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Democrats would need to flip 24 seatsto retake the U.S. House in 2018. But at leasttwo-thirds of that tallymay be permanently out of reach,thanks to a dirty geographical trick played by Republican lawmakers in 2010.

That's according to a new Brennan Center analysis of gerrymandering the process lawmakers use to draw legislative districts for their own partisan advantage.

A bit of background before we delve into the nitty-gritty. Every 10 years, congressional districts are redrawn following the Census. On paper, this is done to ensure the people's House is representative of the country's people states gain or lose districts based on population changes, and district boundaries shift to reflect our ever-changing demographics.

The process of re-drawing district lines to give an advantage to one party over another is called "gerrymandering". Here's how it works. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

In most states, this redistricting process is handled by the state legislature. This is where the trouble begins: legislatures are composed of partisan lawmakers who have partisan interests like keeping themselves in power.Over the past several decades, lawmakers have become adept at drawing district boundaries to benefit their parties.

There are any number of ways to do this. If you want to create a 100 percent safe seat for a friend, for instance, you draw a district with a safe partisan majority. You can also decide to concentrate all of your political opponents in one or two districts, diluting their power everywhere else. Or, you could spread them out thinly everywhere,making it hard for them to achieve a majority anywhere.

Gerrymandering is notoriously hard to measure, because it's partly a question ofintent a state's districts may be lopsided in favor of one party or another, but how do you prove that's not just an accident?

Enter the Brennan Center. For their report, Brennan's researchers used a number of different statistical tests to measure the outcomes of congressional elections in 2012, 2014 and 2016.

They looked at whether "wasted" votes votes for losing candidates, or votes for winners in excess of 50.1 percent were skewed toward one party or another.

They looked at historic trends to determine whether recent congressional election results deviated from historic results in expected ways.

And they looked at differences between the parties'average vote share in a state's districts and theirmedian share gerrymandering tends to skew a party's median vote share away from its average.

Brennan restricted the analysis to states with six or more districts because in smaller states, gerrymandering isn't as much of a problem. To give an extreme example, states with just one representative, like Wyoming, can't be gerrymandered at all, because the single district covers the entire state.The more districts you have, the more districtboundaries youtweak to your desire.

Each of Brennan's three analyses returned more or less the same result: "In the 26 states that account for 85 percent of congressional districts, Republicans derive a net benefit of at least 16-17 congressional seats in the current Congress from partisan bias," the researchers found.

Most of that bias is concentrated in just seven Republican-controlled states: Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania exhibit the most extreme partisan skew, while bias toward Republicans is also strongly evident in Florida, Ohio, Texas and Virginia.

Take a look at the chart from Brennan below, which estimates the net seat benefit to Republicans or Democrats in the 26 states they analyzed via the "wasted" votes method.

The dark red bars represent states where Republicans drew district maps. And in a number of those states, they effectively gave themselves an advantage of two or more seats simply by putting Democrats in places where their votes counted less.

Republicans were particularly successful in Pennsylvania, where they owe 3+ seats to creative redistricting.

Democrats aren't innocent in this whole affair either, but two factors severely limited their ability to redistrict themselves to a majority: for starters, more statehouses are now controlled by Republicans. Post-2010, there are simply fewer opportunities for Democrats to gerrymander.

Second, Brennan's analysis suggests that Democrats did attempt some gerrymanders in places such as Maryland and Massachusetts. But there are fewer people in those states than in places such as Pennsylvania orTexas, meaning that even the most aggressive gerrymander (looking at you, Maryland) might net at besta seat or so.

Republicans maintain some representational advantage from other neutral factors, too, like Democrats' propensity to cluster in densely populated areas, and from a Voting Rights Act requirement that mandates majority-minority districts in some Southern states.

But even after accounting for these factors, the Brennan analysis suggests that a minimum of 16 to 17 seats are in Republican hands because of partisan gerrymandering alone. There's one huge piece of damning evidence in support of this notion: "All of the states we found to have extreme partisan bias had maps drawn solely by one party," they found. Specifically, the Republican party.

There are any number of ways out of the quandary. For starters, a number of redistricting cases are currently before the courts. A number of the more egregious gerrymanders of the 2010 era have already been thrown out.

But litigation is just a Band-Aid. True reform would mean taking the redistricting process out of the hands of partisan lawmakers and putting it under the purview of something like an independent commission. That's already the case in certain states.

More radical reforms would involve handing the redistricting process over to algorithms that draw maps without any human input at all. But the political will for that level of change is currently nonexistent.

At the moment, Democrats' best hope would appear to be former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr.'s National Democratic Redistricting Commission, which aims to help Democrats be just as effective at gerrymandering as their Republican counterparts.

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Republicans are so much better than Democrats at gerrymandering - Washington Post

In 1988, Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis committed campaign suicide when, in a photo op, he oddly popped out of the top of a U.S. military tank while wearing a helmet. Reporters on-site reportedly broke into laughter. Voters were largely turned off. It was an ill-conceived, goofy image that became political lore for future campaign operatives, who would warn colleagues: Lets not pull a Dukakis here.

But the doomed appearance was really just a visual exclamation point for a much deeper problem facing Dukakis and his fellow Democrats. Throughout the 1980s, and really going back to the failed presidential bid of George McGovern in 1972, voters found the Democrats soft on national defense. Fear of an attack by the Soviet Union (or even the rampant, unimpeded spread of Communism) had Americans worried.

The prevailing feeling at the time was that Republicans, particularly the likes of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush, provided the courageous thinking and global bravado that kept America and the world safe; whereas Democrats wanted to slash defense spending and thus weaken the U.S. Democrats generally boasted that more spending on nuclear or similar weapons was a waste of money proclamations that did not make the average citizen feel safer in a period that was smothered with tension. Polling at the time found Bush leading Dukakis by margins of 21 on who would best secure our national defense.

Fast forward to the present, and it appears a new security-related concern has emerged to occupy the minds of Americans and this time the worry is terrorism. And once again it looks like Democratic leaders may be failing to take actions that would assuage voter angst.

The American electorate is genuinely fearful of terrorism, and growing more so by the day. In fact, not only has Americans fear of becoming a victim of terrorism been growing the last few years, but it is now at its highest point since the 9/11 attacks:

And just like the concern Americans had back in the 80s, the increasing uneasiness created by the shadow of terrorism looks to be largely void of partisanship. Republican voters (and often independents) have always been vocal and consistent in their worry about terrorism and its effects, but now Democratic voters have joined them. In the middle of primary season last year, Democrats cited Defending the country from terrorism as the third-most-important priority facing the nation, just behind improving education and strengthening the economy. Defending against terrorism outscored dealing with climate change (a party staple) by a weighty 16 percentage points.

But as voters continued to amplify their anxiety around the threats they felt terrorism posed, Democratic politicians seemed to be tone deaf. Voters last summer even those supporting nominee Hillary Clinton suggested they wanted to hear more during the upcoming presidential debates about what the candidates would do to keep America safe from terrorism. More, in fact, than about any other single topic, including economic growth, gun policy, health care, or climate change.

It wasnt that voters didnt care about those other issues clearly they did but they really cared about terrorism. And perhaps rightly so, as jihadist-related terror activities have grown meaningfully over the last several years:

But in 2016, Clinton and the Democrats seemed either ignorant of the situation or unable to properly address it. Consequently, the awareness deficit seemed to play out in the November presidential election, where terrorism angst ran high with voters in most key states, yet Clintons support among terrorism-focused voters generally ran quite low.

Nationally, exit polls the day of the election showed the economy to be the most important issue on voters minds (as it always is), with 52 percent citing it as the top issue. But coming in a strong second was terrorism, with 18 percent of voters naming it as the most important issue. (By comparison, in the 2012 election, terrorism didnt even make the list.) And among those 18 percent of voters, 57 percent voted for President Trump, whereas only 40 percent voted for Clinton.

If you multiply those figures together, you see that 10.3 percent of all voters felt terrorism was the most pressing issue and voted for Trump, while 7.2 percent of all voters felt terrorism was the most important issue but voted for Clinton. That 3.1-percentage-point difference was a significant deficit for Democrats to overcome, and it is even more telling when you look at it on the state level.

Heres how some key states compared, and the news is not good for Democrats.

The first thing you notice is that Trump won terrorism-focused voters in almost all of these states. Only in California did these voters favor Clinton and even there they just barely favored her. Even reliably blue states such as Washington, New Mexico, and New Jersey, which went to Clinton overall as expected, still saw their voters who prioritized terrorism actually favor Trump. And for predictably red states, the margin favoring Trump was overwhelming.

Perhaps even more troubling for Democrats were the six key Swing states and three Surprise states. Of those nine states, seven scored at or above the previously mentioned 3.1-point national margin for Trump among voters who prioritize terrorism. This suggests the Democrats message on fighting terrorism was even less effective in Ohio, North Carolina, Colorado, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania than it was nationally and in Florida it was just as bad.

Why does this matter? For many of these key states, the margins of victory were exceedingly slim for the winning candidate. Take Florida, for instance. Trump won the overall vote by 1.2 points, and among the 26 percent of voters who cited terrorism as the key issue, Trump won 55 percent to 43 percent a margin that translates to 3.1 points in the overall vote. If Clinton had just cut that gap by half, it would have tipped the scales.

But therein lies the rub. Americans of all party affiliations have sent strong signals they are acutely worried about terrorism, and they are generally not trusting of Democrats to do something about it. Even in traditional Democratic strongholds, Democrats are losing the argument.

And while many may find the rhetoric of then-candidate Trump (such as bomb the sh** out of them) crude or nave, it clearly got the attention of the electorate. Particularly as Clinton often responded to Trump by accusing him of aiding the cause of ISIS, rather than coming across as forceful against terrorists herself.

Americans really, really care about the threat of terrorism right now, and Democrats have failed to read the tea leaves on this. Defeating terrorism shouldnt be a partisan issue. If Democrats want to take an approach they believe to be more thoughtful or safer for the global community and our foreign interests, thats one thing. But they must also learn to show strength and make Americans feel secure if they wish to start winning more elections.

Ken Miller is a venture investor in the Silicon Valley. He is also a writer covering both politics and technology, and is a frequent contributor to TechCrunch. Previously he was an executive at PayPal and Intuit, and an early adviser to Square.

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The Democrats' Blind Spot on Terrorism - National Review

Speaking within walking distance of the state border with Indiana, Gov. Bruce Rauner on Tuesday bemoaned property tax rates in Illinois as a prime hindrance to economic growth in the state, and accusing Democratic leaders in the General Assembly of being happy to hurt who they need for political gain.

Were not competitive, and as a result, our tax base erodes and we dont have enough in tax revenue to support a balanced budget and to fund our schools and human services, Rauner said. Weve got to become competitive so we can afford to be compassionate.

Rauner spoke to reporters after touring the Hegewisch business district and taking part in a closed-door roundtable discussion with local business owners about the economic challenges of the Far South Side neighborhood.

Rauner used Hegewisch as an example of a part of Illinois that has seen its job opportunities flee to neighboring states, comparing it to parts of Lake County, the Quad Cities and downstate East St. Louis.

Illinois has gone more than 700 days without a budget and has seen services cut and its credit rating fall as gridlock in Springfield persists.

Rauner said his chief of staff was meeting Tuesday with the chiefs of staff of Democratic leaders in the General Assembly to continue working toward a solution.

Still, the governor placed responsibility for the states fiscal woes at the feet of the Springfield establishment.

We need a balanced budget today, Rauner said. We needed to two years ago. Frankly, weve needed it for the last 35 years.

Rauner said he suspects but I dont know for sure that Democrats in the General Assembly were, in effect, holding the state budget hostage in order to ensure Rauner was not re-elected in two years.

They want chaos, Rauner said. They want mayhem. Theyre happy to hurt whoever they need to hurt.

About a dozen protesters chanting Do your job! awaited the governor outside Steves Lounge at 132nd and Baltimore.

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Rauner blames Democrats for property tax rates, slow economic growth - Chicago Sun-Times

Gov. Andrew Cuomo vowed Tuesday to help defeat the states Republican members of the House of Representatives when they are up for election next year.

House Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi introduced Cuomo at a rally of union workers at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York City, where he made his remarks.

We will remove you from office, Cuomo shouted. And we are telling you those are not just words you can bet your political life that New Yorkers will do just that!

While Cuomo said hes working to defeat all of the states GOP congressional representatives, he directed his ire at western New York Rep. Chris Collins and the Hudson Valleys Rep. John Faso. The two angered Cuomo earlier this year when they successfully included in the House repeal of the Affordable Care Act a plan to force the state to take over billions of dollars in county Medicaid costs.

Today, I charge Congressman Faso and Collins and their colleagues with violating their oath of office to represent the interest of the people of the state of New York, Cuomo told the cheering crowd. I also charge them with defrauding the voters of this state. They said they would help their districts, they said they would help the struggling middle class. They are doing the exact opposite.

Cuomo never mentioned President Donald Trump by name.

A spokesman for Collins called Cuomos attempt to defeat the congressman laughable and said that Cuomo received only 34 percent of the vote in the district during the governors last re-election campaign.

Cuomos actions also drew notice and a critique from the Republican National Committee, which connected the governor to a former top aide, Joe Percoco, who is facing trial on bribery and other charges. They referenced Percocos use of code words from The Sopranos television series including saying boxes of ziti for money while Percoco allegedly carried out pay-to-play schemes.

The governor has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

State GOP Chair Ed Cox accused Cuomo of having delusions of grandeur and putting his national interests ahead of the state.

Groups on the left also are critical of Cuomo, saying the governor has more work to do closer to home. Bill Lipton, the states Working Families Party director, said while its great that Cuomo wants to help take the House back for Democrats, he should be working just as hard to reunite Democrats in the New York state Senate.

We have this contradiction of the governor being out there fighting to take back the House, and we have the state Senate controlled by Trump Republicans, Lipton said. And hes turned a blind eye to that.

The state Senate is currently ruled by Republicans, with the help of several breakaway Democrats. Democrats have 32 seats, numerically enough to rule the chamber, but are divided into different feuding factions. There are the mainstream Democrats, the breakaway Independent Democratic Conference and one lone Democratic senator who conferences with the Republicans.

Lipton said when the governor was seeking re-election in 2014, he pledged to help elect more Democrats to the state Senate in exchange for the Working Families Party endorsement. Lipton said that promise was never fulfilled.

The governor is not just the governor, hes also the head of the New York State Democratic Party, Lipton said. The Democratic Party needs to rediscover a mission, a purpose.

Cuomo did raise money and endorse some Democratic candidates for the state Senate in 2016.

Democrats already control the state Assembly, and, of course, the governors office. Lipton said if Democrats also ruled the state Senate, New York would be in a stronger position, like that of the state of California, to provide a counter-vision to Trump and the Republican-led Congress.

Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said even with the states current political divisions, New York still has some policies that are more progressive than Californias, including paid family leave.

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Cuomo, Pelosi rally to take back the House for Democrats - WXXI News

A "unity reform commission" the party created last July -- made up of leaders selected separately by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders -- is tasked with making a recommendation by the end of this year: Keep superdelegates, eliminate them, or something in between.

"I think tensions will definitely start to rise as we get into the nitty-gritty of proposals," said Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska Democratic chairwoman and a Sanders selection for the unity commission.

"But I'm confident -- and I guess hoping, at the same time -- that it's not just, 'Oh, you're a Bernie delegate, so of course you think that way,'" added Kleeb, who rose to national prominence as an activist against the Keystone XL pipeline.

The unity commission is headed into its second of four meetings this week in San Antonio. Superdelegates aren't officially on the agenda until the third meeting, in Chicago in August -- but several commission members said they expect behind-the-scenes talks on the issue to intensify over the summer.

Superdelegates became a flashpoint in the Clinton vs. Sanders contest, when members of Congress and other party leaders given the special status to cast a vote for their choice for the Democratic presidential nominee regardless of their states' results overwhelmingly backed Clinton, in some cases allowing her to carry more delegates than Sanders in states where he won the primary or caucus.

They didn't ultimately tip the nomination to Clinton -- she won more pledged delegates than Sanders, too -- but Sanders' backers felt their early endorsements left many Democrats believing that Clinton's nomination was predetermined.

Beating back efforts by Sanders' supporters to eliminate superdelegates at July's convention, the DNC launched a commission to study the issue -- and started with the recommendation that members of Congress, governors and other elected officials retain their status, but that other party leaders lose it, potentially reducing the number of superdelegates by two-thirds.

"To go beyond that would be a push," acknowledged Larry Cohen, a Democratic labor leader who is the unity panel's co-chairman and the chairman of the Sanders-aligned Our Revolution.

Even if the unity commission sticks with that recommendation, it would then need the approval of the DNC's Rules Committee and the full DNC.

Implementing at least that recommendation, though, Cohen said, is key, "because obviously this is aimed at 2020 and the DNC has to adopt it in some way."

A leading proponent on the unity commission for keeping superdelegates in their current role, several members said, is Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio, a Clinton selection to the panel. Fudge declined an interview request.

The superdelegate system has been in place since the 1980s, when Democrats sought to avoid blowout losses like George McGovern had suffered in 1972 and President Jimmy Carter faced in 1980 by increasing the influence of party insiders.

After the 2008 contest between Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, a panel recommended reducing superdelegates' influence, but the DNC never adopted the changes.

Other proposals to curb the influence of superdelegates that have floated around in conversations with unity commission members -- including private conference calls the Clinton and Sanders sides are holding -- includes keeping superdelegates but requiring them to vote according to their states' results.

It's one of several changes Sanders' supporters hope to make. They are also seeking major changes to presidential debate scheduling, and are pushing to open primaries and caucuses to independents. The commission is also expected to examine the party's nominating calendar -- which features the overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire voting first, and a geographic mishmash of states voting in clusters on the same day.

The commission also includes members appointed by new DNC Chairman Tom Perez. And panel members described the early conversations as "Kumbaya" moments, even as they anticipate fights later this year.

"I think for us, we're essentially not assuming that the Clinton or Perez delegates are only status quo thinking. In that until they prove otherwise, we're going to continue on that mindset," Kleeb said.

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The Democrats are fighting over superdelegates -- again ...