GOP More Proficient At Gerrymandering

Fairly recently I did an article about why the 2010 election was so important.* I mentioned in the article that both parties use "gerrymandering;" that is, tailoring congressional districts to their own advantage, and I thought Democrats might have been whining a bit after having failed to recapture the House in 2012. Since I wrote that article I did a little research, only to find that the redistricting for the 2012 election was more than a little tilted to the GOP. It was really GERRYMANDERED, bringing into question whether Americans are really being represented by the votes they cast in 2012. In the overall collective vote for members of the House of Representatives, Democratic candidates drew nearly a million and a half more votes than Republican candidates, with Republicans retaining control of the House by 33 seats (234 to 201), as Democrats gained only 8 seats from the 2010 election. While not unheard of in the history of American congressional elections, a plurality by one party over the other usually has produced bigger gains for that political party, and a plurality that large would have been thought to produce many more Democratic gains, which then would have more adequately represented the congressional delegation split in the House and thus what American voters seemed to be saying with their votes. When results come out like in 2012, are American voters really being represented in "their" House; which after all, is the entity closest to the people. But here's what happened: in seven states where districts were redrawn by Republicans. Republican candidates only outdrew Democratic candidates by about 300,000 votes out of more than 33 million votes in those states, which would have given the GOP an expected "tilt" in seats, but which instead produced a large disparity, with Republicans taking 73 seats and Democrats only 34. For example, here in Ohio, Republican congressional candidates drew a bit more than 2.6 million votes and Democratic candidates drew a bit more than 2.4 million votes, yet while only about 200,000 total votes separated the two parties, Republicans won 12 seats to only 4 for Democrats. Democrats and some media had complained well in advance about how the districts were drawn to give Republicans more than an advantage, but a STAGGERING advantage. As a comparison, Democrats redrew House districts in Illinois where in 2012 Democratic House candidates garnered nearly 2.75 million votes to Republican candidates slightly more than 2.2 million, a difference of more than a half million. This translated to 12 Democratic victories and 6 Republican wins.**/*** 

* The link to the article is:  http://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-2010-was-such-important-election.html

** All numbers come from the Archives of the U.S. House of Representatives.

*** Gerrymandering typically involves the party in charge of redistricting drawing boundaries to include a majority of voters registered with their own party into as many districts as possible, but also placing as many voters registered with the other party into as few districts as possible; districts their candidate would likely lose anyway. This concentration of many opposition voters into districts thus dilutes the other party's impact in the other, more competitive, districts.

WORD HISTORY:
Honey-Forms of this word, common only in the Germanic languages, trace back to Indo European "khonekos," which seems to have had much to do with the color "yellow" or "golden," perhaps even "pale,"  "light" or "bright." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "hunagom/hunagam," which meant "honey," due to its color. This then gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "hunig," which then became "hony," before the modern version. The "ig" ending of many Old English words later changed to "y" or "ey," although its Germanic relatives have usually retained the sound (at least in official spelling) as "ig," "ich," "ing," or "ung." Hearing some Germans pronounce the "ig" ending in some words often, but my no means always, comes across as a "y" sound. The other Germanic languages have: German "honig," Low German Saxon "honnig," West Frisian "honing," Dutch "honing," Danish and Norwegian "honning," Swedish "honung," and Icelandic "hunang."