Hi, this is my first diary.
It's been pretty well established that the Republicans still hold the House now for one and only one reason: Gerrymandering. In 2010 they managed to redraw district boundaries and shapes in enough states to maintain redness, that normally should have gone blue, to maintain the current GOP majority in the House that is causing no end of problems against serious progress in the US. It can be pretty frustrating, and presumably the next chance to remedy things is 2020, right?
Not at all.
As I understand it, the basic principle is that districts have been skewed in careful and often highly sophisticated ways, so that those with R-voting majorities sacrifice enough voters to other normally D-voting majority districts, to push the latter to become R-voting majorities, whilst the former remain R-voting districts and hence the number of Republican representatives for the state in question increases. (The reverse occurs, of course, when Democrats gerrymander.)
Nevertheless, the voters are not doomed as pawns in all of this. An obvious way this strategy would be nullified would be if some spontaneous phenomenon occurred whereby certain (reasonably large) numbers of Democrats in the newly formed R-districts moved into the original R-districts, which now have reduced Republican-voter majorities (having been sacrificed to gain the new ones). Or if Democrats in districts with large D-majorities moved there. If this were to happen spontaneously it would eliminate the effects of the gerrymandering.
Or it could take place in a grass roots manner, or even in an organized and concerted manner. Call it grass-roots gerrymandering. (or anti-gerrymandering).
Obviously not everyone can just pull up their britches and translocate to a new district, even nearby. But I bet enough people do have that ability to make a difference. To change red districts back to blue, or to blue for the first time. Renters are good candidates, I would think. Also people already planning a move within or out of their state or county before 2014, could carefully make the mathematics of anti-gerrymandering one of the considerations made in choosing where their address should be.
This might require some very smart people in statistics to create a sort of "Anti-Gerrymandering Map" for the 50 states, indicating which new districts need new Democratic voters and which can easily stand to lose D-voters, to help potential movers in their decision...
It's worth noting that this strategy would only work for the side attempting to counter the results of gerrymandering. For example, in districts already highly gerrymandered to maximize GOP victories, it seems to me that any translocation of large numbers of Republican voters will also tend to lessen or nullify their majority, which presumably has already been mathematically maximized by the gerrymandering.
So, what does the community here think? Is such a movement worth promoting?
(Or does it already exist, one wonders...?)