California, too, had more Trump voters than any other state, so you'd have to somehow go out of your way to gerrymander them out of power as well.
LMFAO, that got me! You gotta put a tone indicator on that shit or people might not get the joke. Wow...
Like, they might not know that California voted 63.5% Biden to 34.3% Trump... the kind of metric that would actually matter when predicting new senators. You'd have to gerrymander pretty flippin hard to eke out a Republican state there! Avoid all the cities, basically.
Whereas Texas voted 52% for Trump, yet is a solidly conservative (and openly seditious) hellhole with 67% Republican representatives in Congress. How's that for gerrymandering? I know a lot of good people in Austin who'd love a little redistricting.
Every reliably red or blue state has frustrated voters, but that's a LOT of Democrats being taken for a ride... doesn't seem like an accident to me.
Similarly there is no real reason why California or New York couldn't draw up new maps and split into new states and undo this artificial 50/50 stalemate bullshit, if they chose to do it there isn't much that could be done to stop it.
Uh, I live in upstate New York, and I can confidently tell you that any division that isn't heinously gerrymandered hell splitting chunks of New York City into each sub-state would basically be guaranteed to create at least one new Republican stronghold.
60.9% to 37.7%. Again, unless you're making a twisty state that avoids all population centers, good luck with your red "stronghold" in New York. Rural people are loud and armed, but they vastly overestimate their numbers.
They still MATTER, don't get it twisted, but they're not some silent disenfranchised majority. They are literally the opposite of that.
And they have representatives (both locally and often in congress) for their specific issues. They should be happy with their pork barrels, but instead they're chronically aggrieved and violent... go figure. Probably all the lies they're sold.
They would also need the consent of Congress to actually allow any new states to be inducted into the Union.
ETA: And by the way, if they DID do that, there's nothing stopping the Republican states from doing the same. The "50/50 stalemate" isn't somehow caused by the number of states.
"We can't FIX things or else the Republicans would have permission to ruin things!"
We should never have to hear this nonsense EVER again after Trump filled the Supreme Court, and Mitch McConnell taunted us about how they would do literally whatever they can get away with at all times. Such as blocking Obama's centrist picks.
That pretense of a balance of civility is DONE, the Republicans burned it in an end-zone dance.
