"As we all know elections matter. And when folks vote, they order what they want, & in this case they got what they asked for." - VP Kamala Harris, speaking while grinning @ the White House the week of February 28, 2022 - still giddy, but patiently waiting, fully realizing she is one heartbeat away from the presidency after dropping out of the Democrat presidential primaries without ever receiving one vote for president.
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With few exceptions in our country's history, the political party whose candidate won the presidency loses congressional seats in the midterms two years later - & quite often quite big. Democrats seem particularly aware of this historical fact & there are many additional reasons other than political history for them to be afraid.
First & foremost the American people have come to realize that Biden is not up to the job & that a congressional check on him is in order. Any fair minded person of any party affiliation who wants the country to come together should be able to agree on this - they should be willing to admit that Biden's incessant gaffes & mental lapses are no accident & that the real Biden, unlike the one seen during well rested & rehearsed appearances during campaign debates or SOTU presentations, needs to be checked so that the country, the world, does not take a chance on, or @ least minimizes, some disaster happening worse than the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A person of the left, while supporting a Republican 2022 midterm congressional sweep, does not have to give up their political persuasion but could try again in 2024 supporting a less compromised presidential candidate - of which they would have a much better chance of winning.
Next, Biden has a low overall approval rating that falls to dismal levels in some categories: 1) on his handling of inflation it is 28% approval; 2) handling crime is 36% approval; & 3) only 28% say the country is moving in the right direction.
And that congressional check on Biden is very important if he is persuaded by progressives like AOC, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, & Cori Bush to pack the Supreme Court with six more Sotomayor-like justices, add DC & other locales as states that will increase Democrat House margins & pack the Senate so that every piece of legislation that is objectionable to mainstream America is passed & signed into law in a blink of an eye, & effectively abolish the Electoral College without a constitutional amendment meaning the more illegal aliens entering the country the better as Democrats see nothing but additional Democrat voters crossing the border.
But even more important than countering the peaceful fundamental transformation of America as described above we have the danger of the inability of the so far inept Biden/Harris administration to make the right decisions in an ever increasingly belligerent world. In fact their record is so bad we have to question if they even want to make the right decisions.
As of March 1, seeing the writing on the wall, twenty-three House Democrats are retiring compared to seven retiring Republicans. In a reversal, in the Senate five Republicans (Blunt, Burr, Portman, Toomey, & Shelby) are retiring compared to only one retiring Democrat (Leahy). Both chambers are important but it is the Senate that confirms judicial nominees, as we are about to be reminded with the upcoming Senate hearings of Biden's first Supreme Court pick.
Democrats are defending fourteen Class 3 Senate seats & Republicans twenty - with six regarded as very close contests: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, & Wisconsin, some of which states have been Republican traps of high hopes in the past only to lose.
So even with history in their favor & an anti-American anemic Biden administration pouring sand in every gear they can find, Republicans have their work cut out for them in the midterms.
In November 2022 there are also 36 governors seats up for reelection (20 GOP & 16 Democrat) as well as the seats in 88 state legislative chambers in 46 states - 56% of all state senate seats are up for election & 92% of assembly seats.
In this regard & focusing on the state of Georgia, & in particular the governor's race - Trump has convinced David Perdue, one of the two Georgia Senate candidates who lost in the special election of January 5, 2021, to run for governor against Brian Kemp, a man that Trump feels slighted him. This of course will split the Republican ticket & Stacey Abrams will become the next Georgia governor.
But even with their strategic advantages listed above, Democrats are fighting with the best advantage they have - the ability to manipulate congressional boundaries to favor several of their candidates in New York & California & to a lesser degree in other states.
For years conservative pundits have appeared unconcerned that Republicans won the popular vote in only one of the last eight presidential elections (GW Bush in 2004). The thinking was that liberals in California & New York so overwhelm the electorate in those two states that it was only the rest of the country that mattered. Spotting Democrats 84 electoral votes (nearly one third necessary to win the presidency) meant little to them.
And there is some credibility to this. In 2016 Trump won the popular vote in the other 48 states (i.e., excluding California & New York from the 50 states) by over 3 million votes. But there is also reason for Trump supporters to beware of this statistic - in 2020 Biden received 81,284,778 votes nationally compared to Trump's 74,224,501 votes. If you subtract the popular vote totals in California & New York Biden was still ahead in the total from the other 48 states by 36,327 votes so there was definitely a stronger anti-Trump movement in November 2020 in the other 48 states than in the 2016 presidential election. Trump supporters discount this fact @ their own peril.
But considering the results from just California & New York: Hillary walloped Trump in California by 4,269,978 votes (8,753,788 - 4,483,810) & defeated him in NY by 1,732,973 (4,547,562 - 2,814,589). It is these two large state totals following the constitutionally specified decennial census of 2020 that enlightened the latest Democrat mischief.
The Democrat Party advantage in the House is 222 to 211 with two vacancies (both Republicans - Devin Nunez retired on January 3 to work for Trump & Jim Hagedorn died on February 17) - meaning Republicans start the 2022 midterms needing to win seven seats to obtain the majority to control the chamber.
The California congressional delegation is 42 Democrats & 11 Republicans. The New York congressional delegation is 19 Democrats & 8 Republicans. And herein lies the trouble because Democrats have figured out how to take advantage of their large presidential popular vote totals by redrawing congressional district boundaries to overwhelm their opponents in the next election. In essence it is truer that politicians pick their voters than voters pick their political representatives.
Now this process of manipulating congressional boundaries has a name - gerrymandering, named after Founding Father Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry who was instrumental in the redrawing of a state senate district that resembled a salamander. See cartoon below that appeared in the Boston Gazette newspaper on March 26, 1812 that satirized the odd shaped district that had been drawn to obtain every possible vote needed to ensure victory for the candidate preferred by the party in power.
Note that Mr. Gerry pronounced his last name "gary" so the term is correctly pronounced "garymander." I only know two politicians who pronounce it correctly & no members of the press who do.
Check out the table below that shows how 50 people in a congressional district can be gerrymandered to give three different results.
So Republicans start the 2022 midterms seven seats behind but Democrat New York state lawmakers redrew district boundaries to ensure New York Democrat candidates have a better than even chance of winning four or five seats held by Republicans including targeting the seats currently held by Claudia Tenney & Nicole Malliotakis.
California, New Jersey, Illinois, & Maryland have similar plans to each pick off a seat or two from the GOP ranks while legislators in Republican states feel forced to focus on playing defense, shoring up their suburban districts for their candidates in another sign that we're outnumbered.
In addition, the case of Congressman Madison Cawthorn (R, NC) deserves special attention. Madison is a staunch Trump supporter & Madison appeared on the Ellipse in his wheelchair on January 6, 2021 delivering some fighting words of his own, regarding the 2020 presidential election, to the protesters before they broke into the Capitol. Madison's opponents are now arguing that his name is ineligible to appear on the ballot in accordance with Section 3 of the 14th Amendment which specifies, according to them, that he violated the congressional oath to support the Constitution when he "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the country on January 6, 2021. Hanging on to the unproven Trump claim that an election held over 16 months ago was illegitimate is an unforced error that could result in another lost seat when the country needs to look to the future. The Republican infighting over what amounts to Trump's ego could continue to be a loser for all of us going forward.
But getting back to Gerrymandering - I am a fan of replacing the current politically manipulated redistricting system with a computer programmed to divide each state into congressional districts with the smallest perimeter possible while keeping communities & counties whole to the greatest degree mathematically possible - districts should resemble squares, rectangles, & circles not salamanders.
The computer will produce compact districts without identifying the residents' party, gender, or race. Its goal will be to find the most nondiscriminatory geographically compact districts possible. In short such a change gives us a chance for unbiased elections & in essence term limits.
What people are interested in has changed over time as has the makeup of the country. The best way I know to express the changing demographics in America is to understand that Bush (41) got 59% of the white vote in 1988 & won 426 electoral votes while Romney also got 59% of the white vote in 2012 & received only 206 electoral votes.
Throwing the midterms into a computer drawn configuration of districts that are redrawn in each state after every decennial census so that the boundaries of each district would change more as a function of people moving than politicians purposely rigging elections by drawing districts resembling salamanders is an obvious benefit to everyone except the political class.