NC GOPs are taking another run at rigging the boards of elections. "The new legislation would, in odd-numbered years, make the chair a board member who is from “the political party with the highest number of registered affiliates,” which are the Democrats in North Carolina. In even years, when statewide elections are held, the chair would be a board member who is from “political party with the second highest number of registered affiliates,” i.e. the GOP, under the legislation."
That doublespeak reminds me of the justification Sunil Gulati used when he was the #2 man in the league and the league as a whole had pretty much all the say in who got new players coming into the league as allocations. Both DC and Columbus wanted Jamaican international Andy Williams, and there "was a difference of 15 minutes" in the timing of the faxes (remember them?) and since they had to decide who got the player, Gulati's reasoning was he was assigned "to the club that is not the current MLS Champion." But with that "difference of 15 minutes," we never found out who actually was first. My own conspiracy theory was that if Columbus got their fax in first, that would have been all the reasoning they needed--sorry DC, someone else beat you to the punch! But that isn't what they said...
Independent is not a party otherwise they would be up there, but I can see how that rule could be gamed. Democrats can have a campaign to register a bunch of their members as socialists or greens. Reps could do the same with Libertarians.
Republicans refuse to hear a Supreme Court nomination 7 months in advance of an election, because the people need to speak. In Wisconsin, when they do speak and it's in favor of Democrats, Republicans convene a special lame-duck session to contravene the will of the people. Independents say, "See, both sides are the same." That is the state of American democracy, in the late 2010s.
On a superficial level, sure, that makes sense...the Dems could organize to get enough of their members to register as Greens to become the #2 party. That'd be crazy hard to pull off IRL.
Why not get a smaller number of Democrats to register as Republicans, making Republicans #1 and Democrats #2? The #2 party has control during election years, right?
BTW i am hearing that the GOP Senate in Wisconsin passed the vote to limit the powers of the Democratic Governor and AG, it goes to the house (majority GOP) and then the current governor will sign it.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/12/wisconsin-power-grab-gop-urban-vs-rural-voters.html Scary article. I need to tag @soccernutter because it’s about Wisconsin. The GOPers justify their anti democratic actions two ways. First, Walker only lost because of voters in Madison and Milwaukee. Second, “all corners” of Wisconsin deserve a strong legislative branch. If this is their mentality, what, exactly are people in Milwaukee and Madison supposed to do? Don’t tell them to vote; their guy won, and Dems easily outpolled the GOPs in the legislature. They won but it doesn’t matter.
Scary a.f. The idea that you could remove the state’s major population centers and still have an acceptably democratic result is a reasoning that gets to the heart of the matter. It’s not just that Democrats are poised to undo gains made under Walker’s administration, but that Democrats themselves are illegitimate because of who they represent. Vos isn’t saying that Republicans should do better in Madison and Milwaukee, he’s saying that the state’s major cities shouldn’t count. And if they do count, says Fitzgerald, they don’t count the same way. They are the wrong voters, and the Democrats they elect have no right to roll back a Republican administration backed by the right ones. Their understanding of who counts, and who ought to count, is tied to an urban and rural divide that encompasses divisions along race, economic class, education, and ideology. In The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness and the Rise of Scott Walker, Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, shows how the state’s politics have been shaped by a rural sense of “distributive injustice—a sense that rural folks don’t get their fair share.” “(Their) sense of identity as people from a place that was disadvantaged economically coexisted with the perception that wherever their hard-earned money was going, it was not coming to them. It seemed instead to be going, in part, to bloated government programs and overpaid and underworked public employees.” It’s impossible to disentangle these views from racist attitudes and racial assumptions embedded in the ideologies and identities that shape white Americans everywhere. But that’s particularly true of Wisconsin, which is “extremely racially segregated” with just 29 percent of its black population residing outside of Milwaukee and Madison. Even these two cities are highly segregated—the Milwaukee metro area is among the racially segregated in the country. For Cramer, “antiurban resentment is not simply resentment against people of color,” but it’s not unrelated. “Since the cities, particularly Madison, are perceived as liberal and vote Democratic in elections, people who harbor racial resentment may indeed be equating city people with racial liberalism. Now as in the past, racial animosity is directed toward groups of whites that help minorities, such as government employees and academics.” TBH, 28% is higher than I would've guessed.
People in Milwaukee and Mad I think that's city limits only. FWIW: 24% of AAs in WI live outside of Milwaukee and Dane counties. Add Racine and Kenosha counties and that drops to 14%. If you take the counties along the IL border from Madison to the lake and then run along the lake up to Green Bay...that's 96%.
March on the Statehouse, draw some blood. A few beaten republican reps laying in the street outside the capitol will send a strong signal of their displeasure with this. Make the Republicans scared.
There are a few things to consider here when looking at this power grab. The first is that Milwaukee had a true socialist as mayor for quiet a while, and provided quite a bit of public assistance to the poor (which in this case means Black) community. While this was good on one hand, there was also a lack of emphasis to by the mayor/city council to engourage the poor Black community getting the assistance to improve their lives beyond what they knew was comfortable - this comes from people I have spoke with who lived here in Milwaukee at the time. In this context, there was a self-segregation by the Black community to some degree, but at the same time, there were actual racist actions taken by the banks which made it more difficult for Blacks to get home loans (I forget the actual numbers, but Blacks making $100,000 were as likely to get rejected as Whites making half that much, or possibly even less). So what ended up happening, at least in Milwaukee, was the de facto segregation (for those reasons and others, such a racist policing policies). Additionally, one of the issues that I think the Republicans are worried about, why they did this power grab, is that the demographics are changing, and they are changing in favor of the democrats. What I have seen here in Milwaukee is a lot of POC moving out of Milwaukee the city into the suburbs, and I have quite a bit of anecdotal evidence of that as well. One of the more interesting things is that my congressional rep opponent got 36% of the vote, and he had not had that happen in about 15 or 20 years, and when that happened previously, it was by someone who had run against him the previous election cycle. Regarding Madison, it is really a purple area, and would be red without the university. There might be good lip service, but there is a lot of the ignorance which even liberals have regarding POC. Still, it is reliability dem in voting, but if push came to shove, the area which switch. As far as the regions between Milwaukee and the Illinois border, that is a more confusing area. On one hand, it is more affordable, both relative to Milwaukee as well as Chicago. So there are a number of POC moving there, but the area is also somewhat of an exburb for Chicago. Additionally, it is an area which is undergoing some significant growth (Uline, a major box manufacturer) just build it's new corporate hq there, as well as the infamous FoxConn facility, yet it is also a dem strong hold. I was just talking about this last night as well, and what pisses me off is not that the Reps did this, but that their efforts are so disrespectful, and the early voter issue could be overturned as well.
Excellent summary. Only things I’d add: -a lot of the demographic changes re: POC are growing Hispanic populations. Formerly, new immigrants in the region settled initially in Chicago. Now enough people have settled in satellite areas so we see more of an influx into Milwaukee, Kenosha, Racine in WI...Waukegan in IL...places like in Indiana like Lake county, Plymouth, Elkhart, etc. -Politically, it’s still sorta complicated in SW Wisconsin. That area has historically been very blue, now still purple. -the areas near Minneapolis are about to get more interesting due to urbanization.
This is the exact same logic as saying, "Wisconsin would be Republican if not for the cities." The university is immense. Also, Paul Soglin, who gave Fidel Castro a key to the city of Madison, won re-election with over 70% of the vote. I'd hardly call that purple.
Progressives can't help themselves when it comes to cozying up with commies. Bad ones, good ones, they just gotta do it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/nyregion/redistricting-new-jersey-democrats-republicans.html Dems in New Jersey are busting norms in order to enshrine gerrymandering into the state constitution. " Typically, a proposed constitutional amendment requires a three-fifths majority in the state legislature before it can get on the ballot. But since no Republican supports the redistricting plan, it seems unlikely that it would ever succeed in either chamber in Trenton. Instead, Democratic leaders are digging into the state’s laws and using a provision allowing an amendment that passes the state legislature with a simple majority in two consecutive calendar years to be placed on the ballot. Democrats have scheduled a vote on the redistricting plan for Monday, the final day the legislature is to meet this year. Then they are likely to bring it up again in early January, satisfying the two-year requirement in less than a month. Should the measure pass in both instances, the proposal could be put on the ballot in November." Payback is a bitch. In all seriousness, your view on whether or not this is a good thing is probably dependent on whether you believe the current USSC will defend democracy if only one party is attacking it. I very strongly believe they will not, so I'm in favor of Dems all over the US screwing with GOPs in every way imaginable in order to force the courts to deal with antidemocracy.
Regardless of my views of the USSC, I’m okay with this because in and of itself it doesn’t change policy. It simply puts the proposed change on the ballot as an initiative. Vastly different than the NC/WI lame duck stuff going on. If that NJ stuff is anti-democratic, people should look at what the leg is trying to do to ballot initiatives here in Mizzurah that passed 2:1 last election.