Nick Ramos 🗳
20.5K posts
@NicholasMRamos
Executive Director of @WisDemocracy and proud @mulaw Lawyer. Love sarcasm, movies, music, and Cleveland sports. My tweets are my own opinion. ICEMAN coming 🦉
The speed at which red states are moving to diminish Black voting power shows how Reconstruction was necessary and should never have ended.
POV: it's 2004 and you're about to watch a Disney Channel movie
It's not "gerrymandering" that causes progressives to huddle together, fearful of encountering neighbors who think differently, meaning that even compact lines produce more 52% Republican districts and 95% Democrat ones.
I used to teach Election Law. One of the first things you do when you get to redistricting is show that, in single member geographic districts, this kind of thing can happen without an intentional partisan gerrymander. It all depends on where the voters favoring the respective parties live. Because we know that D voters are more concentrated that GOP voters, you would not expect the composition of the legislature to match the statewide vote for Ds. In fact, you have to gerrymander - i.e, draw districts with partisan intent - to make that happen. You can argue that the GOP in WI added partisan slant - politicians tend to do that - but this type of comparison is not the proper test for a partisan gerrymander.
Dem #WIGOV candidate Joel Brennan was recently asked about being the only white, male Dem candidate in the race. He said: "I hope we get to a point in Wisconsin, in America, and maybe this is a step towards it, where we actually can just choose and it be based on vision, it based on how hard you work, based on qualifications. I don't think we're there yet." David Crowley's camp responds: "This kind of thinking is unproductive and underestimates Wisconsin voters." Asked about his answer, Brennan's camp says he does believe "Wisconsin can and is ready to elect a woman or person of color to be governor." jsonline.com/story/news/pol…
