How the GOP gerrymander blocked the blue wave in NC

[G_j]

https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article221532225.html?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=35ea3b09-33f9-4b87-8f0c-aae2da74a72c

Democrats will pick up at least 26 seats and take a majority in the House of Representatives if preliminary results from last Tuesday’s midterm elections hold. But partisan gerrymandering is still a major issue. Our analysis of North Carolina’s results shows that the party would almost certainly have won more if Republicans hadn’t deliberately drawn districts to limit Democratic chances.

North Carolina’s congressional district lines are already the subject of federal litigation claiming they give Republicans a systematic, unconstitutional advantage in winning seats. The Nov. 6 results bear those claims out. Democrats won roughly 50 percent of the vote in North Carolina, their best performance in almost a decade. But despite an extraordinary year, they netted just three of the state’s 13 congressional seats — the same as in 2014 and 2016. That happened because a promising Democratic wave crashed against one of the country’s most extreme gerrymanders.

To engineer this advantage, the leaders of the Republican caucus worked in secret with a consultant to pack likely Democrats into three super-blue districts. In each of these districts, Democrats would win by very large margins. The Republican mapmakers then spread the rest of the state’s Democrats more thinly across the remaining 10 districts, ensuring Republican candidates would win by small, but safe, margins.

With this scientific slicing and dicing of voters, it didn’t matter if Democrats got 30 percent of the statewide vote or 50 percent, as they did this year. In fact, Democrats didn’t stand a chance of picking up a fourth seat unless they could net 52.5 percent of the statewide vote, something they achieved only once since 2000, in the 2008 election.

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article221532225.html?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=35ea3b09-33f9-4b87-8f0c-aae2da74a72c#storylink=cpy

[CurtEastPoint]

1. The GOP Way: Lie, cheat, steal. Repeat.

[SWBTATTReg]

2. Of course this is patently wrong and steals votes from voters or in a way, is telling voters who ...

they are going to vote for, indirectly. I tried getting into the provided link, lots of ads, etc. Didn't pursue.