comment: >
  
  Why is everything run by the people in the city? Cows need votes too
context: Part of the issue is some states simply aren’t competitive outside of hyper concentrated areas. You’d have to go out of your way to create a Republican seat in MA or a Democratic seat in ID. It’s a little easier to imagine Dem seats in red states because so many of them crack deep blue cities (looking at you TN & TX) that left in their own homogenous districts would be unwinnable for Republicans—indeed, their current majority is basically built off of this—than it is more GOP seats in blue ones (many have non-partisan redistricting, although you could argue for IL being worth a couple of red seats). It would make a mockery of the principles people say they want; compact lines that respect municipal & county boundaries and when necessary to split them for population requirements to do so in a way that reflects communities of interest.
  Now what you might be able to argue for would be a plan where the median seat was required to match the statewide partisan lean (perhaps with a secondary requirement that the average across all seats couldn’t deviate by more than…2 points?) The exact formula of what to include and how to weight it would be the subject of a lot of self interested wrangling, but theoretically, a playing field where, for example, Ohio’s 8th seat of 15 was R+7ish or Wisconsin’s 4th and 5th seat of 8 had to average to D+0.5 and only half the seats could be redder or bluer would leave the House very reactive to the electorate. 
  You’d still have very safe seats on both ends, but under this scenario, instead of 18 Biden won GOP held districts, you might have 40. The careful observer will note that’s a lot larger that the 20 recalcitrant holdouts denying the speakership to McCarthy at present, and would also have given the GOP a thundering majority whereby the Freedom Caucus could stomp its feet all they wanted and it wouldn’t mean a damn thing. >
  
  To your point...In the NC case a few years ago, the republicans essentially argued that democrats didn't have a gerrymandering problem, they have a geography problem. When the state legislature drew new compact districts, it created an imbalance since the metro areas leaned so heavily democrat, but were geographically compact. >
  
  That's only really an issue because we have an arbitrary cap (538) on the number of congressional representatives, so you end up in situations where in deep blue areas you might have 1 congressional representative representing >1 million people and in rural areas you have 1 rep representing <500,000 people. >
  
  Do you mean between states? Within a state districts are required to be as  close to even population as possible >
  
  It was capped because even 435 was becoming too cumbersome >
  
  I think for the good of the republic, we're probably going to have to revisit what is "too cumbersome" in that regard. >
  
  Partying like it's 1929.
  I still maintain that you could kill like three or four birds with one stone if you just modernized the Capitol building to not just enable, but make standard "Work from Home (District)".
  
  Far better for the environment. (Frequent air-travel sucks.)    
  Better for the constituents.  
  Better for the congress-critters.  
  Completely invalidates the problem of congressional size.  
  
  Hell, under that system you could theoretically go back to the 1 seat per 30-45k people stipulated in the constitution, though I admit it would be more than a little weird having ~7000 congress members... that's probably just because I'm old and used to being represented by so few. I'm sure in a decade or two people would wonder how the hell we ever managed the way it is now.
  ...which leads to the potential 5th point (if it WERE increased to that level).
  
  Would probably reduce the effect of big money on congress significantly.   
  
  There were like 10 house races last year that ran north of $15M. If you increase the seats by a factor of 10-20 EITHER you're gonna have to swing FAR more money out of the current donor pool (unlikely), massively expand the size of your donor pool (even less likely), or more realistically the price of the majority of campaigns is gonna fall into a level (~50-100k?) that's "reasonable" (for a certain level of reasonable) for... just about anyone with a little grass-roots support in their teeny tiny little district and like... a decent job or something they can borrow against from the bank? >
  
  I'm gonna say the semi-boomer thing of "in-person collaboration is important" because that's still how my industry still works. But there are very likely models and technologies that can make a "virtual Capitol" workable, and also less of a security risk. >
  
  Fetishization of competitiveness as a reaction to gerrymandering is a fine enough goal, but we need to distinguish between seats that are "safe" because they've been designed that way and seats that are "safe" because the existing community of interest has an overwhelming preference for one party over the other.
  Consider AL-7, which packs the state's black voters into a single district and guarantees safe GOP seats across the rest of the state; IL-4 which is drawn to link Chicago's two major Hispanic/Latino populations and guarantee a candidate from that background in Congress; OH-9 which snakes along Lake Eerie packing Democrats, and CA-12 which is pretty neat rectangle parked over Oakland. None of the four seats are competitive, but they're non-competitive for very different reasons.
  Is there value in creating new districts that are "competitive," but link voters with wildly different racial, socioeconomic, cultural, or geographical backgrounds? Pretend we have one million voters, half of which are true-blue Los Angeles young, affluent, educated hipsters and half of which are ruby-red Central Valley farmers. Is it more democratic to have two safe seats where each population is guaranteed to have its needs heard in Congress? Or to split them into two "competitive" seats, where if one side wins both, hundreds of thousands of Americans are ignored at the federal level until the next election? >
  
  2 competitive seats because otherwise the candidates are disincentivized from considering the positions of the other side and instead will only work for the priorities of their "base", parties will run less moderate candidates, and compromise becomes a four letter word.
  Safe seats create greater polarization. >
  
  Having a democracy with competitive elections is certainly better than one without them.
  However, imo, it won't solve the fundamental problems around primaries and fundraising. Primaries will still hew to the extremes and fundraising will still largely be controlled by national parties. You may have more competitive elections and there may be more moderate candidates than you see in very safe seats, now, but you'll still see plenty of candidates who have to play heavily to their base to win. >
  
  I'm pretty aure it actually would do a lot to solve primary issues, since people are nuanced enough to know crazy people won't win a competitive general election. >
  
  That's not true of the current GOP/MAGA caucus. Look at Doug Mastriano for example, and he's hardly alone. >
  
  
  Doug Mastriano
  
  Didn't he lose? >
  
  Yes, the extremist who won the primary lost the statewide general election in a purple state. Hence my response to this comment:
  
  I'm pretty aure it actually would do a lot to solve primary issues, since people are nuanced enough to know crazy people won't win a competitive general election. >
  
  Exactly, are you agreeing with me? Sorry I'm confused,crazy will lose a competitive general election and people don't like to lose. >
  
  I suspect the solution to the quagmire of US politics would be to get away from the winner takes all paradigm and instead have each district represented by the top two vote leaders, with each bringing the votes they received into office (ie 13000 people voted for you - your voting power in the body you’ve been elected to equals that number of votes). >
  
  That's an interesting approach, but I think one consequence is that it would skew the representation away from the population.
  I live in a poor city. People here just don't vote - sometimes as low as 20% in state elections. They still get a representative though, just as much as a suburban town that has an 80% turnout.
  Imagine two cities, one rich, one poor, same population. Why should the rich city have 4x the power as the poor city - because rich people vote more?
  Or another way to look at it is, what if one city is very happy with their representative, and there is no challenger. Turnout would be way down. So they get less representation than the place where 51% of the population hates their corrupt representative, and thus turns out to vote him out? >
  
  Those are great arguments, but ultimately democracy is about participation.
  We won’t know the political will of people who don’t turn up to vote.
  I would also expect that with such a system, people who feel well represented have an incentive to turn up. >
  
  But not everyone has the time to vote. If it was purely based on votes casted, the retired boomers will have even more power than they already do today >
  
  Arguably, that problem is equally present today >
  
  I've thought for years that gerrymandering was one of the biggest threats to our democracy. Just imagine if our representatives had to actually appeal to both sides. They might actually get shit done >
  
  Imagine if there were more than two sides!  If Walmart or GE or Haliburton had to lobby sox different parties, maybe corporate sponsorships would have less of an impact. >
  
  That is what you typically get under a proportional representation rule.
  Under a geographically bound majority rule you rarely see third parties prevail for long.
  Proportional representation would also have the following benefit: If a presidential candidate has more votes, he wins. No matter the states electoral outcomes. To me, handing the presidency to the guy who lost the popular vote is insane. That is a huge damage to democracy. >
  
  They why do most countries, even with first past the post, have more than two parties in their legislative bodies? >
  
  They usually have two dominant large parties and most of the time additional ones only represent their region, like the SNP in the UK. >
  
  Plus, for at least the UK and Canada, they only elect the lower legislative house, rather than both legislative houses and the executive. So the the effects that push towards 2 parties are applied once rather than 3 times. >
  
  How about an even better idea: NO MORE DISTRICTS. NO MORE LINES. 
  Instead, people get a ranked choice vote with everyone running for the representative seats for that state, and the top several winners are sent to congress.