of constitutional arguments against it or use a specific dubious restrictive usage of "state legislature" (see the post) to restrict the power of the people to respond. "Both sides do it" takes you just so far.

I still am not really sure how much net nation-wide partisan gerrymandering is a problem. To get to the point, per the NYT: Democrats received 76,797,776 votes (50.7%) and Republicans received 72,582,488 votes (47.9%). There are four races not decided yet.  Dems by proportion would get 220.5 seats there. They have 222. Republicans would get 208. They now have 209. (again NYT numbers)

(Wikipedia tells me Republicans received 44.8% of the vote in 2018. That means they improved by 3% which is currently the difference between the parties too. That to me comes off as a small number that is quite open to fluctuation.)

Now, why those votes split that way very well can be explained in various ways. It is likely fairly complicated.  So, e.g., in specific states that partisan gerrymandering might have helped one side. The issue there is to determine nation-wise how that balances out.  That would require a complete parsing of the numbers. 

Both parties gerrymander; one party these days seems more open to voting rights legislation to address that and other issues.  But, I don't know.  And, in specific cases, maybe voting id laws and so forth matter.  If they don't, well, why do Republicans support them so much?  If we want to be all cynical (realistic), these things would be motivated in some fashion by pragmatic hard results. 

Anyway, Biden received 51.3% vote. So, he has a slight plus from the House vote, though would appropriately be leader if we had a parliamentary system.  Again, this is all interesting, and somewhat reassuring. Biden won around seven million more popular votes than Trump.  Merely by percentage, his vote total would be in the 270s of the electoral vote.  Is it a "landslide" when you are within a poll margin of error of winning the popular vote?  Seven million is a lot.  It is less when it is a fraction of 155M.  Still, rounding off, we are talking a four percent swing.   

Sounds less than "seven million" in a way.  Anyway, the problem as pointed out by Paul Campos at LGM (see blog roll) is that in the states necessary to avoid an electoral tie (Pennsylvania and Michigan not enough), the popular votes are in the tens of thousands.  Too close, if far enough to match the vast majority (until this century) of times where the winner also got the popular vote.  Again, the recent trend is troubling, and constitutional requirements can make it even more of a problem in upcoming years as population shifts might really unbalance things.

How about the Senate?  I will rest on the other two, especially since the whole Senate isn't elected at once. The balance overall from past information is less likely to be satisfying.  Maybe, not as bad as it might seem, but then the two senator rule inherently is a lot more problematic than what amounts to rounding errors that can be fixed to a large extent by expanding seats. The House, at least, even with problems of small states like Wyoming and existing gerrymandering, does seem again somewhat reassuring.

All the Republican popular votes still to me is rather troubling.