Why Liberals Lose

[wickerwoman]

54. Actually liberals win and have been for a while.

The problem is that the system is gerrymandered by the state legislatures so that even when we get the majority, we don't get the majority.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/11/07/1159631/americans-voted-for-a-democratic-house-gerrymandering-the-supreme-court-gave-them-speaker-boehner/?mobile=nc

"There is a simple explanation for how this happened: Republicans won several key state legislatures and governors’ mansions in the election cycle before redistricting, and they gerrymandered those states within an inch of their lives. President Obama won Pennsylvania by more than 5 points, but Democrats carried only 5 of the state’s 18 congressional seats.

Similar stories played out elsewhere. Obama won Virginia, and Democrats took 3 of 11 House seats. Obama won Ohio, but Democrats carried only 4 of 16 seats in Ohio’s House delegation."

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/02/11968/wisconsins-shameful-gerrymander-2012

"As neuroscientist Sam Wang explained in Sunday's New York Times, [in Wisconsin] "Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin. This is only the second such reversal since World War II."

Wisconsin was one of five states where the party that won more than half of the votes for Congress got fewer than half of the seats. Largely because of redistricting, Republicans in Wisconsin received just 49 percent of the 2.9 million votes cast in the state's congressional races, but won five out of eight seats, or 62.5 percent. And that redistricting process was carried out with a nearly unprecedented level of secrecy and obfuscation."

Some condescending campaign to get "stupid, short-attention span" people out to vote isn't going to work. People get what's going on. The problem is that their vote actually doesn't count.