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Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised. Our schools have become increasingly political institutions in left and right form. The question I have is, as an independent, how do you stave it off completely?

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Make districts competitive. As long as the measure (votes in an election district) can be shaped such that winning the primary (initial election to determine the rep. for each party) basically promises a win in the general (an election where one rep from each party competes), polarization will go up and moderation will go down. Once districts are competitive, reps will face more pressure to the will of the people, as opposed to the people in just their party.

How would this work in deeply red or blue states? If you redraw the districts in California to put all the red voters together, that district will be competitive, but you have gerrymandered all the other districts to be blue forever.

I think districts should represent sections of the geographic population. Its fine for a district to be uncompetetive if the general population in that region have a strong lean one way or the other.

In practice, it means establishing non-partisan redistricting commissions, taking that power away from the legislature or the political parties:

https://www.nonprofitvote.org/nonpartisan-redistricting-citi...

This is a good response. I think California already does things like this, by having a non-partisan redistricting process. Texas, on the other hand, could barely more embrace parternship.

I doubt California does this well. My experience in California is that if you look at voting trends you'd think areas like SF are deeply blue, probably borderline far left. If you come out here though, it's really not that way. Then again, a comparison like the one you gave is bound to fail even the smallest smell test.

The outcome is similar in that votes don't really reflect what the population wants, but for different reasons.

Its not clear to me that a nonpartisan redistricting would automatically make districts more competitive, nor that the increased competitiveness would be the reason nonpartisan districts are better. That was OP's point.

> such that winning the primary … basically promises a win in the general

Assuming you have more than one political party, I don't see how that's possible. All but one candidate in the general election will lose, even though they all won their respective primaries.

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