[rayiner]

> money, gerrymandering

Let’s take these two separately. As to money: the evidence shows money isn’t buying results. Wall Street and Silicon Valley strongly supported Clinton in 2016. She outspent Donald Trump by 70%: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/09/trump-and-cl... ($340m to $581m). But Clinton lost.

Within the Republican Party, billionaires billionaires wanted someone other than Trump: https://fortune.com/2024/02/26/ken-griffin-koch-brothers-rep.... But he’s going to win the primary.

More generally, the donor money in US politics supports globalization/free trade, and mass immigration (for cheap labor). The money is losing that battle not just in the US, but in Europe too.

The problem in U.S. politics right now is that Internet-based donor networks have eliminated the ability of large donors (and institutions) to control the candidates.

As to gerrymandering, what makes you think it has any real effect? Do you have a numerical estimatr in your head of what the party split would look like in Congress if there was no gerrymandering?

[spiderfarmer]

I am not only talking about elections. I'm saying money and gerrymandering result in politicians ignoring the policy preferences of a large part of their electorate, especially after they have been elected. If your interests are no longer represented, why bother voting at the next election?

  "Even without being able to gauge the actual political power of wealthy citizens, we can confidently reject the view that extensive political power by the wealthy would be of little practical importance anyway because their policy preferences are much the same as everyone else’s. On many important issues the preferences of the wealthy appear to differ markedly from those of the general public. Thus, if policy makers do weigh citizens’ policy preferences differentially based on their income or wealth, the result will not only significantly violate democratic ideals of political equality, but will also affect the substantive contours of American public policy."

https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-...

  "Still, the researchers hold that gerrymandering harms our democracy. “Elections are a way to hold politicians accountable for what their constituency wants,” said Kosuke Imai, professor of government and of statistics as well as leader of the ALARM Project research team, which uses big data and computational algorithms to study redistricting. “But if many lawmakers are in safe seats, guaranteed to win by a relatively comfortable margin, there’s less incentive to respond to what voters want."

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/07/biggest-probl...

[mindcandy]

> the evidence shows money isn’t buying results.

There are different kinds of results.

There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets my favored politicians into office” which apparently isn’t working out too well.

There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets politicians to give me favors at the expense of their constituents” which unfortunately works very well.

And, there’s “Money being spent on campaigns gets politicians to favor laws that encourage donatory competition between big donators even if it is at great expense to everyone including their constituents” which is also going just swimmingly.

All of this is because politicians know that if they don’t play the asshole here, their competition will and they’ll end up with a large multiple of their campaign budget. And, that will put them out of office. A small difference like 2x might not work so well, but 10x certainly does.

[bhickey]

> As to gerrymandering, what makes you think it has any real effect?

Without gerrymandering the Republican party would have last controlled the House in 2007.

[rayiner]

Republicans won the Congressional Popular vote exactly half the time since then: 2010 (by almost 7 points), 2014 (by almost 6), 2016, and 2022.

As long as we are talking about counter-factual political systems: If the US had a parliamentary system like most democracies, Republicans would have controlled the presidency for 8 of the last 16 years. Given their coalition of disaffected minorities and recent immigrants, Democrats benefit tremendously from the quirks of the US Presidential system, which lends itself to nationwide machine politics.

[tptacek]

One of these complaints, that Republicans benefit from the structural tilt away from densely populated states, is objective. The other, your argument that Democrats reliance on immigrants enables machine politics, is subjective. They aren't directly comparable arguments; the latter argument feels like special pleading.

[rayiner]

I understand the “structural tilt away from densely populated states” to be a different thing than gerrymandering. Whichever party outperforms in sparely populated rural states (historically, it was democrats) has an advantage under the US system.

The point that directly elected executives give rise to different political dynamics is no less objective. Among those political dynamics is the feasibility of blasting a nationwide message that embodies the party in a person low information voters can relate to. That’s been a major enabler of Democratic machine politics aimed at immigrants. And these days, it’s an enabler of MAGA machine politics.

It’s quite different in Westminster style parliamentary statements, where people in different districts vote for different candidates.

[leereeves]

False. Republicans won the popular vote in 2022, 54M to 51M.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Re...

[chabes]

> Without gerrymandering

Emphasis on this part

[rayiner]

Yes, that’s why OP cited the Congressional popular vote. What’s happening is that both parties gerrymander, so it largely cancels out. For example in Maryland, democrats won 65% of the 2022 Congressional popular vote, but hold 87.5% of the House seats. The 450,000 or so excess Republican votes—votes for republicans which didn’t contribute to a Republican house seat—cancels out some excess Democratic votes in Montana or Wyoming.

[chabes]

Indeed, but there are other factors at play, in regards to the influence of gerrymandering on voting in general

[rayiner]

You can speculate about such factors, but the House popular vote tends to line up pretty well with opinion polling of the "generic Congressional ballot"--which is a nationwide measure that isn't affected by gerrymandering. For example, republicans were leading by up to 10 points in polling in 2010 before they ultimately won by 7 points: https://news.gallup.com/poll/142718/gop-unprecedented-lead-g....

[psadauskas]

Take a look at Figure 1 in this study (about halfway down): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Essentially, the likelihood of a particular bill being passed doesn't matter at all on how many average citizens want it to pass. It does matter greatly, almost 100%, on how much the economic elites want it to pass.

[felixgallo]

'wall street and silicon valley', as if there weren't hundreds of millions of dark money billionaire slush funds and the world's biggest and most effective propaganda network in play.

Gerrymandering absolutely has an effect, and this has been well documented. Here, for example: https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2024/01/analysis-of-pr...