Gerrymandering is destroying America(n democracy)

[A Black Falcon]

Here in Maine it's not remotely close to as bad as it is in a lot of places in this country, fortunately, but perhaps there is a bit of it. So, in 2010, the year of the census, the Republicans won both houses of the state legislature and the Governorship (our fortunately soon to the term-limited out governor Paul LePage). They considered two possibilities for where the line between Maine's two US House seats should be, one which just slightly modified the current lines -- district 1 is the southern few counties, while district 2 is the rest of the state -- or another option which blew up that map and moved to a blatant gerrymander that had district 1 as the western section of the state, still including the southeast where most of the people (and liberals) live, and district 2 as the rest. I'm sure it was a complete cooincidence that District 1 Representative Chellie Pingree just happened to be in one of the towns moved over to district 2 in this second map... yeah, right.

However, after blowback from that second option, they ended up doing the first one, and only moving a few towns back and forth between the two districts. It wasn't an aggressive gerrymander, but they were trying to slightly redden district 2 and make district 1 slightly bluer, and this has happened. It would probably have happened anyway, but since 2010 northern Maine has gone hard right. They were the key behind LePage's victories in both 2010 and 2014, and despite having Democratic representatives in Congress for years in the '90s and '00s, now Bruce Poliquin, a Republican, is in his second term now and easily won last year. The changes in 2010 probably made his victory a bit easier than it would have been otherwise, so yeah, it probably would be fair to call it a mild gerrymander.

Compared to a lot of states, though, we're nowhere near as bad off as many are. Oh, and as far as the state level races go, this state hasn't devolved to the point of a North Carolina yet, so that part isn't gerrymandered, I don't believe. Maine has a big state House, as at 151 members it is not as big as New Hampshire's 400, but larger than most states; the state Senate is a fairly normal 35, though. Combined with our small populartion that means that each member represents a fairly small number of people, so an aggressive gerrymander would probably be tricky, but I'm sure it'd be possible if they really wanted to... fortunately the political will isn't there, and Democrats do control the state House now (and it's VERY close in the state Senate) so it'd be quite unlikely to pass.

So I mostly wrote this for those other states where gerrymandering is a much bigger problem, but so many key states are heavily gerrymandered now, almost all of those by Republicans and not Democrats (Illinois is one of the only states with an aggressive Democratic gerrymander) that it is a massive problem. The 2010 election was a crucial one here because that gave Republicans huge amounts of power in a lot of states in a census year, but the problem would exist regardless.