How those in power stay there
In 1812, Gov. Eldridge Gerry signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the districts in the Boston area was said to resemble the shape of a mythological salamander. Thus we have the process of “gerrymandering,” the creative drawing of districts to benefit the party drawing the districts.
Ever since, we’ve had incumbent parties trying to disenfranchise opposition voters by merrily “packing” them (putting large numbers of them into a few districts to concentrate their votes) and “cracking” them (spreading them among multiple districts to dilute their influence).
Trying and succeeding. A study by The Associated Press has found, to no one’s great surprise, that Republicans, in charge of redistricting efforts in the majority of states, have a far greater partisan advantage in their races.
The AP scrutinized the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year using a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage. It’s designed to detect cases in which one party may have won, widened or retained its grip on power through political gerrymandering.
The analysis found that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would have been expected based on the average vote share in congressional districts. That helped provide the GOP with a comfortable majority over Democrats instead of a narrow one.
In Indiana, the study found a marked difference in “efficiency gaps” for the two parties (the further away from zero, the bigger advantage a party has). For the 2016 congressional races was 10.6 percent in favor of Republicans, while the efficiency gap for the state senate races was 4.76 percent. Researcher Eric McGhee, who helped create the mathematical formula used in the study, says the gap could be even higher — 13 percent in favor of house Republicans and 17 percent for the Senate. As Tom Sugar, a member of the special interim study committee on redistricting in Indiana, says, the state is “more Republican than Democratic for the most part … But it isn’t 80 percent Republican.”
The AP study outlines both the problem and, unfortunately, the reason it’s so difficult to solve.
How do you get those in power to give up that which keeps them in power?
Within 24 hours of President Donald Trump’s disgusting Twitter outburst targeting MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, two stories making the rounds on social media provided a very different take on life in America in 2017.
That got us thinking: What if Trump used Twitter as a tool to hold up acts of kindness and generosity instead of as a vehicle to attack those who have in some way offended his delicate sensitivities? What if he used Twitter to highlight what’s already great about this country?
Sure, it’s naive to think a Trump social media transformation will begin any time soon, if ever. But let’s just ponder those two aforementioned stories for a minute and consider the impact they might have had on the president’s nearly 40 million Twitter followers.
There’s motorist Andy Mitchell, who could have ignored Justin Korva, the young man in a fast-food uniform he recently noticed walking along a road on a 95-degree day in Rockwall, Texas. Instead, he offered Korva a ride and learned that the 20-yearold made the 3-mile walk to and from work each day. Mitchell recounted the experience on Facebook, prompting strangers to donate more than $5,000 to buy Korva a new car.
Then there’s Major League Baseball umpire John Tumpane, who instinctively grabbed a 23-year-old woman who had hopped over the railing of the Roberto Clemente Bridge in Pittsburgh on Wednesday and appeared to be planning to take her own life.
“You’ll forget me tomorrow,” the woman said, asking Tumpane to let her go. “I’ll never forget you,” he told her. “You can have my promise on that.”
The woman was eventually lifted back over the railing, and Tumpane tried to comfort her before paramedics took over. “I told her, ‘I didn’t forget her, and we’d be here, and she’s better off on this side than the other side.’ I just want her to know that,” he recalled in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Trump’s use of Twitter amplifies his voice while revealing much about his character. He too often comes across as a selfabsorbed, insecure bully. In other words, the antithesis of Andy Mitchell and John Tumpane — two everyday heroes whose stories would have provided a refreshing change of pace for @realDonaldTrump.