This is why you don't cheat. From the WSJ:
Gerrymandering was supposed to cement Republican control of the House of Representatives, offering incumbents a wall of re-election protection even as public opinion turned sharply against them. Instead, the party's strategy of recrafting district boundaries may have backfired, contributing to the defeats of several lawmakers and the party's fall from power.
The reason: Republican leaders may have overreached and created so many Republican-leaning districts that they spread their core supporters too thinly. That left their incumbents vulnerable to the type of backlash from traditionally Republican-leaning independent voters that unfolded this week.
That helps to explain why three of four Republican incumbents in the Philadelphia area were beaten this week, while the remaining incumbent hung on by just a few thousand votes. In Florida, meanwhile, state lawmakers had shifted some Republican voters from the secure district of former Rep. Mark Foley in an attempt to shore up the re-election chances of Rep. Clay Shaw without risking the Foley seat. Instead, Democrats took both. In Texas, former Majority Leader Tom DeLay's decision to transfer thousands of stalwart Republican voters from his district in 2004 to boost a neighboring seat heightened the burden on the write-in candidate trying to hold Mr. DeLay's seat. She lost it.
"The trade-off in redistricting is between safety and maximizing the numbers," says Alan I. Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. "You can't do both."
So can we learn from this political mistake? Can we start talking about non-partisan redistricting? (By the way, isn't karma great? I just love it when cheaters lose because they cheated.)
Gerrymandering worked just fine for the Ohio General Assembly.
In the Ohio House of Representatives, the Republicans won 53% of the seats with 48% of the vote.
I was speaking with a lady from Ireland and she refered to Bush as being pig-headed. I thought about this in the context of his holding on to Rumsfeld until after the elections - even though he had presumably reached the decison to let go of him either last week or before. This had required Republican politicians to defend Rumsfeld through the election. If he had let go of Rumsfeld before the election, they could have pointed to this and said that policies were changing, that it wasn't just stay the course. But Bush didn't want to admit to making any mistake - until after the election. In both cases dishonesty cost the Republican party a great deal.
Now the party which had been marching in lock-step together consists of rival factions who blame one-another for having lost the election. For some reason, I believe they will have difficulty uniting behind the president during the next month - with the Bolton nomination, the budget, etc.. Everything the newly bipartisan president would have them push through - before the Democrats take over the House and the Senate. I suspect such efforts will cost the Republicans even more.
Gerrymandering does not work?
Would you say that a hammer does not work because someone hit their finger instead of the nail?