Following Election Day, I wrote about how, under the current electoral system, the GOP would not win the Presidency again for decades. The reason for this is that states like Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Texas were becoming purple. This would cause the Republicans to spend resources to hold onto states that have been traditionally Republican; they could not readily expand into Rust Belt states at the same time. But now, the Republicans have initiated a clever move, and the Democrats can’t actually talk about the real problem.

So, Republicans in Virginia are passing a law that divides the electoral votes in that state based on Congressional District. This is a system already in place in Maine and Nebraska. Each district gets one electoral vote; the popular vote winner in the state gets 2 electoral votes.

The Voting Rights Act required setting up what is known as majority-minority Congressional districts. The rationale for this is that, under the prior system, minorities were effectively disenfranchised since, in a state like Mississippi (with 40% African-Americans), for example, districts were gerrymandered to make them each 40% African-American. By doing this, with the racial basis for politics in the South, they were unlikely to garner very many Congressional seats in the region.

So, what the Act did was set up, in virtually each of these states, districts that concentrated the minority vote. This sounded fair to liberals so they agreed to it. That’s just one reason why liberals are not very bright; something that sounds fair must be right under their logic. Let’s first look at the rationale behind majority-minority districts.

First, it is essential to understand that you can’t make a Congressional district 51% or even 55% minority and guarantee minority Congressmen. There are a couple reasons for this. First, African-Americans vote in midterm elections at a much lower participation rate than do whites. Second, if whites make up 45% of the population, they are likely to still have the majority of people of voting age, since the birth rate is so much different among races. So, what was done is that these majority-minority districts end up with 85% or 90% minorities.

Now let’s look at the problems that have occurred because of these districts.

• If you gerrymander one district to make it primarily African-American, then the other surrounding districts will become whiter, obviously. So, you end up with one Democratic district and a number of Republican districts. The beauty of this move from a tactical point of view is that white Democrats can’t complain. If they did, they would alienate minorities, making them even less likely to vote.
• The South is much more conservative than are the other regions. So, the Republicans elected end up being much more conservative than Republicans in other regions. This has moved the Republican Party to the right.
• Likewise, by placing a minority into a one-party district, they are guaranteed their seat, unless challenged by another minority in a primary. These representatives end up with the most seniority in the Democratic Party, giving them control of committees. They tend to be much more liberal than Democrats nationally, inducing that party to move to the left.
• When a person has their Congressional seat for life, they are much more likely to be corrupt. So, we end up with situations like Jesse Jackson, Jr. or Iceman Bill Jefferson.

The beauty of the Virginia change is that liberals can cry about it, but they can never explain the real reason for the problem. So, I’d expect, as other states in this region to change their allegiance to become more independent, that they would also change their system to match Virginia. I read a number of liberal websites today; not one of them talked about this situation; they just cried ‘whaa, whaa, whaa, all the way home.’