[tjstankus]

I think your argument is focused too far along the timeline. Yes, the Republican majority was elected. What's in dispute is the legitimacy of how they came to be elected, given the proven racist bias of how districts came to be. Different (fairer) districting might not change the Republican majority status, but it probably wouldn't be so lopsided. (BTW: Asheville is almost completely blue, too.)

[fortythirteen]

Yup, I forgot about Asheville.

> proven racist bias

That goes both ways (Charlotte, Greensboro and Fayetteville). I really don't think the Democrats are going to be happy with the outcome of a rebalancing, because the Republicans will still have a huge legislative majority, maybe even more so.

[hyperpape]

How do you get to a huge legislative majority from the voting pattern, except via unrepresentative districts?

[fortythirteen]

When you divide the state up geographically instead of by population, it's way red (as is with every state in the union). While the current gerrymandering is ridiculous, I don't think it has much of an effect on the overall outcome.

[hyperpape]

"When you divide the state up geographically instead of by population, it's way red (as is with every state in the union)."

So don't do that. Land doesn't vote, people do. If you give every 600k people a congressional district, the state is slightly more red than blue.

[fortythirteen]

Any country with our agricultural exports and requirements that decides to do that will collapse upon itself.

When every policy decision is decided by the needs of the residents of a few, highly populous cities, with no thought to the different needs of those living in rural areas, being a farmer, miner, logger, etc. becomes completely disincentivized.

When all those people in those cities (and the rest of the country) require incentivized agriculture to supply their basic survival needs, the system falls apart. The whole reason we have a Senate is so people in states that produce our agricultural products aren't disenfranchised.

[hyperpape]

Leave aside the argument that people outside of agricultural states will not understand that the billions of dollars worth of agriculture are valuable, which seems false.

Even so, California is our largest agricultural producer, and it's disenfranchised by the Senate. Other major producers include some small states like Nebraska, but also other large states like Texas, Illinois and North Carolina.

[throwawayjava]

> Any country with our agricultural exports and requirements that decides to do that will collapse upon itself... incentivized agriculture to supply their basic survival needs

Ugh.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine. The agricultural industry does not exist in isolation, so its most immediate practitioners do not deserve a minority-rule electoral power.

Farmers use Wall St money to fund the planting of seeds geo-engineered by folks living in cities, harvest the resulting crops using tractors designed/built by folks living in cities, then ship the product on freight designed/built by folks living in cities. Throughout the whole process, farmers depend upon a whole set of energy informatics products (from weather prediction to oil discovery) made possible by a tour de force of scientific and engineering talent designed/built by folks living in/around cities.

Farmers are not rugged individualists, and an individual farmer is no more "critical to the survival" of city folk than a Deere software engineer or an Exxon scientist is "critical to the survival" of the modern farmer. And yet, you don't see those folks asking for a non-representative democracy...

The myth of the rugged farmer as the pillar holding modern society is just that -- a BS mythology.

And all of this before even considering that city folk help pay for all the public infrastructure that makes farming possible in the first place -- everything form rural roads and interstates they never directly use to subsidized crop insurance they don't immediately benefit from to concessions in international treaties that directly harm their industry in return for concessions that boost our agricultural industry and thereby contribute to our own food security.

Going back to the article, farmers don't deserve to be the dictators of a minority-ruled psuedo-democracy because farmers are just one more cog in a huge machine, a machine that farmers depend on to support their own way of life and, in many cases, even survival.

> When every policy decision is decided by the needs of the residents of a few, highly populous cities, with no thought to the different needs of those living in rural areas, being a farmer, miner, logger, etc. becomes completely disincentivized.

There are lots of people in cities who depend on and know a lot about the agricultural industry. Some of them grew up on farms and went on to work in knowledge industries supporting farming. Many of these city folks know more about farming/logging/mining than even the most skilled farmer/logger/miner. And many have more at stake in the success of America's agricultural industry than the folks actually working the land.

Presuming that someone who doesn't work the land can't know the needs of the agricultural/mining/logging industry is a somewhat conceited viewpoint.

[FireBeyond]

While I get some of the merits of this method in the beginning, it really does subvert democracy.

"Los Angeles and New York get less proportional representation, just because many people choose to live there."

"What about the people of rural South Dakota, don't they get a vote?"

Absolutely they do.

Geographic systems are based on a flawed predicate. Democracy should be based on "1 person, 1 vote", not "1 square mile/foot, 1 vote".