Juneteenth

Happy June 19th, the day that Democrats in Texas were finally forced to free their slaves.  Yes, the Republicans - the party begun to oppose slavery - accomplished the mission only a decade after the party's founding.  The Democrats spent the next century trying to prevent blacks from equality.  Not until LBJ did the Democrats change tactics and ''embrace" equality while simultaneously accusing Republicans of doing all the things they had done for a century.  Today, you will find many ill-educated people who think Jim Crow and segregation were Republican policies and Lincoln was a Democrat.  This miseducation is not accidental.

Juneteenth, brought to you by the Republican Party.

Gerrymander

Based on the 2024 election results, there are 21 blue states and 29 red states.  The blue states account for 206 seats in the House of Representatives.  The red states account for 229.  Of course, there are Republican Congressmen from blue states and Democratic Congressmen from red states.  How does that break down?

Now let's talk gerrymandering.  The idea is rather than let the voters pick their representative, the representative picks the voters.  This allows for safe seats or splitting strongholds of the other party into bite-size chunks that can be overwhelmed and digested by the ruling party.  Depending on how the districts are drawn, the dominant party can greatly weaken the opposition.  Let's look at some examples.

Illinois (blue) has 17 congressional districts.  In 2024, the state votes 43% for Trump and 54% for Harris.  How many Republican congressmen are there from Illinois?  Three.  That is 17% representation.

Texas (red) has 38 districts.  In 2024, the state went to Trump by 56% to 42% vote.  How many Democrat congressmen from Texas?  Thirteen.  That is 34%.

California (blue) has 52 districts and broke heavily for Harris: 58% to 38%.  Republicans hold 9 of the 52 seats, or 17%.

Many states are difficult to gerrymander.  Several only have 1 congressman (Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming).  The smaller states - 4 congressional districts or less - are mostly unremarkable.  That eliminates 21 states from the list, leaving 14 blue states and 15 red states.  Here is the new breakdown:

First thing to note is that there were no Republicans in the smaller blue states, but there were 5 Democrats in the smaller red states.  Interesting.  In a red state, representation is 71% Republican vs. 29% Democrat.  In a blue state, it is 73% Democrat to 27% Republican.  Not a big difference.

Harris carried blue states by an average of 55% to 43%.  Trump carried red states by an average of 58% to 41%.  Trump performed better in blue states than Harris in red states and yet, the House was on a razor's edge.  

The blue states have done a far better job of gerrymandering than the red states.  If the Republicans adopt the same strategy, they will gain seats.  Having already gerrymandered the blue states, there is little the Democrats can do to counter it, other than complain.  That 34% representation in Texas might soon drop to the level of an Illinois or California.

In the near future, perhaps an unbiased AI can draw districts that don't create ludicrous zigzag patterns that weave through various counties and cities to generate a safe seat for the dominant party.  For the time being, a party would be foolish not to gerrymander.

Maybe the Parties Did Flip?

Recently, someone noted that Trump, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk all used to be Democrats.  In fact, Ronald Reagan had been a Democrat in his younger days.  Reagan often said that the party left him rather than he left the party. Tulsi had run for president as a Democrat during the 2020 primaries, but she soon broke with her party on topics such as LGBTQ, the border, and foreign policy.  Her views on all of these would have been mainstream Democrat in 2008 when Obama won the presidency, but were now viewed as 'far right' positions.  RFK Jr. has been an environmentalist for all of his professional life and a vaccine skeptic for nearly 20 years.  He was a Democrat through all that time until last year, when he became an independent.  Then he supported the Republican to Make America Healthy Again.  Why didn't his message resonate with his old party?  Elon voted for Biden in 2020.  However, the censorship that followed led him to buy Twitter.  Like RFK Jr., he is clearly on the environmentalist side of the aisle - traditionally aligning with Democrats - but he too switched to the Republican candidate.  Elon has tweeted this image to show how he didn't leave the party, it left him:

Remember, Obama opposed same sex marriage in 2008, the trans issue was on the far fringe, and Democrats were the anti-war party.  Today, Trump is anti-war, has no issue with same sex marriage, and opposes transgenderism with regard to minors.

When the party flip story is told, it is always about racism.  Democrats grew into anti-racists and Republicans - the party created to oppose slavery - adopted racism to win votes.  No.  That is false.  However, it does seem that the parties have traded some policies over the years.

The Fictional Party Flip

Democrats are always eager to explain away the past dark periods of their party by explaining how the parties flipped.  Post Civil War, blacks supported the Party of Lincoln, the Republican Party.  Democrats may have been forced to surrender slavery, but they imposed Jim Crow as soon as Reconstruction ended.  This continued for decades, especially since the Republicans held dominance in the government from 1861 until 1913.  In 1913, Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated president and reintroduced segregation in federal workplaces.  He was an apologist for the South and screened Birth of a Nation at the White House.  However, when FDR was elected in 1932, he retained segregation.  In 1948, Harry Truman desegrated the military.  In 1954, during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Court overturned the policy of 'separate but equal.'  Eisenhower set about enforcing this with the National Guard and pushing both the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts.

By the time JFK arrived in office, the writing was on the wall for segregation.  It was doomed and any Democrat with sense was going to abandon it.  Where Republicans had argued to just treat blacks like everyone else, Democrats embraced a strategy of one-upmanship.  Not only would they pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act (with strong bipartisan support), but they would also implement affirmative action.  Though a noble goal, it assumed employers were guilty of discrimination if the pool of employees did not match local demographics.  So, the Democrats went from discriminating against blacks to now discriminating in their favor.  Low grade reparations?  Though Republicans continued with the same old policy of just treat everyone the same, that now meant repealing quotas.  That's anti-black!  Sigh.

The Democrats have spent decades claiming that Republicans are holding blacks back and yet, most blacks live in cities that have been governed by Democrats for all those decades.  For instance, Detroit hasn't had a Republican mayor since 1962.  Whose fault is the decline of that city?  What about St. Louis?  Last Republican mayor left in 1949.  Philadelphia?  Last Republican mayor left in 1952.  The modern Democrats are the same as the old Democrats, they have just changed their tactics.  The Democrats have trapped blacks in a new kind of plantation - harvesting their votes during election season by blaming the Republicans for their misery.

Juneteenth

On June 19th of 1865, the last slaves were freed in Texas.  Mostly.  There were other slaves in states that did not join the Confederacy; they had to wait until the end of the year for the 13th Amendment.  It should be noted that it was Democrats who practiced slavery and Republicans who freed the slaves.  This is not only a holiday for African-Americans, but one for Republicans.  At least, it should be.

When the Party Cracked

In 1848, President Polk could claim success on all four of his campaign promises.  He had reduced tariffs, reestablished an independent treasury, settled the Oregon boundary with Great Britain, and acquired California from Mexico.  Promises made and promises delivered.  This should have been a boon to his party.  Instead, his success broke his party.  That vast stretch of land was now up for grabs between the free states and the slave states.  Many northern Democrats weren't keen on the extension of slavery.  These voters split from the Democratic Party to join the Free Soil Party.  Former President Martin Van Buren (1837-1841) was chosen as the presidential nominee and Charles Francis Adams - son of President John Quincy Adams and grandson of President John Adams - as the VP nominee.  Though the Free Soil Party didn't earn a single electoral vote, it did manage to accumulate 10% of the popular vote.  The Free Soil Party out-performed the Democrats in three states.

Of course, Vermont and Massachusetts had voted for Henry Clay (Whig) in 1844, so Van Buren did little damage to the Democrats there. The important state was New York with 36 electoral votes.  In 1844, President Polk carried the state by a margin of 5,100 votes.  Native New Yorker Van Buren took all those votes and much more.  General Taylor, the Whig candidate, defeated Lewis Cass by an electoral vote of 163 to 127.  If Cass had carried New York, that would have been exactly reversed.  Van Buren knew full well that he had no chance of winning and that he was almost certainly handing the presidency to the Whigs, but he had moved toward the abolitionist camp over the years.

This was the second - and final - time that the Whigs won the presidency.  Like the previous time, the president died during his term: Harrison had only served a month as president and Taylor died after 16 months.  By the next presidential election, it was the Whig Party that unraveled.  By the mid 1850s, the disaffected Democrats, the Free Soil Party, the American Party, and various other splinter groups formed the Republican Party.