I’ll tell you for the last time: The degree to which a jurisdiction is gerrymandered exists independently of past elections. Your red herring saying otherwise has begun to putrefy in the hot sun. The concept of a “gimi index” is a measure of the current distribution of political power at a particular point in time. Period.

It’s as if you’re denying the existence of gerrymandering even as a concept. You must think that that’s the only way you can avoid having to concede the reality that a maldistribution of seats won is the whole point of gerrymandering. This is the result it produces, and I’m just pointing out a way to measure it.

You’re really threatened by this line of argument, aren’t you?

Your voter suppression and election lies backfired. People who hadn’t voted in years stood in line for hours just so they could send your gang packing. And you people never even saw it coming. Remember your posts…
counting the days…ticking them off…one by one. Excuse me for rubbing it in, but you’re so busy rewriting history I feel the need to remind you.

You’ve been obsessing about 2010 like the Dems obsessed about bin Ladin. The only difference is Obama was reelected, you lost ground in both House and Senate, and bin Ladin is STILL dead.

Go back and google what the GOP chattering classes were saying and believing until 11PM on election night. You all live on a fantasy planet feeding off each other’s gaseous emanations.

The 21-seat Republican gain in Michigan and 64-seat gain in the U.S. House in 2010, a year before the redistricting? Why, that was a “fluke.”

Got it.

Have you considered developing a theory of Tachyon Elections, where redistricting actually affects the previous election? That would fit the facts better than anything I’ve seen here.

Isn’t it funny how everyone has a mental block except you?

They also have the same tool steel mental block I’m dealing with on this board.

If it’s all about the 2011 redistricting, how the hell did the Republicans pick up 64 House seats in Washington in 2010, a year before the last redistricting ever took place?

If you want to go back to the previous redistricting, in 2001, and theorize that the Republicans cooked that one, then you’d better have a good explanation for 2006 and 2008, when the Democrats picked up a combined 52 seats in the U.S. House.

Your premise blows goats, Robert. It’s entirely based on a number from Wikipedia that is unsourced, and doesn’t even appear on the same page for 2010. Not only that, but when looked at in the light of previous elections, it falls apart in several places.

When you scrape the paranoid lunacy off this year’s election in Michigan, even assuming those Wiki numbers are right, we have a Democratic plus margin in votes cast of about 7 percent, and a Democratic gain in seats of about 5 percent. What’s the problem here?

This is not a trivial debating point. It’s not an accident that I nicknamed pct_seats/pct_votes the “gimi index”, because there’s a correlation between the inclusiveness of political institutions and the inclusiveness of economic institutions.

I say that there’s a correlation between gimi and the “gini” index of maldistribution of wealth. And exhibit A is what Republicans are choosing to do with their disproportionate political power: Attacking the foundations of economic equality.

Maldistribution of political power leads to maldistribution of economic power.It always has, and it always will.

If you think I’m wrong about that, Tom, please explain how the complementary proposition can be true: That the American way, notably our broadly inclusive political institutions, leads to general prosperity.

Which one is it?

Why stop at Michigan? In the US House, Republicans got 48% of the popular vote, yet ended up with 54% of the seats. You think that might explain the yawning chasm between the extreme positions the House Republicans are taking compared to surveys that consistently show that Americans hold very different views? Notably on the subject of the rich paying a fair share of taxes.

The issue at hand is Republicans gaining disproportionate political power through corrupt means. Not how they did two years ago in Michigan. That red herrings is beginning to smell.

After redistricting, the legislature STILL did not reflect the true partisan makeup of the electorate. The fact that the numbers have changed is not relevant, it is not an improvement, it is not progress, and it is not evidence of the virtue of Republican administration. It is the result of what the gerrymanderers were forced to do in order to maintain their artificial majority under new demographic conditions.

The new districts did not reflect the new demographic reality, they simply responded to the Republican need to maintain a legislative advantage in a state where they were outnumbered and where people of both parties were leaving.

If the distribution of legislators has been deliberately engineered to not reflect the distribution of voters, it doesn’t matter what it was before. It simply doesn’t matter.

It’s not that hard to understand. Its called ‘ratio and proportion’. I believe they teach it in sixth grade.

“The Republicans lost five seats in the Michigan House in 2012 after redistricting, after picking up 21 seats in 2010 before any redistricting, and somehow there’s a ‘fix’ in?”

You would have thought that would be enough. Allow me to elaborate:

– In 2010, prior to the redistricting, the Republicans, with the same basic voting population in Michigan that exists now, took 21 new seats in the House.

– Count them. Plus 21.

– Total Republican seats, BEFORE redistricting, SAME voting pool: 64.

– Now, AFTER redistricting, the Republican DROP 5 seats, and you claim the Republicans would not have that current majority without the Evil Redistricting and Gerrymandering of 2011.

See the hole in your theory? If not, I’m almost out of options.

Why do you think “(t)he 2010 election is a very important part of this discussion”? If the gimi index (gerrymandering index, pct_seats_won/pct_vote_won) was higher in 2010, does that make Republicans heroes for making the state relatively less gerrymandered (but still in the top five)? If it was lower, doesn’t that prove what I said about the valiant gerrymandering efforts of the Republican Michigan House in 2011?

I don’t think the 2010 election is germane to this discussion. If you disagree, please dig up the numbers to show me.