Forever 20
If you let the popularity of an idea – no matter how silly – dictate your stance, then you are not a very good elected official.
If you completely ignore and shoo-away and disparage overwhelming public sentiment on an issue, then you are not a very good elected official.
And, in the latter case, doing so used to mean your job at risk. But that, in the large and depressing part, is no longer the case.
And that is a result of voting districts, at every level.
You can be consistently on the “20% side” of an issue, as it were, and defy the remaining 80% of public sentiment and not be too worried about losing your seat because the district you represent has been drawn in such a way as to make it nearly mathematically impossible.
You can be in favor of paying for trans surgeries, in favor of illegal alien criminals staying in the country, in favor of massive slush fund spending that only goes to your political cronies, you can be in favor of government censorship, and on and on and not worry even though the vast majority of the public – probably even your district – are opposed to them.
In other words, rotten districts are licenses to be crazy because you only have to get through the primary where the 20% miraculously becomes 50% because they are far more obsessed with their issues…they vote…or are voted for…or paid to vote…
Let’s start with Congress.
Out of the 435 seats, about 190 are Democrat automatics. If a combination of Albert Einstein, Cary Grant, and the Buddha challenged the incumbent in any of these seats he would lose, even if he ran as an independent (Run as a Republican? Don’t even bother.)
The same can be said for the 190 ribrock reliable Republican seats.
That leaves 55 seats, or only 13% of the entire House of Representatives, in play in any given year. (Note – if only legal residents and citizens were counted when creating congressional districts, it is estimated that at least 10 Democrat seats would slip at least into the “contestable” pile.)
And if you are in one of those safe seats you can do anything you want, no matter what the public thinks.
On the Senate side, it’s slightly different as they are statewide elections that far more closely represent the actual will of the voters. At this moment in time, about 15 states can reliably predicted to return two Democrats, about 18 to return two Republicans.
That leaves about 34 seats or so theoretically in actual play, a far larger percentage than in the House.
Of course, senate seats do turn on other issues – while money and personality are important in all elections, they are far more important in statewide (and national) elections than any at the district level.
Let’s turn now to a specific type of election – local school boards.
Typically, the winning candidate has the support of the local teachers union. That means money and people to knock on doors and all of the rest of the permanent organization the union has is at your disposal.
So, then you win? Whom do you owe?
The union. Imagine if you could pick your own boss and then imagine you can get your boss fired and then imagine what happens when you ask for a raise or demand a new policy or procedure?
You get what you want, and what teachers’ union want, beyond money, is astonishing:
From a previous story on a recent California Teachers Association convention:
The “So you Want to be an Anti-Racist Union?” program page leads the curious to at least one hint – stop embracing “white supremacy culture,” aspects of which include perfectionism (there goes math), objectivity (there goes history), individualism (there goes art), worship of the written word (there goes English) and urgency (actually this would have been handy if I forgot to do my homework) –see here for more detail.
Hence most school boards becoming covens of 20 percenters and, just to emphasize the issue, California is not an outlier in this respect.
Speaking of California, we come to its legislature.
There are 80 state Assembly seats and 40 state Senate seats. The Democrats have 60 Assemblymembers and 30 senators – literally 75% of the legislature.
What that means is that they can do anything they want – they could even override a Gov. Gavin Newsom, should the need ever arise (it hasn’t and won’t.) They have a super-majority.
In 2022, the state voted across the board for Democrats for each statewide office (governor, attorney general, etc.)
The average percentage of votes they each got was 57.7%, a bit different from the 75% (actually in 2022 it was 77%) in the legislative races.
In November’s presidential vote, Kamala Harris got 58.4% of the vote. Nice, one supposes, but far less than either Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton got.
But the more fascinating results were in the state proposition votes:
State voters took a hammer to the most progressive propositions. Allow cities more leeway to impose rent control? No. Allow cities and counties to have to get only 55% of the vote to approve new bonds? Hell no. Making it illegal (ish) for prisoners to work? Very no. Raising the minimum wage? You’re kidding, right?
And then of course there was Prop 36 that makes crime illegal again in California. 70% approval, a crushing defeat for the woke justice mob.
Each of these measures had the very strong backing of the governor, the legislature, public unions, and the Democratic machine yet they failed. Why?
Because at the statewide level, 75% of Californians are not lunatic leftist progressive determined to end policing, move abortion on demand to we demand you get an abortion, have the state take over local zoning, and give aggressively incompetent people like LA’s Mayor Karen Bass a standing ovation.
Yup, the Dems in the legislature really did that yesterday when she was in Sacramento asking for $2 billion to bail out the city.
Combine the above statistics with voter registration – 50% Dem, 25% Rep, 25% NPP (no party preference, like an independent elsewhere) – and the legislature number become even more of an outlier.
And typically the NPPs vote leans Republican by about two-to-one.
In other words, it is only how the districts are drawn and composed that’s keeping the legislature so far out of touch.
They’re like trust fund nepo-babies – they never have to face consequences so they can do whatever they want.
And in situations like that, even the stupidest most radical most unpopular policy or proposal becomes very possible, especially because it is rare that a Democrat will ever say or vote against anything another Democrat offers.
How did the districts get this way? First, the “independent citizen’s re-districting commission” has been anything but.
Second, districts are divided up by counting all the people, not just the legal residents.
An example from 2020:
An average district has about 275,000 legal voters. Districts that have more than 300,000 legal voters (about 10 percent higher than the average) returned seven Republicans, 16 Democrats, and one independent, results roughly in line with statewide party registration figures.
But districts that have fewer than 250,000 legal voters showed a very significant tilt, electing three Republicans and 17 Democrats, more than twice the difference that could be expected vis a vis statewide party affiliations.
It should be noted that the turnout and citizen rates appear to be intertwined. The competitive districts with the highest percentages of citizens had the highest turnouts, with the top eight turnout districts showing an average citizenship rate of 87 percent, while the lowest 10 districts by turnout carried a citizenship rate of 62 percent (Republicans and Democrats split the top eight districts four to four while the lowest went Democrat by nine to one).
Add those facts to boggling incompetence of the state Republican party, the leftist manipulation of the districting process (even ProPublica noticed how bad it is ) and the Dems cannot possibly lose.
And add that the political starting point for most members is somewhere to the left of Trotsky and the end result is foretold.
In other words, Democratic extremism (and in some case Republican silliness) is baked into the system which is why when people ask why so many take such extreme and extremely unpopular positions the answer becomes obvious.
If the districts were more representative of the population generally, the Dems would lose about 10 Assembly seats and 5 Senate seats and there goes the super-majority and the tempering process begins.
And that would be a start, at least.
This originally appeared on The Point.
The post Forever 20 appeared first on LewRockwell.
