Professors from across the country have long been lured to Florida’s public colleges and universities, with the educators attracted to the research opportunities, student bodies, and the warm weather.
But for a swath of liberal-leaning professors, many of them holding highly coveted tenured positions, they’ve felt increasingly out of place in the Sunshine State. And some of them are pointing to the conservative administration of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis as the reason for their departures, according to The New York Times.
DeSantis, who was elected to the governorship in 2018 and was easily reelected last fall, has over the course of his tenure worked to put a conservative imprint on a state where moderation was once a driving force in state politics. In recent years, DeSantis has railed against the current process by which tenure is awarded, and with a largely compliant GOP-controlled legislature, he’s imposed conservative education reforms across the state.
It’s literally impossible to draw districts in such a way that a minority party is the majority of voters in every district. You have to either pack the opposition into seats you are basically giving them to secure yours or you are doing some math on expected turnout and thinking how to promote turnout for your party and depress it for the opposition and aiming to win by a smallish but predictable margin.
It sounds an awful lot like you are in a very red state, and there isn’t a blue majority that can hypothetically vote.
Or they’ve packed enough Dem voters into a single district (depending on the state not doing this can be considered illegal racial gerrymandering, depending on how majority-minority districts fit in - in some cases not having them is racist, in others packing minorities into them is racist). But that requires a small number of total districts, or surrendering more than one to the opposition (the more districts you have, the less impact surrendering one district gives you).
Really, we just need to switch to some fixed, abstract mathematical process that cares not about how people will vote and use that to draw district lines. Something like least split line. But that’s a hard sell, because the people who would need to pass it are the people who benefit from it not existing.
What’s this “every” district business? Congressional elections, urban area, two primary districts with others on the fringe. The state legislature redrew the line between one of the primary districts and a fringe district. Lo and behold, a new perma-R city that was solidly purple and occasionally blue.
I won’t say which congressional district I’m talking about but honestly it’s not even hard to figure out: it’s not like they failed to announce it after the fact, or no one noticed when it was done.
There was, until two years ago. But hey, keep explaining. Maybe if you throw enough good-sounding words at the problem that will change the reality of it.