Political Maps and Moral Authority are the Most Influential Unknowns in the 2022 Showdown for Power

by johndavis, June 14, 2021

Political Maps and Moral Authority are the Most Influential Unknowns in the 2022 Showdown for Power June 14, 2021 Vol. XIV, No. 9 7:13 am What if remapping turned Farmington, WV into Farmington, MD? Imagine how politically disruptive it would be if every 10 years, following the US Census, we redrew all of the state
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Political Maps and Moral Authority are the Most Influential Unknowns in the 2022 Showdown for Power

June 14, 2021 Vol. XIV, No. 9 7:13 am

What if remapping turned Farmington, WV into Farmington, MD?

Imagine how politically disruptive it would be if every 10 years, following the US Census, we redrew all of the state borders. One decade your hometown, say Farmington, West Virginia, is within the boundaries of a conservative Republican-friendly red state, and the next decade Farmington is within the boundaries of a neighboring liberal Democratic-friendly blue state like Maryland.

Sen. Joe Manchin, the conservative West Virginia Democrat who has thwarted the liberal Biden/Schumer/Pelosi legislative agenda on everything from the filibuster and election law reform to infrastructure spending and packing the US Supreme Court, is from Farmington, West Virginia, a small coal mining town of 445 people about 40 miles West of the Maryland state line. Manchin could not win a US Senate seat if Farmington were in Maryland, nor can he keep a US Senate seat in West Virginia if he supports the most liberal line items in the Biden/Schumer/Pelosi agenda.

Bottom line: Political boundaries, whether they be state lines or congressional and legislative maps, determine the moral authority of each lawmaker; a moral obligation in a representative Democracy to vote the way your voters would on legislation before the state legislature or in Washington, DC.

So, what is Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin’s moral obligation to West Virginia?

In 2020, Republican President Donald Trump won every single county in West Virginia. Every single county. He carried the state by 69% to only 30% for Biden. Cook Political Report shows West Virginia as second only to Wyoming as the most Republican state in the nation.

For Emphasis: Voters in the second most Republican state in the nation, where President Trump carried every county, are the foundation of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s political moral authority. It’s why he consistently rejects legislation proposed by left-of-left liberals in Congress.

It’s not how I was raised.

On November 9, 2020, Sen. Joe Manchin told Bret Baier on FOX News’ Special Report with Bret Baier, “When you’re talking about basically Green New Deal and all this ‘socialism,’ that’s not who we are as a Democratic Party. It’s not how I was raised in West Virginia.”

Hmmmm. So, the state where you are raised influences your political ideology?

In 2019 and 2020, Manchin was ranked #3 most conservative Democrat in the US Senate by GovTrack.us. On the other end of the spectrum, the least conservative Democrat, ergo the #1 most liberal US Senate Democrat, was then-Sen. Kamala Harris, raised in Berkeley, California, located in the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland area, with a population of 8.7 million.

In her book, The Truths We Hold, Harris writes that her parents, while doctoral students at UC-Berkeley, “often brought me in a stroller with them to civil rights marches.” Do you think being raised on the campus at Berkeley informed Harris’s political biases in the same way being raised in Farmington, West Virginia informed Manchin’s biases?

Like Joe Manchin, Kamala Harris’s moral authority as a US Senator came from the voters in the state she represented, the 6^th most reliably Democratic state in the nation; from the voters in the San Francisco Bay Area, the #1 most liberal area in the nation.

That was then. Now, Vice President Kamala Harris, like President Joe Biden, must look to the entire nation for moral authority to lead. If they do not, Democrats risk losing moral authority over extreme liberal ideas like the federal takeover of redistricting and election laws.

Democrats’ national moral authority threatened by liberal power grab

On Sunday, June 6, 2021, Sen. Joe Manchin wrote an Op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Why I’m voting against the For the People Act. The bill is the federal takeover of elections, from state legislative remapping and voter registration laws to early voting and mail-in ballots.

Sen. Manchin’s argument was that the For the People Act was a partisan power grab. “Partisan policymaking won’t instill confidence in our democracy — it will destroy it,” he said.

So, why do Congressional Democrats want to nationalize the power to draw congressional and legislative districts and enact election laws? Because thanks to former President Barack Obama’s political naïveté, Republicans have controlled most state capitols since 2010, a disastrous election year for Democrats that Obama admitted was “a shellacking.”

Democrats, with a narrow 222 to 213 US House majority, know that the party controlling the White House usually loses a net of 23 seats in a new president’s first midterm elections. They also know that the GOP has an advantage in the number of states where mapmaking is controlled by the parties.

Per the Cook Political Report, states where Republicans have final authority over congressional maps have a combined total of 187 districts (including North Carolina’s 14 districts), with Democratic controlled states having the final say over a total of 75 district maps. States where independent commissions draw the maps have a combined total of 121 congressional districts, and states where partisan power is split have a total of 46 districts. Six states have only one congressional district.

Unfortunately for Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin gets his moral authority on the matter of the federalization of redistricting and election laws from the voters of West Virginia, folks who do not want liberals in Washington DC telling them how to run their elections. If Democrats in Congress continue their effort to take remapping and election law reform away from the states, they will lose the national moral authority to lead. If that happens, they will lose the Congress.

Political maps and moral authority are the most influential unknowns in the 2022 showdown for power in Washington DC and the state capitals.

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