She Knows She’s Going To Lose Her Election. She’s Running Anyway.
Kate Barr has no chance of winning this election, and she knows it. Barr is running as a Democrat for North Carolina’s 37th state senate district. If things go as expected, she’ll get around 30 percent to 35 percent of the vote.
That’s because Barr is running in a gerrymandered district. To have a chance of winning, Barr would need an astonishing statistical anomaly—a “99th percentile kind of blue wave,” as she tells Reason, to get elected. But just because Barr’s campaign is doomed doesn’t mean she isn’t going to have fun on the way to defeat.
“I’ve been training to lose this Senate race for all of my life,” reads the glib “about” section on Barr’s campaign website. “I voted for Al Gore in 2000, cheered for Carolina basketball during the Matt Doherty era, and watch the Carolina Panthers on Sundays (shudder).”
Barr says she was motivated to run after watching antigerrymandering efforts face losses at the Supreme Court and state-level courts. Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court—following a flip from Democratic to Republican control—reversed its own decision that had ruled partisan gerrymandering illegal. In the new map that followed, the heavily democratic Charlotte suburb Barr lives in was redrawn to be included in a district dominated by the much more rural and conservative Iredell County.
“When I learned about gerrymandering at that point,” says Barr, “I was like, ‘this is what’s making our politics feel so extreme.'”
These changes haven’t just affected state-level races like Barr’s. In 2023, the Republican-controlled state house approved a congressional map that will likely flip three Democratic seats—halving the state’s Democratic representation in Congress.
Partisan gerrymandering—drawing an electoral map to make uncompetitive districts—happens across the pol
Article from Reason.com
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