Congress

Carllene Brooks
April 23, 2016
Professor Murdaco
Politics




Task: Summarize the main points of the article
 

          To begin with, we were asked to analyze the speeches or analyzations of Christopher Ingraham. In his first article" America's Most Gerrymandered Congressional Districts", he talks about the concept of gerrymandering and how it affects certain districts. Gerrymandering is when political parties redraw district boundaries to give themselves an electoral advantages. My opinion of this article is that it is very informative to those who are unfamiliar with the gerrymandering process such as myself. This process is said to help people stay on the safe side when trying to secure votes. According to the article it states that gerrymandering is supposed to help people stay on the safe side. Not only do they stay on the safe side, it's supposed to give your opponents a small number of safe seats ,while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that aren't safe. But it still allows you to win comfortably. By Ingraham giving pictorial examples and diagrams, it really gives you a visual eye/ idea on how gerrymandering in certain districts occur.
      In like manner, the two points that really caught my interest are points #1 and #6.  The main idea of the first point is that gerrymandering is not to draw yourself a safe seat; but its supposed to put your opponents in safe seats by cramming all of their supporters into a small number of districts. This allows you to not only allows you to cram your supporters, but you have the opportunity to spread your own supported over a larger number of districts. Whereas in the sixth point, the main idea is that gerrymandering is easier to get away with in more densely- populated areas. This means that the more diverse your community is then you are more likely to have a little "leeway" in drawing their districts.
    In Ingraham's follow up article " What 60 years of political gerrymandering looks like"' he is trying to answer the pondering question of how beneficial and effective gerrymandering actually is. In order to better explain his thesis or idea he went along and gathered data from the early 1950s. When looking at this data you can see that gerrymandering  has consumed the likes of many different states. The most increasingly high numbers of gerrymandering have occurred in Pennslyvania, Ohio and Illinois. By having a certain amount of changes within these states, it allows the other states to better control the extent of gerrymandering.
    In closing, we can see that the topic of gerrymandering has become increasingly important when trying to secure a certain amount of wins in certain districts. Prior to reading these two articles, I had no knowledge of what gerrymandering was and how it helps people in the race better their chances in the race.