Stephen Wolf on The Daily Kos rather gleefully notes another North Carolina gerrymandering case won by the Democrats:
On Monday, a federal district court struck down a map that North Carolina’s Republican-controlled state legislature had imposed on the city of Greensboro, the state’s third-largest city. In a remarkable affront to local rule, Republican lawmakers passed a law in 2015 that replaced the city council districts that the city itself had drawn and replaced them with gerrymandered lines intended to hurt Democratic and black voters.
Democrats quickly brought a challenge to this new map, and the judges hearing the case have now put a stop to this usurpation of power. The court concluded that the legislature’s map was an impermissible racial gerrymander; that it violated the principle of “one person, one vote”; and that it unfairly singled out Greensboro. The city-drawn map had remained in place for the 2015 elections while litigation was ongoing, and it will now stay in effect for elections in fall.
Which is all well and good. But then he seems to engage in a bit of confirmation bias:
In fact, these gerrymanders are so effective that Greensboro, which typically votes for Democratic presidential candidates by a two-to-one ratio, is represented in the House by zero Democrats. And Guilford County, which is home to Greensboro and roughly half a million people, likewise supported Hillary Clinton by a 58-38 margin, but Republicans have maintained a majority on the county commission ever since 2012—when, of course, they got to draw the map for it.
The real problem is that his case is difficult to assert without supporting evidence; that is, we can find other reasonable reasons for the observed behavior. For example, perhaps the Greensboro Democrats are a mendacious, despicable bunch who have repulsed voters so badly that they’d prefer local Republicans – and perhaps those running for county commissioner are not as bad as those running for the legislature. The victory in the gerrymandering case is, of course, a point in his favor; but his brush is too large. I fear that he misleads himself and his audience through this presentation.
And I remember how confident the diarists on The Daily Kos were that Clinton would be victorious, that Senator Johnson of Wisconsin would fall, that there’d be a general Democratic victory in the Senate and possibly even one in the House.
Technically, you can say Clinton won the popular vote and lost in the Electoral College because of a quirk and Russian interference, and that some ground was made up in both chambers of Congress.
But, honestly, it was still a disaster for the Democrats and their Progressive wing, and I put it down to the Progressives having their own little echo chamber. They talk to themselves too much. I think Stephen’s post would benefit from some self-criticism. The victory in the court case is encouraging, I do agree – but precision in observation and argument will lead to better results down the road.
