ROLLING STONE: How Republicans Rig the Game-gerrymandering, voter suppression and legislative tricks

[kpete]

How Republicans Rig the Game:
Through gerrymandering, voter suppression and legislative tricks, the GOP has managed to hold on to power while more and more Americans reject their candidates and their ideas
By Tim Dickinson
Rolling Stone Magazine
November 11, 2013 10:35 AM ET
(This article is scheduled for publication in the November 21st issue of the magazine.)



As the nation recovers from the Republican shutdown of government, the question Americans should be asking is not "Why did the GOP do that to us?" but "Why were they even relevant in the first place?" So dramatically have the demographic and electoral tides in this country turned against the Republican Party that, in a representative democracy worthy of the designation, the Grand Old Party should be watching from the sidelines and licking its wounds. Not only did Barack Obama win a second term in an electoral landslide in 2012, but he is also just the fourth president in a century to have won two elections with more than 50 percent of the popular vote. What's more, the party controls 55 seats in the Senate, and Democratic candidates for the House received well over a million more votes than their Republican counterparts in the election last year. And yet, John Boehner still wields the gavel in the House and Republican resistance remains a defining force in the Senate, frustrating Obama's ambitious agenda.

How is this possible? National Republicans have waged an unrelenting campaign to exploit every weakness and anachronism in our electoral system. Through a combination of hyperpartisan redistricting of the House, unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate and racist voter suppression in the states, today's GOP has locked in political power that it could never have secured on a level playing field.

Despite the fact that Republican Congressional candidates received nearly 1.4 million fewer votes than Democratic candidates last November, the Republicans lost only eight seats from their historic 2010 romp, allowing them to preserve a fat 33-seat edge in the House. Unscrupulous Republican gerrymandering following the 2010 census made the difference, according to a statistical analysis conducted by the Princeton Election Consortium. Under historically typical redistricting, House Republicans would now likely be clinging to a reedy five-seat majority. "There's the normal tug of war of American politics," says Sam Wang, founder of the consortium. "Trying to protect one congressman here, or unseat another one there." The Princeton model was built, he says, to detect "whether something got pulled off-kilter on top of that."…
…

… The bad news is that the Republican death grip on our political process could get even worse. The midterm electorate tends to be older and whiter than in presidential years; no one should be shocked to see the GOP expand its advantage in the House in 2014, or even make a run at the Senate. The good news is that the future is more powerful than Republican dirty tricks. The GOP may have postponed its day of reckoning at the hands of a younger, browner, queerer electorate – "They're holding back the tides," says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics – but sooner or later, they're going to get swamped.



MORE:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-republicans-rig-the-game-20131111

[beachbum bob]

1. democrats sit on the sidelines when itcomes to state elections

its nobody fault except for democrats and progressives


if you don't like it, get off the rear end and engage otherwise the GOP will keep control at the state level and keep doing what they are doing