This is the link to the article at the Maddow blog. Quoting from the RedMap project, they have posted:



President Obama won reelection in 2012 by nearly 3 points nationally, and banked 126 more electoral votes than Governor Mitt Romney. Democratic candidates for the U.S. House won 1.1 million more votes than their Republican opponents. But the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives is a Republican and presides over a 33-seat House Republican majority during the 113th Congress. How? One needs to look no farther than four states that voted Democratic on a statewide level in 2012, yet elected a strong Republican delegation to represent them in Congress: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Of course, Obama won, but we can't count on the Republicans being bad at math to protect us and our voices going forward. Republicans are planning to assign electoral votes according to the heavily gerrymandered districts. Example: the state of Pennsylvania in 2012. It went overall for Obama, so its 20 electoral votes were all cast for Obama. However, if this idea were implemented, based on the 18 heavily gerrymandered districts, 5 of the 18 votes would have gone for Obama, 13 for Romney (not sure about the other two).

I know many don't want to think about the 2016 election yet, but this is an extremely dangerous situation for us. Remember the 2010 mid-terms? How Democrats slept through that, and how Republicans gained control of the House, and gained control in many of the states - which led to this gerrymandering.

Of course, I'm preaching to the choir. And I'm not entirely sure what else to preach, but here are some starting points:

(1) We need to make sure everyone is aware of this

(2) We need to come up with better messaging. Math is no problem for a lot of people at dailykos, but it doesn't sell everywhere to everyone

(3) We need to fight in the targeted states. RedMap lists four, but I've got to think others, such as Virginia and Florida and Iowa are also being targeted.

I would love to see other suggestions on this, about what we can do to stop it.

I have edited this diary to include a comment from NWTerriD below:

If the proposed plan had been in place in 2012 in all of the states where the Republicans are pushing it now, Obama would not just have lost the election, he would have lost it by a "decisive" margin, despite winning the popular vote by 5 million votes.

This is a critical issue, my friends. We need to defend and attack.

Thanks for your time.

*

Tired of politics? Need to escape? Try my Greek mythology based novels, either the story of Oedipus from the point of view of Jocasta, or a trilogy about Niobe, whose children were murdered by the gods - or were they?



Rec list - I don't want to just say thanks for the honor, but that I am relieved tha people are paying attention. If we don't attack this, then every other battle will become much more difficult.