Club PA 2.0 has arrived! If you'd like to access some extra PA content and help support the forums, check it out at patreon.com/ClubPA
The image size limit has been raised to 1mb! Anything larger than that should be linked to. This is a HARD limit, please do not abuse it.
Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
[Wisconsin] no longer ascribes to representational democracy
Posts
Political maneuvering of outgoing administration Rs: OK
Political maneuvering of incoming administration Ds: not OK
Honestly I don't see anything legal ever fixing it either
Republicans undo democracy in Wisconsin
The rare "good job, CNN!" from me.
I imagine it's somewhat similar in Wisconsin? Nationally, the threshold for dems taking over was about D+6. What's the threshold for Wisconsin? Is the problem just that threshold is impossibly high, or is there some other issue that prevents the dems from ever taking the legislature?
I make tweet.
D+ 30
Currently in Wisconsin its... a lot worse. There are 99 seats in the Assembly and Republicans won 63 of them in the last election (down from 64 in the prior). This gives them a 75% advantage in votes. Democrats won the total votes 52.99 to 44.75. This is an 18.5% vote advantage producing a 42.8% representation disadvantage
There is no democracy in Wisconsin
More likely Wisconsin becomes increasingly shitty, everyone who can leaves, no one new moves there, and the remainder chokes and starts a slow decline. Not bad for Wisconsin's feudal lords, but the serfs are in for a bad time.
I'd just like to point out that Minnesota is RIGHT HERE, and we have been blue since it was extremely unfashionable (we voted Mondale/Ferraro in 84!).
Nothing stops you from cheering for the Packers just because you are across the Mississippi River.
Oh.
Well then.
I make tweet.
Yeah, but the roving bands of Vikings though...
Though if we moved to Minneapolis we'd have the Herbivorous Butcher to visit on the regular, so I can't say I'm not tempted
Inquisitor77: Rius, you are Sisyphus and melee Wizard is your boulder
Tube: This must be what it felt like to be an Iraqi when Saddam was killed
Bookish Stickers - Mrs. Rius' Etsy shop with bumper stickers and vinyl decals.
They basically lucked out with the 2010 election, and the 2020 redistricting won't be able to save things.
Hell, the other thing is that what Democrats want for the most part is fair elections rather than ones disenfranchising Republicans.
2020 might've fixed things, except Republicans, having just lost in 2018, refused to transfer power. They quite literally don't believe in democracy in America anymore, which is refreshingly honest from a bunch of fucking fascists.
At this point, I think their response will be to initiate the Omega Protocol and burn the land from the safety of their underground lair.
Out of curiosity I checked the actual results page. Two takeaways:
Going from R+6 in the popular vote (2016) to D+8 (2018) flipped exactly one district (14th, Dem won by 138 votes)
The 50th highest vote percentage for Republicans was in the 92nd district where the Republican won by a little over 10 points.
So between these, we can estimate the required margin for Dems to win 50 seats: D+19.
They aren't going to let him is the thing.
Basically, nearly every Democratic seat is 100% uncontestable. Only a couple Republicans even bothered to run in blue seats. The Republican seats are all contestable, but Dems would need to win more like 60-65% statewide in order to capture those seats. Somewhere around that 60% figure Dems instantly go from about 35 seats to about 85 seats in the statehouse.
And my last hope for this state is that the actions of the republicans last night make that happen. If that doesn't happen then Wisconsin is fucked until the republicans say they are finished.
Also, I am fairly certain Minnesota is so democratic because a lot of the left in Wisconsin has fled there, which is not helping the problem and why I feel so bad for wanting to get out.
They had a Republican Governor in the 2010 anti-incumbency wave. A Republican Governor who oversaw MNDOT when an Interstate bridge collapsed and killed everybody.
The time for fixing Wisconsin was in 2013 when the recall elections happened. Wisconsinites let themselves be convinced that recall elections weren't the correct way to deal with Scott Walker.
Russ Feingold could have ended it right then, though. Polls had him beating Walker by a fair margin, but he didn't want to be governor...wanted his plush Senate seat back. How'd that work out for you, Russ?
Bitter? Me? Yes. We needed a Cincinnatus, but Cincinnatus he was not.
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/lame-duck-session-focus-turns-to-what-scott-walker-will/article_190fa291-6232-5169-9ca6-0cb077beef12.html
So yeah, here I am hoping once again that Scott Walker does the right thing while knowing that he absolutely will not.
One, win something like 65% of the vote statewide.
Two, win a majority of supreme court seats, sue the state to fix districting and/or give powers back to the governor so he can fix districting, have a normal election with normal district boundaries and get dems majority control of the legislature.
Once one of these things happen, try to amend constitution to make it so this shit can't happen anymore.
That about the size of it?
I make tweet.
If he vetoes he's basically announcing a 2020 run.
Nah, 2020 is right. 2016 showed that Walker can not win votes on a national stage as a typical republican. Vetoing this will make him persona non grata in many right wing circles, but it will make him the #1 Not-Trump Republican, which means he could attempt to primary Trump and many non-republicans around the country would gladly vote for Walker over Trump which drastically changes the calculus when trying to decide to run or not.
That said, I firmly expect him to just sign the bills and move on to wing-nut welfare
Vetoing those bills would be a rejection of the current GOP.
If he thinks that country is angry enough he could make a play for the anti-Trump people.
Alternatively it could be a play to blunt Blue anger so they can take back/hold any statewide positions next election.
This could be his “I promise to stop hitting you, baby” moment.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
This whole thing was probably his idea to begin with.
86 45
Nah, it’s because so much of our population is centered around the Twin Cities with liberal pockets like Duluth outside of them.
I don't think hope is what's being pinned here.
I believe in this last election the dems got 54% of all votes cast for the state house seats and won 36% of the seats. So that illustrates a bit the level of gerrymandering we are talking about. Frankly given how polarized the country is I am not sure short of some externally forced redistricting the dems will ever be able to overcome that to take back the state legislature.
Honestly I think the most likely route is probably some redoing of the VRA with some teeth and force some external agency to do the redistricting. Until/unless that happens what would have to happen to let democrats win even a close to fair amount of assembly seats per vote is basically implausible.
This is the tommy thompson plan to get republicans elected. Jack the state up so bad that if you happen to lose control now the dem holds the bag to undo 8+ years of damage in a couple years with a hostile legislature sandbagging everything and taking no blame because nobody knows who their state legislatures are anyway.
Well that and places like the iron range which are super GOP leaning simply have no real population left. All the young people headed to the twin cities or duluth so they could get jobs.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
E: Which is to say, their stranglehold is untenable long term if they're not actually growing the party with converts to their ideology.