- Not if they can strip the powers of positions that they have lost: https://www.apnews.com/62c976c13a574fa7a8cbb2aa4de425da
- Not if they have a propaganda media outlet that misinforms voters: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-...
The cronysm and party-before-country behavior of the republican party is a threat to the democracy of the nation.
Meanwhile, the Senate and the Presidency are controlled by Republicans, and gerrymandering is utterly irrelevant to those outcomes.
You're correct that at the first order gerrymandering is irrelevant to the Senate and Presidency. Gerrymandering comes into play as a second-order effect, though; when used at the state level, it can cause state legislatures to effectively lock to a party. These state legislatures can then make changes to the way voting is organized in their state, enfranchising and disenfranchising voters in ways that support their party, and funding/defunding polling districts per the same. This has an effect that can be plenty large enough to swing statewide elections: see the last election's shenanigans in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida if you're in doubt.
You said "explain your reasoning", and that's what I did.
No need to get defensive over it and try to pretend like it's irrelevant to the discussion. This is literally the discussion you explicitly asked for. If you don't like the fact that the Republican party has acted in a decades-long effort to guarantee their own power in perpetuity with or without public support, don't get mad at me, get mad at them.
I never disputed Republicans’ attempt to give themselves an electoral advantage. I just disagree that this is consequential, much less decisive. As you yourself argued elsewhere in the thread, NC Republicans’ chicanery could mean a 2% swing in the House. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’re telling me that by attributing 100% of R success to trickery, in a state that’s the worst of the worst in this regard and so yields the biggest effect size, you can create a counterfactual where Democrats have 2% more seats in just one half of Congress?
Your smoking gun is a rounding error. So I’m asking again: how do these sorts of numbers lead you to believe what you apparently believe?
In any event, the House sits beside the Senate and the Executive. As another commenter pointed out, this case at best explains ~2% of the dynamics of one out of three legislative bodies offices. And sure, other states might contribute a bit more. Fine, maybe it clears my 1% threshold; but just barely.
I'm not here to defend Republicans (I think they're pretty bad) or the practices you described (I also think those are bad). But that doesn't change the fact that gerrymandering and power grabs and Fox News are nearly completely inconsequential in explaining the world in front of us. Quit with the liberal wishcasting. People don't vote Republican because they've been misled by some sinister conspiracy. They just don't want what you're selling.
Regardless. The biggest obstacle to NN is currently the Senate and the Presidency. Two out of your three points are completely irrelevant to those offices. Is it all just Fox News? The Russians?
Wave your wand and make it disappear. The House is now... still Democratic. And the Senate is now... oh dang, still Republican! And the Trumpenfuhrer... still there!
Sounds to me like your electoral boogeymen don't have that much explanatory power.
That's not true. People voted them out in 2016 but their votes were not counted, or their registrations were falsely and illegally cancelled, etc. There is a lot more at play here than people's choices; and given that people's ability to choose with correct information and free will has been significantly hampered by Republican-led efforts to reduce the quantity of real factual information in the hands of voters, replaced with lies designed to steal votes.
Now I know that Donald Trump lies a lot, like a lot but sometimes he tells the truth. He has stated at least 5 times that neither he nor his supporters would accept any election results where he did not win.
The current President threatens the nation regularly with his active plans to cancel the next elections and stay in power.
Be careful assuming that the popularity of politicians or their party has anything at all to do with them being in power. It doesn't.
I have no special interest in American politics as I just watch from the other side of the border, but I'm pretty sure my understanding of the political system down there is full enough that I'm right in saying that a sitting president can't legally follow through on threats like that without getting evicted from office.
Aren't there failsafes and backup plans and laws and a justice department to prevent presidential overreach?
This is the whole purpose of the three branches of government.
For example, the chief architects of the Constitution, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, tried several times to eliminate the Electoral College with amendments once they saw how it behaved. They wrote extensively about how their intention had been subverted and the language they chose was a mistake, but other politicians rebuffed their efforts to fix the mistake, and decided instead to exploit it: presidential candidates can ignore most of the voters.
Any party is only as effective as the numbers of people they have in office.