When I hear that members of the US Republican Congress and Senate don't care about a backlash against their shutdown of the federal government because they almost all hold safe seats, I wonder how this can be. But this week The Economist magazine clearly explains the formula. Gerrymandered electoral boundaries are set by state governors - and they are mostly Republican. About setting these boundaries, The Economist explains:
“The ideal strategy for elections is to make sure your districts have just enough of a partisan tilt to ensure you’ll almost certainly win them, but not so much that you win them overwhelmingly and waste your votes. Meanwhile, you want to cram the opposition’s voters into districts which they win by overwhelming margins and thus waste their votes. Republicans can make sure their seats are both safer and more numerous by achieving lots of districts where they’re likely to win by a safe but not extravagant margin, say 15-30%. If they pursue this strategy, they should wind up with relatively fewer seats that tilt overwhelmingly Republican. Meanwhile for Democrats, whose votes have been “cracked” or “packed” such that they lose more districts, the districts that they do hold would be more likely to be overwhelmingly Democratic than is the case for Republicans.”
And so the Republicans lost the 2012 popular vote in Congress but hold many more seats than the Democrats. I'm amazed there is not more backlash against this corruption of the electoral system.