By now we’re taking a better gaze at the 2012 landscape.  We see that Presidential Democratic vote trailed the Senate Democratic vote  and the House Democratic vote trailed the Presidential Democratic vote.

The Democrats won the majority of House votes.   Far comfort, when the Republicans maintained the House.  Politifact feels the need to clarify the words spoken by a Democratic house figure that the Democrats won a majority of the House vote.  Apparently they might’ve won only a plurality — the classic 49.9 or thereabouts, with a few points lobbed to various third parties.  And, as I see noted happily in the National Review, the Republicans have gotten to an advantageous position at the state legislative level.

If at first blush we slide into the realm of Grover Norquist’s sour grapes but probably apt for his purposes “Redistricting has us controlling the House for the next decade”, things get even worse.  Redistricting isn’t all that tilts the map.  Demographic spreads mean an urban district controlled by the Democrats will tend toward a possible 75 to 25 advantage as against a rural spread for a Republicans at 60 to 40, and like that.  (The numbers… Democrats represent 47 districts with a partisanship of more than 70-30 percent in their favor, while Republicans represent only 23 such districts. Of the 16 districts with a partisan split of at least 80-20 percent, Democrats represent 15.)

So we land on some fun fact such as this:

A Quinnipiac poll shows that if the election were held today, 43 percent would support a Democratic House candidate, to 35% who would support a Republican.
That 8 point lead for Democrats is significantly more than the GOP’s margin of victory during the 2010 Republican wave election (6.6 percent) and even more that the Democratic margin of victory during the 2006 wave (7.9 percent) — when Democrats were bolstered by both an unpopular Republican president and a failing war in Iraq. And yet, if Democrats succeed in maintaining this substantial lead through next year’s congressional election, they will likely emerge with a tiny majority of just 5 seats.

So, staring at this dilemna of proportional angst, you see the understandable urge by liberals to come up with new ways for proportioning Congress.  See this In These Times article.

The best way to remove the structural unfairness inherent in the current House of Representatives is to get rid of winner-take-all elections. FairVote has a plan to do just that, grounded in our Constitution and American electoral traditions. The first requirement is an act of Congress. The more ambitious plan would be for Congress to prohibit winner-take-all elections in all states that elect more than one House Member. A more modest step would be to repeal the congressional mandate for states to use single-member districts that was established in a 1967 law.

These voting methods have already proven their effectiveness in our local elections and, in their one sustained use, in state legislative elections in Illinois. Choice voting, our preferred system, has been used in more than two dozen American cities and is currently used for at least one local or national election in Australia, Ireland, Malta, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, and Scotland.

 Fair voting and multi-member districts are fully constitutional. For the first half-century of congressional elections, at least one state—and usually many more—elected House members in statewide elections. The movement to single-member districts was ironically driven by the goal of partisan fairness, avoiding distortions from the use of statewide winner-take-all elections. We know today from the experiences of fair voting systems at a local level, in Illinois state legislative elections and in most democracies around the world that fair voting methods provide a far more reliable means of accomplishing that goal.

Of course, solving the problem that there is “democracy” afoot in voting — fixed lines seem to have allowed the Democrats to pull ahead in the Senate this last election… and it is interesting to note that while the liberals dream of this voting idea, here’s what comes from the “Tea Party” set:

Tennessee legislator to take up nixing popular vote of Senators.

This throws us back to pre-Progressive Era voting.  The state legislator would vote for the Senator.  Because –?  What?  The current ahistorical 60 vote threshold for any Senate movement isn’t enough?

I imagine this hypothetical world where this “multi-member district” House comes into fruition and the state legislative Senate.  Then it’s a more democratic House and a more lordly Senate.  Actually moving past what the Founders had envisioned, I suppose.

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