Many of my fellow Canadians don’t know that many American state legislatures are also up for election next week, and even fewer likely care. Which isn’t surprising - three provinces (New Brunswick, British Columbia and Saskatchewan) had provincial elections in the past few weeks, and how many of you even noticed?
Elections at the state level can be a very big deal, however. Electoral districts for the House of Representatives are drawn by the state legislatures, and Republicans have used their advantage to gerrymander districts to their advantage. Democrats have the opportunity to turn that around next week:
Most of the attention on the 2020 election is focused on who will sit in the White House for the next four years. But the 2020 election could also help decide who controls the House of Representatives for the next decade.
This is the last election before data from the census is released, so whoever emerges from this year holding power on the state level will have the power to redraw their state’s congressional maps — and maybe even give their side an unfair advantage in future elections. (Although this is not true everywhere, as some states have independent or bipartisan commissions draw their maps.)
Gerrymandering, or the act of purposefully drawing a map to advantage one political party or group, has a long history in this country — and politicians of all persuasions have been guilty of it. But the red wave election of 2010 upped the ante by giving Republicans lopsided control of the 2011 redistricting process. Thanks in large part to the 21 state legislatures and six governorships they picked up, Republicans were able to draw 55 percent of congressional districts, while Democrats drew just 10 percent.
As a result, in both 2012 and 2016, the House map was more biased toward Republicans than it had been at any point since the 1970s. Republicans even won 33 more House seats than Democrats in the 2012 election despite Democrats winning the House popular vote by 1.3 percentage points. And even as courts ruled some states’ maps unconstitutional and Democrats were able to flip the House in 2018, the median seat remained 4.4 points more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole.
[…]
…In the best-case Democratic scenario, the party would gain control over drawing 77 more seats and would share redistricting control over the other 55 with Republicans. That would give them redistricting control over 124 seats in total (29 percent) — slightly more than Republicans.
If there’s a blue tsunami next week, Democrats will get the chance to make the House of Representatives legitimately more representative, and…oh, who am I kidding, they’ll most likely follow the Maryland example and tip the scales in their own favor. That’s politics.
Speaking of Saskatchewan, the conservative Saskatchewan Party winning its fourth consecutive majority government got most of the attention, such as it was. The New Democrats finished a distant second. But Colby Cosh notes that a Western separatist (“Wexit”) party did surprisingly well:
…the Saskatchewan election represented the first genuine electoral test for the quasi-separatist “Wexit” sentiment on the Prairies. A party originally registered as Wexit Saskatchewan changed its identity a few months before the vote, becoming the Buffalo Party of Saskatchewan.
It ran only 17 candidates in particularly friendly ridings, adopting the ragbag of Wexit ideas devised in Alberta and giving them a Saskatchewan First twist. (Frankly, Alberta seems to be subtly included in its list of external adversaries: the Buffalo party wants to quit the New West Partnership and start operating a protectionist trade and public-contracting policy.) The party has not yet been able to hold a convention of any kind. It was, in short, practically the definition of an improvised effort.
Despite this, on the basis of Saskatchewan’s preliminary vote count (which does not yet include 61,255 mailed ballots), the Buffaloes are now the province’s third most popular party. They attracted 11,055 votes in their 17 ridings; the provincial Greens, who ran in 60 of the province’s 61 ridings, received just 9,108. (“My people are probably mail-in voters,” Green Leader Naomi Hunter told the CBC hopefully.) Four Buffalo party candidates finished in second place, ahead of the New Democrats. Only one finished as low as fourth.
In the Estevan riding, where lignite mines are being phased out under federal regulations, the Buffaloes’ Phil Zajac, a federal candidate for the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) in 2019, has over 25 per cent of the vote. Last fall, his total for Maxime Bernier’s PPC was 1.7 per cent. The Buffalo party chose its battlegrounds very carefully and mostly avoided the major Saskatchewan cities, so there is no telling how a full Buffalo slate would do, but the party’s candidates logged about nine per cent of the vote overall in the places where they ran; in those same ridings, the New Democrats got 15 per cent.
Saskatchewan shouldn’t be preparing any Unilateral Declarations of Independence just yet, but stay tuned. That province has a history of populist political parties rising to prominence during tough economic times, albeit on the other end of the political spectrum.
Via The Comics Curmudgeon, more evidence that the venerable comic strip The Family Circus is hopelessly out of step with 2020:
If you spent more time on Twitter instead of doing homework or playing outside, Billy, you’d know that 2 + 2 can indeed equal 5 and that you’re racist or something for thinking it can only be 4.
"If you elect those people, they'll take away your home, they'll take away your car, and burn down your churches. Furthermore, they'll nationalize your women.” What, really? All they wanted was basic security. I had no idea that we owe basics such as family allowance (child tax benefit), unemployment insurance, government-mandated medical care and old age pension - all of which Canadians now take for granted and depend on - to a party started in the 30s in the Prairies.
That rhetoric about the poor coming to take away the goodies (and women LOL) of the more moneyed segments of the population sounds a little like what one reads about Sanders and co. in the US. Yet they, too, basically seem to aim for what amounts to more equality by giving the poorer sections basic security in jobs, healthcare etc. - which they should have in the first place. That’s not quite the same as communism, even if Sanders doesn’t seem like the most practical person in the world when it comes to realistic implementation. Yet without such parties and politicians as the CCF and Sanders, respectively, to push the government, many necessary changes might never come to pass.
The website with the Saskatchewan CCF description looks like a good Canadian history resource for homeschooled autistic kids, by the way! :)