An important aspect of how members of Congress think about their votes and future electoral prospects this year is that none of them actually know the contours of the districts they’ll be running in in 2022. All their districts are being redrawn before then.
Idk how likely this is, but one way that Representatives could be retaliated against for their votes (on impeachment or otherwise) is that their state legislatures back home could draw them unpleasant districts (or draw them out of their districts altogether) #gerrymandering
I.e. you make a moderate’s district redder/likelier that they lose a primary. You take an important constituency out of their district. No one is giving seats to the other party, obviously. But there are many ways to make a district better or worse for a particular lawmaker.
Anyway, I don’t think this is a primary motivator for how lawmakers will behave this year, but it will be something gnawing in the back of their minds...
“What’s my district gonna look like next year?!?”
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There is plenty of anxiety about whether the polls will be "right" this year. It's because people care a lot about the outcome of the election and, notably, because of the larger than average polling errors in the upper Midwest in 2016...
2/
I think that's understandable. "How could it be that Clinton led in Michigan for the whole race only to lose it in the end? Polling must be broken!"
1) This turned into a THREAD: A notable theme of the 2020 Dem primary has been the degree to which some candidates misjudged how left Dem voters are. Harris, Booker, Warren, Buttigieg have all had to recalibrate away from their further left positions. I’m curious why...
2) So many candidates miscalculated. I’d guess it has something to do with learning the wrong lessons from the ‘16 election. Trump was actually seen by voters as less partisan than Clinton. Not more. It’s hard to make the case that Clinton lost chiefly bc she wasn’t left enough..
3) Probably also has to do with how close politicians and their staff are to the activists in their party (something that skews perceptions of politicians on both sides of the aisle)...
1/ Let me tell you a little story about the cluster**** that is going to play out over the coming month regarding North Carolina’s congressional maps…
2/ Yesterday a 3 judge panel ruled NC’s maps to be an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, saying the maps should be redrawn in time for the 2018 MIDTERM ELECTION, which is 70 days away...
3/ North Carolina Republicans want SCOTUS to stay yesterday’s decision, blocking a redraw until the Supreme Court itself can review the case on appeal. This would allow the current map to remain in place for the upcoming election…