There's a big brouhaha right now because the Texans are redistricting Texas to try to give more seats in Congress to Republicans by gerrymandering districts to make more seats safe.
I'm a Republican, and I'm here to say that gerrymandering by either party stinks. There's nothing rational about a congressional district that meanders across many counties just to make a safe Republican or Democratic seat. Many use the argument that Senators are supposed to represent the entire state, and Representatives are supposed to represent a particular group of similar individuals. There is nothing similar about most of these congressional districts being drawn except they guarantee a R or D will hold them.
It isn't right to complain unless you have a proposal that you think is better, so here goes.
There is merit to having a particular person who represents a group of people in the state. But I would challenge that that ends at the state level. Once you get to the federal level, the elected Representatives of a state should represent all the people of the state, just like the Senators who are elected do. The whole idea of basing the number of Representatives a state receives based on its population is fine. But the gerrymandering of states to try to create new seats or protect members of Congress who are at risk of losing their seats due to incompetence or age or some other reason is wrong.
I propose that all Congressional positions be voted on in a single primary by all the people in the state. Use ranked choice voting to pick N+M candidates that all of the people in the state think might be suitable and let them run for the N open seats based on population for Representatives or 2 for Senators, where M is a somewhat larger number to give people some choice for the final general election to really think about who should be in office.
This has a lot of advantages. How many readers think there should be term limits, and that a particular Congress critter is long past the shelf life, but they are in a district which may have been especially crafted for them where there are enough of the particular party that they'll never be voted out of office? If every election they have to run against all of the other candidates in the state for the office, it will be much easier to get rid of the bad apples who are just there because they have found their gravy boat supported by campaign finances from special interests who won't ever leave until they are in their doddering nineties.
I'm not naive enough to believe that the Congressional mix of Republicans and Democrats won't change somewhat if this was adopted everywhere. But I suspect that it would be very close to what it is now. You can be pretty sure that good candidates who truly work for all the people in their state, regardless of party, will be rewarded at the polls even with ranked choice voting. Those who are far left wing or far right wing will have more trouble. And this would be a very good thing.
From the people's perspective, if they got a Congress critter of either house who wasn't responsive to the people, they would be more likely to be gone in the next election, If a Congress critter turned out to be corrupt, did insider trading to benefit only themselves, was beholden to only corporate sponsors, they would be easier to remove from office.
Is it likely that something like this would be put in place? No. Not likely. The entrenched elements of both parties would throw up a fuss like you couldn't believe. But it is time for the state's citizens to claw back their federal representation from the loony bins or bordering senility bins that some seem to be drawn from. Gerrymandering is just an ugly thing and needs to go away. Everyone elected to Congress needs to represent his or her entire state, including citizens of all parties. They need to support legislation that supports all of their citizens and not just the wealthy or the poor. I don't see this happening with the way things are now in all states. Work to move your state in the right direction - I think a solution like this would help.
And if works to shape up Congress, and make it a more civil institution that actually gets good things done instead of hurting the poor, increasing the riches of the well off, and kowtowing to the President it would be a good thing. If it works for Congress, work on eliminating winner takes all in the electoral college. Multiply each states electoral college vote by the percentage of the popular vote that each candidate one, and apply ranked choice voting there as well across all states at the presidential level.
If you run that on the previous few elections, most wouldn't change, but a few would, and we might have better Presidents as well. Winner take all is the next thing to eliminate once you get rid of gerrymandering. Allocating by district like a couple states do isn't enough. Multiply the electoral college votes by the actual vote counts each person got and use ranked choice there as well.
Fix the political mess we're in, one step at a time.