Gerrymandering: Republicans could already win the 2022 elections
Others aren’t so sure. The Cook Political Report has predicted that the republicans will win 2.5 seats from the redistribution.
Even before a boost from redistribution, Republicans don’t have far to take the house.
The GOP started with the advantage. It controls more state legislatures and displaces more safe seats from those states.
Republicans control the reallocation process in states that oversee 179 seats in the House of Representatives. Democrats control the process in states that only oversee 75 seats.
The rest are either overseen by divided governments or bipartisan or bipartisan commissions, or they have a single member of Congress.
North Carolina is an example. CNN’s John Avlon looked specifically at North Carolina, a state that is essentially even in party registration between Republicans and Democrats. The state legislature had given the Republicans a seat advantage of 10-4 in the new congressional tickets, he said on “New Day”.
Advantage in Texas. It’s a similar story in Texas, where competitive seats were replaced with safe seats, and one seat was tipped towards Republicans.
There will be legal battles over these various cards, but after the census has been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the courts have less time to work.
Read the tea leaves. More Democrats are retiring so far this cycle, according to CNN’s Ethan Cohen, who is tracking these things. He writes: At this point in the 2020 cycle (November 16, 2019), 28 members of the House of Representatives (20 R, 8 D) were well on their way to leaving the Chamber at the end of their term of office, including 6 members (3 R, 3 D) who are for run for higher offices.
What happened in a month? The seats themselves are unchanged and Republicans are defending many more of them. But the landscape feels very different than it did a few months ago, before the Republicans took a surprise victory in the race for governor of Virginia. You still have hurdles and some flawed candidates, as Pathe writes.
The GOP is more excited about its chances of racing in states like New Hampshire and Colorado.
From the archives: Republicans in Vermont. Look at this report the last time a Republican represented Vermont in the Senate. The year was 2001 – not that long ago, really. The Republican was Senator Jim Jeffords.
Education then and now. I was struck by Jeffords’ frustration with an increasingly conservative GOP. That resonates today.
What I found more interesting was his anger over the cut in education funding. Education, as we learned after the Virginia governor’s race, will be the number one issue for Republicans through 2022. The question will be whether parents want more money for schools or more individual say in their children’s experiences.
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