America Held Hostage

http://billmoyers.com/story/america-held-hostage-minority-rule/"For the first few months of his presidency, Donald Trump delighted in showing guests an electoral map of the country in which huge splotches from the South through the Midwest and into the far West were red, indicating Trump’s support. He was right, of course. Those were areas that voted for Trump. Except that those splotches were sparsely populated. The dark blue dots in urban America were the densely populated Democratic areas — areas with more votes. In most nations, geographical advantages don’t mean much. In our system, however, geography plays an outsized role. It’s not how many votes; it’s where they are cast. A lot of this, as we all know, is the result of gerrymandering — a point that New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg made in her debut op-ed about the “tyranny of the minority.” If you want some sense of how badly gerrymandering hurts Democrats, consider this: In 2012, 224 congressional districts voted for Romney, 221 for Obama, though Obama easily won the overall popular vote by nearly 4 percent. This Republican reward has been referred to as a “seat bonus” — the degree to which Republicans get more seats than their popular vote would warrant. According to the Brookings Institution, Republicans received just under 50 percent of the congressional vote, but wound up with 55 percent of the seats. They also got bonuses in the 2012, 2014 and 2016 congressional elections — again, 5 percent more House seats in the last election than their overall vote count would have entitled them to. But the worst gerrymandering isn’t just politics and it isn’t just in the House; it is constitutional and it is in the Senate, where of course, seats are apportioned by state. Since rural and sparsely populated states are far more likely to vote Republican, and since all states, regardless of population, get the same two Senate seats, the GOP gets a much larger bonus in the Senate than in the House."