Have you seen this? This is unreal. Bottom line, the Republican, Pat McCrory lost his reelection bid, but he's now trying steal the election by throwing it to the state legislature. You have to read this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/...to_steal_the_north_carolina_governorship.html If this isn't an Article IV, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government," violation, then I don't know what is.
Man this country elections are reminding me more and more on how politics and elections work in Mexico.
He's desperate. The state legislature isn't exactly stoked about his suggestion. Whether that's because they have scruples, or because they got along poorly with McCrory, or some combination of the two, I have no idea.
I would suspect that they've seen the backlash from business groups over HB2 and would rather lay low, cut their losses with McCrory, move on, and try to retake the governor in four years, rather than try some shenanigans on his behalf that puts them back in the spotlight when a lot of them are gonna be up for reelection in two years.
Fair enough, but at the same time, I'm sure that they didn't expect things to go down the way they did with HB2.
If there's enough of a shift in partisan sentiments, multiple districts that were engineered to have safe (but not too big) majorities can all become unsafe at the same time. And even with a Trump-nominated judge filling the Supreme Court vacancy, the possibility of judicial actions against gerrymandering in state legislatures can't be ruled out. Relying on rule manipulation to overcome unpopularity can work in for a party the short term, but can also be dangerous in the long term - especially if the manipulations become a source of unpopularity in their own right. The Republicans as a whole might face that dilemma in another decade or so, if they decide that vote suppression, gerrymandering, etc. are an adequate response to unfavorable demographic currents.
It's gonna be over soon. McCrory is now down almost 10,000 and he's going to get a face saving gesture. We're going to have legislative elections next year because of racially Gerrymandered districts. The judges considered waiting till 2018 but decided to have the elections next year. The GOPs are going to appeal to the USSC. To quote myself from earlier, gee, I wonder how Justice Cruz will vote.
How bad is the NC gerrymander? In 2012, the Dems got more votes for the legislature, but the GOPs had veto proof majorities. Now, it's 60% here, not 2/3, but still. I'm not a fundamentalist that if one party gets 51% of the overall vote, then dammit, they must have 51% of a legislative body. I don't think it's a crisis for democracy that in 2012, the Dems got more votes for US House and the NC legislature and was in the minority in all 3 bodies. But it's, if not a crisis, disturbingly close to one, if a party can get a majority of votes and not even be near a majority, if the majority party's 2 or 3 most moderate/most vulnerable members don't matter.
In some important ways, that comparison is unfair - to Mexico. After all, Mexico has a politically independent institution to oversee national elections (the IFE). That puts them way ahead of the US, where election oversight is partisan. In this country, the electoral game's referees are often members of one of the competing teams.
So were the ones at IFE. (it is now called INE) But I do get your point, our states should set up IFE like departments, I would vote for that.
Actually, my sense is that since the mid-1990s, the IFE/INE (thanks for correcting the outdated name) has been pretty nonpartisan and independent in practice. The contrast really came to the fore in 2000, when Mexico had a fully democratic presidential election to end PRI rule, and the USA had Katharine Harris.
McCrory has conceded: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...or-pat-mccrory-concedes-to-roy-cooper/509603/ Good.
The only reason the democrat one is that all the other judge races are partisan, and the Republicans were listed first. For the top court, Mike Morgan, by lot, was listed first on the ballot. The Independent did a study and found that in county after county, Morgan's vote reflected the lower court GOP vote. This was all Republcian shenanigans to begin with. It's funny that they were hoisted in their own petard. http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/how-did-mike-morgan-win/Content?oid=5090915
The case hinges on a really interesting system that evaluates the severity of partisan gerrymandering called the wasted vote theory and, associated with that, the efficiency gap. If you haven't read about it, I'd recommend checking it out, because there's a good chance it becomes a judicial standard of evaluation in the future. IIRC the guy who came up with the system is Nick Stephanopolous at the University of Chicago Law School.