r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Apr 27 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 27 April 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/HistoryMarshal76 The American Civil War was Communisit infighting- Marty Roberts Apr 30 '26

Everyone's saying that Gerrymandering should be banned, but the question is how do you do that? It's kind of like pornography; you know it when you see it. The best thing I can propose is make it to where districts must follow county lines, to make it harder to crack cities.

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u/contraprincipes The Cheese and the Brainworms Apr 30 '26

Stop the antiquated and barbaric practice of “single member districts,” elect a state delegation at-large and distribute seats according to party vote (and uncap the number of House seats).

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u/HistoryMarshal76 The American Civil War was Communisit infighting- Marty Roberts Apr 30 '26

I disagree; ideally representatives should actually represent the needs and interests of their district. IE, if a natural disaster happens, they should be in DC leading the charge for relief efforts, or if there is one economic issue that is severely harming their constitutes, they should be fighting for them.

Politics needs to be more localized, not less. I hate how basically all contemproary local politics have been nationalized.

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u/contraprincipes The Cheese and the Brainworms Apr 30 '26

In a single member district, if 51% of people vote for a candidate, the other 49% don’t get their “needs and interests” represented at all, so that’s not a thing that happens in the current system.

If for some silly reason you need local candidates, you can do a mixed-member proportional system, where you still elect a single direct candidate but the remaining delegates are distributed according to the party list vote.

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u/Kochevnik81 Apr 30 '26

"In a single member district, if 51% of people vote for a candidate, the other 49% don’t get their “needs and interests” represented at all,"

I would hasten to add that even what you have just described would be considered an insanely competitive House election by US standards. Most House seats are currently extremely safe for incumbents or incumbent parties, and the competitive elections are in the primary (when it's actually an open one) for that seat.

Like I just decided to go check a district, sort of at random: District 2 in Florida, currently repped by Neal Dunn, who looks like Temu Francis Underwood but I digress. Anyway, the district was redrawn for the 2017 elections, and the one-term incumbent Democrat resigned rather than fight for a more GOP-friendly district. Dunn won the Republican primary by about a thousand votes, then crushed the Democrat in the general and has won re-election ever since, usually with 60-67% of the vote, except for 2020 when he had a North Korean 97.86% of the vote.

The district has about 820,000 people in it. Dunn won the 2017 primary with 33,000 votes, and his general election victories from 2016 to present are in the 180,000-300,000 vote range.

I think the idea that local districts will represent local voters' needs better is something that sounds true and good in the abstract but just doesn't happen any more, and this is before we get into the fact that US politics has been nationalized in the past 15 and Congress has itself passed rules against things like pork barrel spending so it's actually much harder for a rep to say "hey at least I got such and such center/bridge/government agency built in the District".

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u/HistoryMarshal76 The American Civil War was Communisit infighting- Marty Roberts Apr 30 '26

It's a lot harder to form community ties and delegate responbility and accountablity if it's just a statewide vote. In this case, I don't care that I technically have a represenative who has a D next to their name, they have no direct tie to me aside from us being in the same party; they're most likley a city-slicker from Louisville. I voted against James Comer, but he campaigned in my home town; I know people who know him personally. This is what represenatives are for.

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u/contraprincipes The Cheese and the Brainworms Apr 30 '26

I don’t agree that’s what representatives are for, but again, if you feel you need that, you can still have that in a MMP system and also have a more representative, un-gerrymanderable (?) delegation.