re: #265 Anymouse

Gerrymandering can be overcome, when a candidate at the top of the ticket tanks horribly.

The essence of gerrymandering is you concentrate your opponents voters into as few districts as possible, to give your own party a narrow margin of victory in those that are left.

That narrow margin can be overcome in each gerrymandered district if the opposition (Dems in this case) are motivated to vote and the friendlies (Republicans) are not, or vote for the opposite party.

Consider my own gerrymandered state (Nebraska). [yes, you can gerrymander three districts]. Omaha and inner suburbs are walled off as a single concentrated Democratic-Republican even district. (That’s why we got a Democratic representative from there in the last election, and an electoral vote went to President Obama in 2012.)

Lincoln’s district (second-largest city) includes much of the rural area, and the remaining rural area is one district. (A district map of Nebraska looks like concentric circles spreading west from Omaha.)

Omaha has a good chance of going Democratic again this year. Lincoln, reliably Republican due to the large rural area attached to it, is in trouble if large numbers of Republicans stay home. (That would yield two Democratic representatives.)

The remaining district (NE3) will go for Trump. If Clinton took significantly more votes in Lincoln and Omaha, that would overcome NE-3’s majority of voters (NE-3 has more voters than the other two districts each). Four electoral votes to Clinton, one to Trump.

In states that do not split electoral votes, they would all go to Clinton if significant numbers of Republicans stayed home or did not vote for President.

That said, there is always the fear-factor in conservative voting (guns, abortion, &c). Those might be enough to overcome the downsides of Mr. Trump.

An excellent explanation. Then there is a chance that because Trump is so utterly repellent, he exerts a serious demotivating factor on GOP voters and if the Democrats have a solid GOTV effort and ground game, then the GOP could indeed lose the House as well as the Senate (provided the GOP doesn’t rapidly counter to focus on the down ticket races in order to save their position).