18 January, 2017

Democrats: Left in the Lurch - NBC News

Democrats: Left in the Lurch - NBC News:

But Democrats a have a deeper, structural problem beyond gerrymandering. Democrats lost the House in 2010 before Republicans had redrawn the maps.
The problem is quirky but its effects are profound: Electorally speaking, Democrats live in the wrong places.
America’s electoral system rewards the party whose voters are more spread out across the map and, for now, that means the GOP. Democrats are densely packed in major cities where they waste millions of votes winning inefficiently huge margins that can’t be effectively redistributed no matter which party is drawing the congressional districts.
In Pennsylvania, for example, Republicans control 13 of the state’s 18 congressional districts even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state by close to 1 million voters. Republican gerrymandering is responsible for much of that mismatch. But GOP mapmakers were aided by the fact that Democrats tend to be inefficiently concentrated in the state’s two major cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.


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