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Comment by SlowRobotAhead | Hacker News Reader

>districts lean heavily Democratic (because, duh, California)

Except that outside of a few cities, California is actually quite red. IIRC would be a red state if LA and SD were underwater.

https://www.politico.com/election-results/2018/california/

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This is a weird statement. You're saying California would be a red state if you removed a lot of Democrats.

About 50% of registered voters in the state are Democrats, and 30% Republican: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_locations_by_voter_...

So yes, if you removed close to 3 million democrats from the state somehow, it would be a tie. Probably an easier method would be for Republicans to make their policies more attractive to more people.

The topic was on gerrymandering districts - there are more republican districts. The part of the comment I was replying to was "DISTRCITS lean heavily Democract" which is not true, more DISTRICTS lean Republican.

Well the majority of California's population is in those cities' metro area. The map only looks that red when it isn't accounting for population.

I can’t see how you came to that conclusion whatsoever, though I may be biased as an SF-born Democrat.

If you’re looking at the governor race, the votes eyeball to 2.8m Dem, 1.7m Rep.

As well, it was surprising to me that you would choose to remove SD, as a Republican lead that county, though the Democrat leader there was only down by 10k (of ~400k total) votes.

Edit: 400k, not 350

He's talking about counties, which are spread across a diverse geographic region. As per the image there it looks like the clear majority of California's counties leaned republican for governor. But the counties that leaned democrat are very densely populated and so end up choosing for the entire state.

On a national level this is the reason for the existence of both the electoral college and the senate. Imagine we did not have the college or senate and there was one very heavily populated state with a large group of mostly homogenous voters. Suddenly that state would be deciding every single action for the entire nation. Whether this is a good or bad thing probably depends on your views on what representation means, but it's safe to say that people in many states would feel they lacked such - which was the very reason that we rebelled against the British Empire.

Wait why should how homogenous a State of determine it's voting representation?

In effective two party systems, votes cancel each other out. If I vote A and you vote B, then our votes effectively negate each other. This is why 'strategic voting' is a thing - a problem that does not exist in more sane proportional systems with more diverse representation.

The same thing would happen all the way up. Imagine we have two parties, again A and B, that are completely mutually exclusive - one representative always voting exactly the opposite of the other. And now imagine we have a state Massivefornia that has 1 billion voters and a proportional number of representatives, but it's split exactly 50/50. And then there's the other state, Lonely Island, with exactly 1 voter and 1 representative (who... I guess would be one and the same?). In this example, Lonely Island would decide each and every action that goes forward as Massivefornia and their 50/50 split of A/B cancels itself out on everything.

Yes, thank you, I didn't realize it would be such a difficult topic to understand.

It’s not hard to understand - land doesn’t vote, people vote, and measuring party share by the wrong metric is silly. Tango’s explanation was very clear and perhaps helpful to others but didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.

Ed: Your comment elsewhere in thread about districts helped the most in realizing we were talking about different things. MB

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