You Don't Have to Yell

The practice of gerrymandering - that is, drawing congressional districts to either favor candidates from one party or disfavor another - is as old as the district itself. During the very first congressional election after the Revolutionary War, Patrick Henry, then Governor of Virginia, carved the...

In 1950, a report published in the American Political Science review issued a dire warning over the state of politics in America. The nation’s two parties, it argued, were too much alike and got along so well that voters might be inclined to gravitate towards smaller parties with more extreme...

It should be a forgone conclusion that political polarization in America has reached an unhealthy level when the end of a presidential election cycle is marked by an angry mob storming the Capitol, the seat of the Senate President being occupied by a shirtless man in a buffalo headdress carrying a...

To many, the Electoral College could best be described as the appendix of American democracy - a vestigial organ sitting in the nation's body politic that's only noticed for the problems it causes. Given the Electoral College has overruled the popular vote in two out of the last five presidential...

As with our puzzling aversion to the metric system and our lack of enthusiasm for soccer, America’s two party system makes it an outlier in the world. While most democracies have large center-left and center-right parties that garner most of the votes and seats in government, they also have viable...

Last week’s episode of YDHTY featured Christian Onuoha, who was undertaking the herculean task of running as a Republican in New Jersey’s 6th congressional district - one of the more heavily gerrymandered districts in one of the more heavily gerrymandered states in the nation. For this week’s...

New Jersey's 6th congressional district is an artfully carved piece of territory that sits like a balloon animal just to the southwest of Staten Island. Whether it's carved that way because Democrats have been the historical majority in that state or whether Democrats have been the historical...

Depending on your partisan bent, Nathaniel Lane, Chair for the Green Party of Ohio, bears many descriptions. To Republicans, he's a socialist, Antifa sympathizing tree-hugger hell bent on destroying the economy with a radical green agenda. To Democrats, he's an embittered idealist hell bent on...

On October, 7, 1780, Brigadier General Isaac Gregory led a bayonet charge into a numerically superior Loyalist militia in the Battle of Kings Mountain. After a string of humiliating defeats by the British, the battle boosted the morale of Patriot militias, being noted by Thomas Jefferson as the...

Every decade, the North Carolina General Assembly engages in the process of redrawing the boundaries of the state’s congressional districts, as required by law. Going above and beyond the minimum requirements, the majority party has historically engaged in the almost punitive practice of carving...