How partisan is your district?
The Civitas Institute has updated its Partisan Index, based on the Cook Partisan Voting Index of Congressional districts, so anyone can compare the political leanings of a state House or Senate district with the rest of the state's voting tendencies. It's an interesting look at N.C. politics -- especially for political junkies -- and is based on results from the 2008 statewide elections for governor and other members of the Council of State.
Here's the link to the Civitas Institute's "North Carolina Partisan Index."
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
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4 comments:
A more interesting index might be "How partisan is your paper's editorial board?"
Another general question about the political nature of congressional districts has to do with Representatives' attitudes toward citizens who once may have lived in their districts but have since moved elsewhere either within the same state or to a different state.
Occasionally here in the Triangle area of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, one gets the idea that a member of Congress from the Charlotte area may feel that any former resident of Charlotte continues to be a constituent of sorts even when living elsewhere. But there's not much in the way of a scientific method to test such questions as these.
So perhaps it might be good to ask: do Charlotte's U.S. House members recognize that former Charlotteans living elsewhere in North Carolina are now represented in Washington by other members of the state's congressioanl delegation besides the illustrious members whose districts include parts of Charlotte and Mceklenburg County?
Um, editorial boards are supposed to partisan. That's kind of the point. Regardless of political bent.
But more importantly, newspaper editorial departments should be the guardians of the rights and liberties of the people they serve in their particular circulation areas. This means that newspapers, even if they tend to support one political party over the other at the local, state or federal levels of elective government, still should be independent of the political parties in their willingless to question any actions they feel to be improperly or unjustly directed toward the citizenry.
One unfortunate weakness of The Observer in the last 30 years is that while the newspaper has been conscientious is advocating the strengths and qualifications of a number of outstanding Charlotte-based candidates for statewide office, in both the Democratic and Republican parties, the newspaper appears to be indifferent to, ill-informed about or simply uncaring of punitive politial activities directed against Charlotte people by various political interest groups in both the major political parties in this state.
It is a helpless feeling to encounter highly organized political harassment at the state or local level in Charlotte, Raleigh or elsewhere when you know that articles or editorials about the wrongful political actions are unlikely ever to be attempted by staffers from the newspaper.
So the least we can hope for is that major newspapers will not be partisan to the point that they are willing to sit by and let one political party or the other run over the rights of certain citizen groups served by a newpaper within the areas of its own readership.
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