Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Two red Midwestern states take up the partisan gerrymander debate

Missouri and Indiana congressional districts

Republicans currently control six of eight U.S. House districts in Missouri and seven of the nine in Indiana.

mapchart.net

Efforts to drain more politics out of legislative mapmaking for the new decade are getting pride of place as GOP-run legislatures convene in a pair of generally red Midwestern states.

Influential lawmakers from both parties in the Indiana General Assembly signed a pledge Monday to support legislation making the next round of redistricting more transparent, nondiscriminatory and politically impartial than in the past.

And in Missouri, where the General Assembly convened on Wednesday, leaders of the GOP majorities are pushing a measure they describe as a compromise for tamping down the state's past tendencies toward partisan gerrymandering. Democrats are not yet on board, however.


Legislative and congressional district lines across the country get redrawn once a decade, the year after the census details how the population has changed and relocated, to reflect the Constitution's one-person, one-vote mandate.

Under the maps that were in use for the past decade and will be used for the last time this fall, the GOP has a comfortable hold on seven of the nine U.S. House seats in Indiana and six of the eight districts in Missouri, along with supermajorities in both halves of the legislatures in both states. But in the last statewide races in both places, for Senate seats in 2018, Republicans Mike Braun of Indiana and Josh Hawley of Missouri each defeated incumbent Democrats with just 51 percent of the vote.

The redistricting reform bill on the agenda in Indianapolis with the best chance of passage would allow citizens to access the detailed census data so they could try their hand at drawing political boundaries — and would require, at least theoretically, the legislators to take such handiwork into account when setting the real lines.

"Legislators should serve in competitive districts," GOP Sen. John Ruckelshaus said in unveiling the bill and its bipartisan roster of sponsors this week. "I think we're all better for that. Competition is good."

He conceded, however, that his more ambitious measure — to turn the redistricting responsibilities over to an independent commission — was not likely to advance any farther this time than the previous two times he's offered it, which was nowhere.

In Missouri, by contrast, 62 percent of voters in 2018 approved redistricting changes as part of a sweeping constitutional amendment. It created a new position in Jefferson City for a nonpartisan state demographer, with responsibility for proposing state House and Senate maps after the 2020 census with the goals of achieving both "partisan fairness" and "competitiveness." Six finalists are still in the running.

Some Republicans are pushing for having the state vote to change the system again this fall — so that the demographer's work next year would be subject to approval by the same bipartisan (but GOP-tilted) commission that drew the lines a decade ago. Some Democrats are willing to go along but others say that would undercut the point of the referendum two years ago.

Read More

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

The B-2 "Spirit" Stealth Bomber flys over the 136th Rose Parade Presented By Honda on Jan. 1, 2025, in Pasadena, California. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

After a short and successful war with Iraq, President George H.W. Bush claimed in 1991 that “the ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.” Bush was referring to what was commonly called the “Vietnam syndrome.” The idea was that the Vietnam War had so scarred the American psyche that we forever lost confidence in American power.

The elder President Bush was partially right. The first Iraq war was certainly popular. And his successor, President Clinton, used American power — in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere — with the general approval of the media and the public.

Keep ReadingShow less
Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are
a close up of a typewriter with the word conspiracy on it

Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are

The Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate shooting, the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and a man’s livestreamed beheading of his father last year were all fueled by conspiracy theories. But while the headlines suggest that conspiratorial thinking is on the rise, this is not the case. Research points to no increase in conspiratorial thinking. Still, to a more dangerous reality: the conspiracies taking hold and being amplified by political ideologues are increasingly correlated with violence against particular groups. Fortunately, promising new research points to actions we can take to reduce conspiratorial thinking in communities across the US.

Some journalists claim that this is “a golden age of conspiracy theories,” and the public agrees. As of 2022, 59% of Americans think that people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories today than 25 years ago, and 73% of Americans think conspiracy theories are “out of control.” Most blame this perceived increase on the role of social media and the internet.

Keep ReadingShow less
Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job
woman wearing academic cap and dress selective focus photography
Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job

A college education used to be considered, along with homeownership, one of the key pillars of the American Dream. Is that still the case? Recent experiences of college graduates seeking employment raise questions about whether a university diploma remains the best pathway to pursuing happiness, as it once was.

Consider the case of recent grad Lohanny Santo, whose TikTok video went viral with over 3.6 million “likes” as she broke down in tears and vented her frustration over her inability to find even a minimum wage job. That was despite her dual degrees from Pace University and her ability to speak three languages. John York, a 24-year-old with a master’s degree in math from New York University, writes that “it feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out.”

Keep ReadingShow less