Look at those crazy shapes! GERRYMANDERING!!!!!
Progressives and the news media have decided that they don’t like the Constitution, so they are actively trying to confuse the public, which is depressingly easy.
We know Democrats and the mainstream news media hate the Electoral College and don’t view it as “legitimate.” The latest anti-Constitutional spin is that there is a national “popular vote” that should rigidly dictate the party representation in Congress. Vox’s Ezra Klein suggested that a revolution was coming if the imaginary Congressional “popular vote favored Democrats and Republicans held the House, but that’s Ezra and Vox—I assumed that this was an aberration. No! The same wacked-out theory was all over social media. The concept is based on regarding the Democratic and Republican Parties as Borg-like hives, with there being no legitimate distinction between on party candidate or another, as if no voter actually cares about experience, character, the record, skills, or any of those minor matters. Party is All.
I hate to keep pointing out that the Left is behaving, speaking and thinking increasingly like totalitarians, but the Left is behaving, speaking and thinking increasingly like totalitarians. Here’s what one of my Facebook friends, a lawyer and pretty openly a militant socialist, wrote yesterday (in part):
If you are on the left, fight for your ideal candidate in the Democratic primary and then vote Democrat in the general. The primary is the time for “who should represent the left in this election.”The general is the time to support the left over the right.
I don’t care if that nominee is “too far left” (Gillum) or “too centrist” (Sinema or McCaskill) or just “not exciting enough.” In every general election in the United States there are two candidates who have a chance to win. The Democrat is on the left, the Republican is on the right.
There is never a situation in which the agenda of any self-identified progressive or liberal or marxist or socialist or lefty or whatever is advanced by a win by the Republican. Never.
As anyone who has read Ethics Alarms for any length of time knows, I reject that argument absolutely. It is unethical, flat out. The agenda of our representative democracy is to have qualified, dedicated representatives and leaders whose judgment we can trust. It is, however, a nice summary of how someone can rationalize voting for people like Hillary Clinton, Bob Menendez, Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters. Or Jack the Ripper, as long as he ran as a Democrat.
But I digress. Totalitarians can only prevail by misleading the public, and so the “popular vote” confusion is apparently deemed worth promoting. ABC’s News’s Matthew Dowd brought up the fact that more ballots were cast in favor of the total number of Democratic candidates than Republican candidates running for U.S. Senate. That’s a nice piece of meaningless trivia, but he raised it as if it meant something. It doesn’t, but “The View’s” Joy Behar—remember, this woman has a daily platform to spout her analysis of news and politics—finished Dowd’s thought by saying, “Because of gerrymandering.”
That’s right: the states are “gerrymandered” districts. That’s what Joy thinks. She’s an idiot, but she’s not alone. David Rutz wrote an essay “Complaining About the ‘Senate Popular Vote?’ You Suffer From Civic Illiteracy.” This is true, but Democrats and the news media are actively promoting this civic illiteracy. Yes, trying to make trusting people more ignorant is unethical. Here is Amanda Marcotte on Twitter:
Republicans lost the popular vote in Senate races by over 15 percentage points, but still gained two seats. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/06/us/elections/results-senate-elections.html … Our country is not a democracy.
Max Berger:
The US has a progressive majority that’s being held captive by the unrepresentative institutions we inherited. Democrats will win the popular vote for the Senate tonight, but lose seats. It makes no sense to apportion political power by land mass, instead of by person.
Matt Johnson:
Oh so 9 million more people voted for Democratic senators than GOPs, resulting in…[checks notes]…the GOP gaining three seats.
There are many, many more like this. This is one of the many times I weep that the most vocal of the knee-jerk defenders of any leftward position no matter how absurd have taken refuge in the Ozarks or Berkeley or the Daily Kos or someplace, because I would love to have an interactive online debate with someone who tries to defend this crap, and I am being restrained. I must say that Rutz does a thorough job destroying it, though:
There were 26 Democrat-held seats up for election in this cycle—including independents Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont—and many of them won, since many of them took place in blue states. Twenty-two of them so far, in fact. As of this writing, there are still races outstanding in Florida and Arizona, where Republicans Rick Scott and Martha McSally hold narrow leads but are not the official victors.
This included a race in California, where both candidates are Democrats, due to state rules where the top two primary finishers, regardless of party, advance to the general election. In this race, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) faced Democratic State Senator Kevin de León, and the two combined for nearly 6.3 million votes. There were zero—yes, zero—Republican votes cast for the Senate in the most populated state in the country.
Rolling up uncompetitive victories against Republicans in blue states: Kirsten Gillibrand in New York (1.8 million-vote margin of victory), Ben Cardin in Maryland (700,000), and Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts (640,000)….
Democrats won both the “Senate popular vote”—the last time I’ll ever write that phrase—and also took a majority of available Senate seats on Tuesday… The Washington Post noted that Democrats look positioned to win 63 percent (22/35) of the available Senate seats on Tuesday, even though they won around 56 percent of the total Senate race votes. If the available seats won by Republicans were proportional to their popular vote totals, they would have picked up at least an additional two Senate posts on Tuesday.
So I’m happy to report The Constitution is alive and well. I’m not so sure about civic literacy though.
Ethics Alarms 
So let me get this straight? They are saying votes for senators in other states should apply simply because they have more people voting blue? What does any of that have to do with state representation?
I will admit I was thrown for a loop when I saw the actual numbers: 40 million people voted for a Democrat senator while only 31 million voted for a Republican senator, so how could the Republicans gain 3 seats? Of course, I realized the issue with this argument after about 2 seconds, but it’s interesting to see just how easy it is to deceive people using nothing but the (partial) truth.
Since the 2016 election there has not been one component of the Federal Government that hasn’t had it’s legitimacy attacked by Democrats.
This should terrify people who believe the Founders bequeathed us a solid reliable system of governance.
And for those who aren’t terrified…what is the matter with you?
Arg. Forgot to click “notify me of new comments”
You have been notified 🙂
I know this deals with the Senate, but in my House district (Virginia District 3), the candidate was running unopposed. He’s a Democrat. So there were 0 Republican votes (although about 10% of th votes were write-ins for someone else, including one that said “anybody but him”–which says something about his constituency.) So under the popular vote analysis, all of his votes should count even though there was no Republican candidate? I didn’t realize the states had been gerrymandered, so let’s go back to the original boundaries of the early settlers. A lot of states would be back in Virginia.
“We know Democrats and the mainstream news media hate the Electoral College and don’t view it as “legitimate.””
You’re giving them entirely too much credit for consistency. We all know that if Hillary had won via the E.C., they would be loudly proclaiming the undeniable wisdom of the Framers for establishing it. Any and all things currently in or out of favor with the left depend on the needs of the moment, and any attempts to point this out are met with accusations of being “stuck in the past”.
I tend to agree with you, joed68. The left absolutely will seize on whatever serves their needs at the moment. I do notice however that they seem to be focusing on systemic issues that typically thwart their totalitarian tendencies: the Electoral College, the Senate, a 9 member Supreme Court, free speech, the Second Amendment, home-schooling,…it’s a long list.
In Re: Amanda Marcotte’s tweet
She’s right, our country is not a democracy, it is a democratic republic of several states who have rights.
People like Marcotte, Klein, and others would basically transform the United States of America into just America. If country-wide majoritarianism becomes the rule, the States will have no meaningful rights except as dictated by the majority.
The left hates the idea that laws, mores, and cultures can differ state-to-state. They desire a homogenous federal system where states occupy a quaint, antebellum sort of novelty, not a muscular buttress against their idea of utopian society.
Only in a society where the culture has been rotted from the inside out could nonsense like “Senate popular vote” be taken as anything other than a joke. It is, in its essence, a complete unicorn (we’ll call it Chet, because, well, everyone’s unicorn seems to be named Chet) — it cannot exist in the country our founders envisioned, just as freedom cannot exist in a totalitarian society.
I’m happy to see the right mock Chet so brutally — he deserves it. Even the Washington Post has had to hold their nose and defenestrate Chet.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/07/some-democrats-are-complaining-about-senate-popular-vote-its-still-not-thing/
Chet deserves to go on the metaphorical guillotine at the hands of… well, everyone not actually an idiot. From a quick Google search, it looks as though the rejection of this concept is near-universal among even serious lefties.
Perhaps there is hope.
Your friends thinks Sinema is a centrist.
Dear lord.
He’s too far gone.
No, that just tells you how left he is.
Sinema certainly is a centrist compared to, say, Bernie Sanders or even Hillary Clinton. She joined the Blue Dog Coalition, voted against the ACA, against allowing the FCC to regulate broadband, and several other breaks with the far left of her party.
You’re right. She is relatively centrist. I really didn’t know her official track record of supported/opposed policies. I based my characterization entirely off of her aggressive campaign rhetoric…which struck me as…well…extreme.
And the fact that she was outed with what she really thinks of her constituents… and the need to lie to them to get elected.
Mass apportioning of representatives relative to the proportion of votes the representative’s parties might work…but only in SMALLER political entities, more homogeneous political entities, and UNITARY political entities.
The United States is NONE of those 3, thank God.
Where did the idea that we are a democracy develop. Can these idiots say Constitutional Republic?
Thanks for posting on this, Jack. Where the heck did this concept of the popular vote in the mid-terms come from? I’d never heard of it before. I think it’s the bastard child of the “generic” poll. Which is stupid as well but hey, guess what, the Dems always lead in the generic poll. So I guess following elections now, we have to hear about the “popular vote.”
Speaking of preposterous alleged rules that have sprung into existence for the first time in history so that they can be applied solely to the presidency of Donald Trump:
Did you see the article by George Conway in the New York Times claiming that it’s unconstitutional for Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to do his job because he hasn’t been confirmed yet by the Senate — unlike all of the hundreds and hundreds of other acting cabinet secretaries in history, including (to choose a few names at random) Acting Attorneys General Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch and Sally Yates. Because reasons. And because it’s a conflict of interest for President Trump to appoint somebody who supports his policies and legal positions.
I haven’t watched tv since Tuesday. Is this talking point being flogged on CNN and MSNBC today?
You beat me by about 15 minutes. That post is up.
I think the Dems are using a random talking points generator.
George Conway is a very fine lawyer. He can spin clever but unsound arguments by the yard.
Off topic, whoever produced the political map you used, didn’t do their due diligence and go lazy around Colorado.
Given the Four Color Theorem, they should have started with Colorado (being in contact with the most individual states) and colored outwards from there.
Missouri.
Missouri touches the most individual states.
And Tennessee.
I don’t want to play this game anymore.
It was a good hypothesis, just did not stand up to rigorous testing (I was going to point out Tennessee…)
My hypothesis is still good. The guy who colored the map was lazy. Four color theorem works.
I meant starting with Colorado
You’re not wrong about the color problem, but can I get my vote in for “Has divided Michigan into two states” as my vote for most egregious use of color in the map?
And, adding insult to injury, they’ve rendered the entire state maize and blue. Eugh.