Forever 20
If you let the popularity of an idea – no matter how silly – dictate your stance, then you are not a very good elected official.
If you completely ignore and shoo-away and disparage overwhelming public sentiment on an issue, then you are not a very good elected official.
And, in the latter case, doing so used to mean your job at risk. But that, in the large and depressing part, is no longer the case.
And that is a result of voting districts, at every level.
You can be consistently on the “20% side” of an issue, as it were, and defy the remaining 80% of public sentiment and not be too worried about losing your seat because the district you represent has been drawn in such a way as to make it nearly mathematically impossible.
You can be in favor of paying for trans surgeries, in favor of illegal alien criminals staying in the country, in favor of massive slush fund spending that only goes to your political cronies, you can be in favor of government censorship, and on and on and not worry even though the vast majority of the public – probably even your district – are opposed to them.
In other words, rotten districts are licenses to be crazy because you only have to get through the primary where the 20% miraculously becomes 50% because they are far more obsessed with their issues…they vote…or are voted for…or paid to vote…
Let’s start with Congress.
Out of the 435 seats, about 190 are Democrat automatics. If a combination of Albert Einstein, Cary Grant, and the Buddha challenged the incumbent in any of these seats he would lose, even if he ran as an independent (Run as a Republican? Don’t even bother.)
The same can be said for the 190 ribrock reliable Republican seats.
That leaves 55 seats, or only 13% of the entire House of Representatives, in play in any given year. (Note – if only legal residents and citizens were counted when creating congressional districts, it is estimated that at least 10 Democrat seats would slip at least into the “contestable” pile.)
And if you are in one of those safe seats you can do anything you want, no matter what the public thinks.
On the Senate side, it’s slightly different as they are statewide elections that far more closely represent the actual will of the voters. At this moment in time, about 15 states can reliably predicted to return two Democrats, about 18 to return two Republicans.
That leaves about 34 seats or so theoretically in actual play, a far larger percentage than in the House.
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Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
