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25 May, 5 tweets, 3 min read
[Thread] Major Illinois redistricting news: Dems have proposed redrawing IL's Supreme Court districts for the 1st time in decades. Compare the current districts (first), which have become badly malapportioned since they were drawn in the 1960s, with Dems' proposed redraw (second)
I wrote a story just last week on how Illinois' malapportioned Supreme Court districts could lead to a decade of GOP minority rule in the legislature as a result of the 2022 elections if Dems don't redraw the court districts to make them fairer, so this news has big implications
Dems' new IL Supreme Court districts would end the malapportionment that has left the 2nd District with as many people as the 4th & 5th Districts combined. Doing so flips the 3rd District from 51-47 Trump to 53-45 Biden & boosts Dem chances of winning the key 2022 election there
Ending malapportionment will make Illinois' Supreme Court districts fairer, but the IL constitution's ban on split counties means even this revised map still has a huge GOP bias. Dems won for 2018 governor by 15% yet only won the median seat by 2%, though Biden's gap was narrower
See here for a comparison of Illinois Dems' proposed redraw (left) of the state Supreme Court districts for the 1st time in decades with my version (right). The partisan stats are similar, which is unsurprising since the ban on splitting counties sharply limits what can be drawn

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More from @PoliticsWolf

Stephen Wolf Profile picture
25 May
From the lame duck power grabs after Dems won governors offices in MI, NC, & WI in 2016-2018 to Trump’s Big Lie to AZ GOP considering stripping power from an elected office only when Dems win it, the Republican Party is increasingly refusing to cede power when they lose elections
Update: Arizona state House GOP has passed a bill in a committee that strips Dem Secretary of State Katie Hobbs' power to defend election lawsuits & hands that power to GOP Attorney General Mark Brnovich, but only through the end of Hobbs' term in 2022 abc15.com/news/state/sec…
In what is a highly petty move, the Arizona GOP's bill also strips Dem SoS Hobbs of her oversight of the state Capitol's museum after she flew a gay pride flag from the Capitol balcony in 2019
Read 4 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
15 May
Mississippi is now firmly the least democratic state:

Huge barriers to voting

1 in 9 people banned from voting for life due to a felony (Black voters at 2x the rate of whites)

Dems would have to win the popular vote by an impossible 15% to win the GOP-gerrymandered legislature
Mississippi:

Has no early voting

Requires an excuse & *notarization* for both requesting & casting an absentee ballot

Requires voters to register 30 days before Election Day, which is the maximum allowed under federal law, & no online, same-day or automatic voter registration
It is entirely not a coincidence that the state with the highest proportion of Black citizens is also the least democratic in America.

They still have vestiges of their 1890 Jim Crow constitution in effect & until last year even had a hyper-gerrymandered "electoral college" law
Read 5 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
14 May
A huge blow to Mississippi democracy. Reformers had been trying to pass an initiative to finally adopt early voting & could've used one to ban gerrymandering.

Republicans in myriad states have responded to progressive & democracy-reform initiatives by trying to kill initiatives
The GOP playbook in so many states in the past decade has been to gerrymander & pass new voting restrictions in the legislature, then when activists try to fight back using ballot initiatives, pass legislation trying to kill off the initiative process too dailykos.com/stories/2019/7…
The GOP-dominated Mississippi Supreme Court used an absurd reason for gutting the ballot initiative process amid ongoing efforts to pass voting reforms & Medicaid expansion, & this should be a federal equal protection violation
Read 6 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
13 May
Sigh. Oklahoma GOP legislators passed their legislative gerrymanders with most Dems voting for them just like they did last decade (story doesn't say if Dems got anything for it), which the GOP will undoubtedly use to argue in bad faith that they didn't gerrymander any districts
This is something that happens from time to time: Democrats in particular are more likely than the GOP to support the other side's gerrymander if the GOP gives certain Dems districts that they like even if they have no hope of winning significant power. Happened in Ohio in 2011
Oklahoma Republicans passed these new legislative gerrymanders using population data estimates since the 2020 census data won't be available until mid-August, risking a lawsuit, though they say could revise them later with hard census data if necessary to equalize populations
Read 4 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
30 Apr
Terrible news for American democracy: Joe Manchin becomes the first Senate Democrat to come out against the #DCstatehood bill, ensuring that 700,000 citizens remain disenfranchised & increasing the likelihood of a return to GOP Senate minority rule washingtonpost.com/local/dc-polit…
Because of how the states were drawn & malapportioned, the Senate imposes a huge penalty against Black, urban, & Dem voters like those in D.C. The GOP has run the Senate most of the time since the late 1990s despite never winning more votes than Dems once
Dems represent >56% of the U.S. population despite holding just half the Senate seats. We're stuck in a democratic doom loop where our lack of fair elections makes it impossible to make elections fairer. Manchin's vote wouldn't be needed if the Senate didn't already penalize Dems
Read 6 tweets
Stephen Wolf Profile picture
26 Apr
Happy census day! In two hours, the census will release 2020 state population counts, revealing which states will gain/lose congressional seats & Electoral College votes in reapportionment.

As a preview, here's what the 2020 estimates showed, but several states are on the bubble
While this data will tell us how many congressional seats each state gets, we still won't know how the population within states has been redistributed until the census publishes census block-level data in August, when redistricting will begin in earnest
We'll update these maps once the 2020 reapportionment numbers are out, but these cartograms based on 2019 pop estimates show the partisan control over 2020s congressional & legislative redistricting. GOP is set to draw 2-3 times as many districts as Dems dailykos.com/stories/2020/1…
Read 13 tweets

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