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Where do you get your midterms coverage? Is your seat an interesting one? Please tell me about it! (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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Basically, I'm due to interview a a polls/elections guru about the midterms a couple days after the polls close.

He's very nitty gritty and will talk about specifics of gerrymandering and so on, it's more or less my job to rein him in so he talks about the juiciest bits before the audience tunes out.

I'm not American, so to watch the midterms as they come in I'd have to stay up beyond midnight, and obviously no one really talks about it here either in more than vague terms, so please enlighten me!

Obviously I've done a fair amount of research already, the problem is sorting which are the most interesting without an actual ear to the ground. America is a very big place.

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[–] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

WNC has the Jamie Ager running. He's a chill guy from my interactions and my friends interactions with him. Don't think he's super radical or anything, but this is also the district that produced Chuck Edwards and Madison Cawthorne (who I had the pleasure of being in highschool with...)

So really anything is an improvement.

Also NC11 is the textbook example of gerrymandering.

They cracked Buncombe since Asheville is there and it's solidly Democrat. The whole of WNC is basically small cities and towns that are progressive with vast swaths of hollers that are conservative. They carefully draw the districts here so the swing is always 45/55 in favor of the boonies. Then they shut down polling stations near the cities and the conservative incumbents use state funds to bus rural voters to polling stations.

NOTE: The 11th district was re-drawn in 2021.

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  • [–] 2 points 17 hours ago*

    but this is also the district that produced Chuck Edwards and Madison Cawthorne (who I had the pleasure of being in highschool with...)

    Woof dah

    The NC districts seem like a good example of how "compactness" is not a very useful criterion for drawing districts. The shapes look reasonable at first glance.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 child)

    Wow. Great tipoff. Do you know the origin of the word gerrymander?

    Governor of Massachusetts back in the day was called Gerry, and redrew the boundaries so egregiously that a district looked like a salamander - Gerry's Salamander. Crazy stuff.

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