This is a Big, Big Deal-Josh Marshall Talking Points Memo

[BlueStreak]

31. There is a little silver lining here (admittedly a stretch)

There are two sides to the Gerrymandering coin.

First let's start with an understanding of how the game in played. The utopian goal of the Gerrymanderer would be to create one district that is virtually 100% Democratic, and then have all the other districts favor Republicans 55 to 45% (or whatever ratio will work.)

In reality you can never create a 99% Democratic district. Alan Grayson won in one of those heavily Gerrymandered districts, and his margin was about 62-38. The practical consequence of an aggressive Gerrymandering effort is that the Republicans end up shaving off some of the safety factor in "safe GOP districts". This would not be true if the goal of the Gerrymandering was to simply make Democratic and Republicans seats safer without changing the overall allocation of seats. But that is not the goal. The goal is to carve out more Republican-leaning districts, and therefore these are going to have a much smaller safety factor than would naturally happen.

So, although we must take the election rigging very seriously, and fight it every possible way, we also have an opportunity to make the GOP pay a dear price for their election tampering. Many of these new "Republican" districts might have a natural bias of 55-45 for the GOP. That is a margin we can overcome if we have real leadership and don't concede everything to Republicans. And this is particularly true because the demographics continue to change in our favor even though the districts stay put for a decade or so.