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[Wisconsin] didn't mess it up for once
Dracomicron
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Sadly, "Democrats win Democratic Primary" is not the title of an article in The Onion, but something that actually had to be reported.
Why is this news? Well, it's because their primary challengers were actually Republicans who registered as Democrats in order to slow down the recall process.
Here's a list of the results:
If you've been watching only mainstream media for the past five months, you may not know what the big deal in Wisconsin is. Well, basically, new Governor Scott Walker is a longstanding union hater who got elected as Governor of Wisconsin five months before his actions as Milwaukee County Executive got reversed by the courts and proceeded to enact a draconian set of conservative policies with the Republican legislature, focussing on, but not limited to, destroying collective bargaining for public sector unions. This resulted in 14 State Senate Democrats fleeing the state as a legislative trick to slow down the proceedings and enormous protests in the state capitol of Madison and around the state, and now, as noted above, recall elections against the eligible Republican State Senators in an effort to stall the Walker agenda. Walker himself can't be recalled until he's been in office a year, but, believe me, the state's Democrats have plans for that, too.
When Scott Walker isn't trying to drive the Democratic party from Wisconsin and sell the state's future to the Koch brothers, he likes to sit down with a nice cold beer, as long as it's macro-brew shit.
So yeah. On Wisconsin! Go Badgers!
The State wrote:The six Democrats who won on Tuesday — Nancy Nusbaum, state Representative Sandy Pasch, Shelly Moore, state Representative Fred Clark, Jessica King and Jennifer Shilling — will now seek to unseat six incumbent Republicans in recall elections on August 9.
Why is this news? Well, it's because their primary challengers were actually Republicans who registered as Democrats in order to slow down the recall process.
Here's a list of the results:
Progress Illinois wrote:* Former Brown County Executive Nancy Nusbaum of De Pere defeated Otto Junkermann of Allouez, a one-time Republican state representative and past supporter of Sen. Rob Cowles (R-Allouez).
* Rep. Sandy Pasch (D-Whitefish Bay) easily defeated Gladys Huber, a Republican Party stalwart from Mequon. Pasch will face Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills).
* Shelly Moore, a River Falls teacher and official in the state's teachers union, defeated Isaac Weix of Menominee, a hardware store owner and former failed candidate in Republican Party primaries for state Assembly. She'll face Sen. Sheila Harsdorf (R-River Falls) in the general election. Weix did the best of all the Republican-backed candidates.
* Rep. Fred Clark (D-Baraboo) defeated Republican Rol Church of Wautoma for the right to face Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon).
* Jessica King, former deputy mayor of Oshkosh, defeated John Buckstaff of Oshkosh and will now go up against Sen. Randy Hopper (R-Fond du Lac).
* Rep. Jennifer Shilling (D-La Crosse) defeated James D. Smith, a hospital technician in La Crosse. She will now take on Sen. Dan Kapanke (R-La Crosse).
If you've been watching only mainstream media for the past five months, you may not know what the big deal in Wisconsin is. Well, basically, new Governor Scott Walker is a longstanding union hater who got elected as Governor of Wisconsin five months before his actions as Milwaukee County Executive got reversed by the courts and proceeded to enact a draconian set of conservative policies with the Republican legislature, focussing on, but not limited to, destroying collective bargaining for public sector unions. This resulted in 14 State Senate Democrats fleeing the state as a legislative trick to slow down the proceedings and enormous protests in the state capitol of Madison and around the state, and now, as noted above, recall elections against the eligible Republican State Senators in an effort to stall the Walker agenda. Walker himself can't be recalled until he's been in office a year, but, believe me, the state's Democrats have plans for that, too.
When Scott Walker isn't trying to drive the Democratic party from Wisconsin and sell the state's future to the Koch brothers, he likes to sit down with a nice cold beer, as long as it's macro-brew shit.
Wisconsin has three tiers, like many other states, for alcohol distribution: a brewer, a wholesaler that distributes the beer and a retailer that sells it. The system was put in place at the end of Prohibition and used by brewers that made Milwaukee famous: Miller, Blatz, Schlitz and Pabst. (They've since moved all or most of their facilities out of the state.)
The proposal was inserted into the proposed state budget by the Legislature's budget committee. It would combine the brewer's permit and wholesale and retail licenses given out by municipalities into a single permit under state control. It would effectively ban brewers from purchasing wholesale distributors — something craft brewers say they might need in the future to avoid getting squeezed out of the market by large corporate brewers.
So yeah. On Wisconsin! Go Badgers!
Dracomicron on
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If that fails they'll just alter the law so that Democrats need double the number of votes to win, we literally cannot win back the state as they have the ability to pass whatever they want and they own the court.
I'm predicting a bunch of small republican districts and one gigantic democratic one that's spread all over the state.
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Im pretty sure each district has to have equal population so itll probably a bunch of slightly red purple districts and a few dark blue districts.
Feel free to add me on whatever network, it's always more fun to play with people than alone
They can make it harder for Democrats to vote. They can gerrymander districts. They can try to de-fund their opponents. They can't change the fact that Wisconsin residents are generally honest, hardworking folk that believe in fair play. They also believe in voting.
Don't lose hope. Just keep fighting.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
Sure you might get some people who're stuck out in the boonies away from a polling location, but that is better than having the power of the day redistrict you so that your vote is effectively discounted. You'll probably also get ridiculous things like someone in Appleton being in the same district as Milwaukee and not feeling 'adequately represented,' but hey. If your district is defaulted to another party's power because of how the districts are reorganized for the party in power it won't much matter.
Heck, the census is run pretty competently, can we let them do it?
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
The whole redistricting thing via "MATH!" is actually a very difficult problem, to the point where supercomputers would be involved to get approximate answers. This is on top of the fact that perfectly random distribution of districts is actually the opposite of the intention. Some districts are gerrymandered to preserve majority minority districts.
The bolded above is a very bad statement regardless and really doesn't follow from the redistricting comments. There is no reason you can't have multiple polling places per a district. Shit, if I had to drive to the geographic center of my congressional district to vote I would spend about 5 hours in the car, one way.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Sigh.
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But if you take that area and deliberately make it a single area then it's voice has been amplified artificially. Yes, the computer is going to mess with things a bit, however I'm fairly sure you could set it to love clustering and then it would naturally group towns together and so on.
Having a computer do the districting according to fair laws which treat each person as equivalent is the only non-biased way. Yes, some blocks will be broken up, others however will probably be put back together.
Dude, what? That's not trivial at all. What you've described is a fairly strong heuristic that isn't fail-proof - what if you end up with a district-to-be that's underpopulated but hemmed in on all sides so you can't expand it?
I'm pretty sure solving this problem optimally is NP. I can't recall off the top of my head which NP-hard problem it reduces to, but I'm pretty sure it is. It's similar to some graph theory problems on node merging, and this would be an extremely dense graph due to the 2d nature of geographical distribution, plus having to weight distances between individuals because people aren't uniformly distributed.
(That being said, just because it's NP doesn't mean it's not doable. Just run it on a bigass computer for a few weeks and you should be fine. But far from trivial, and any implementation will involve some algorithmic tradeoffs that could have various political repercussions.)
Edit: The problem is clustering, which is defined differently via different algorithms, and has spawned a large number of NP-time algorithms, though there are poly-time algorithms that use stronger heuristics. Minimally though, choosing between the different categories clustering could result in very different electoral maps.
If you have 100 latinos and 300 upper class whites, and you've got 4 districts to divide up, 4 groups of 25 latino/75 white isn't going
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Its scary how often people can't see the forest from the trees.
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No, it wouldn't.
Except, you know, for the fact that Walker is actually confiscating the benefits that were paid for. Paying the union was an attempt to NOT get screwed over like that.
Well seeing as how she just lost 4k in benefits she should find a better rep.
That's not really accurate either, is it? Is Walker actually confiscating any benefits, particularly any benefits that are already purchased by employees? Is he reducing the current valuation of pensions? Is he retroactively denying health coverage?
Also, is "paying the union" an accurate description? It might be just semantics, but I feel terms are important in this discussion, because each side is trying to claim rhetorical ground through the language they use to frame the debate. Union member dues are confiscated before the employee ever touches the money. There is no payment involved because there's no choice involved. Moreover, isn't it reasonable to think that at least for some union members, union dues weren't an attempt to avoid getting screwed in contract negs, but the required fee for getting access to the job in the first place - access controlled by union gatekeepers? Could it not be the case that some people would rather lose $4K in benefits than be forced to pay a monthy fee to support an organization they oppose politically, simply for the opportunity to work?
Sure people do stupid things all the time.
Semantics are important sometimes, and any side degrades its position among those people trying to understand facts and chart a course through them, by engaging in these rhetorical misdirections.
If you want to talk about what's going on in Wisconsin, post here.
http://gab.wi.gov/sites/default/files/publication/65/recall_manual_for_congressiona_county_and_state__82919.pdf
I find that for partisan offices, each party "holds" its own primary, but the sitting legislator is automatically nominated for his own party. However, there is no requirement that a candidate in a partisan primary election need actually be a member of the party holding the election.
So there you go - definitive answer.