‘Genius’! Joy Behar may never live down blaming GOP Senate wins on ‘gerrymandering’

“The View” co-host Joy Behar said something so stunningly incorrect this week about America’s election system that some now wonder whether she’s ever read the U.S. Constitution, let alone a book.

During a discussion Wednesday with ABC’s Matthew Dowd about the just-completed elections, she suggested the GOP captured additional seats in the U.S. Senate because of gerrymandering.

“Democrats won the popular vote last night by 8 million votes. But they lose U.S. Senate races in red areas,” Dowd initially said, spurring Behar to reply, “Because of gerrymandering …”

Listen below as Dowd explains to her why that is literally impossible:

 

“That’s not gerrymandering, that’s the Constitution. The districts are gerrymandered, but states are part of the Constitution,” he replied in a far more congenial tone than most would have used.

The makeup of the House is determined by congressional districts, and the process of redrawing these districts on the local level to better represent the population is known as gerrymandering. It’s viewed negatively by most because of attempts by local legislators to purposefully redraw districts to favor one particular political party over another.

While the framers of the U.S. Constitution purposefully based the House on districts to make it proportional to population, they likewise constructed the Senate to be proportional to the number of states in the union. Ergo, each state receives only two senators. This in turn prevent higher-population states from unfairly imposing their will on smaller states.

Clearly, Behar doesn’t understand any of this, presumably because she failed to pay attention in high school civics class, as speculated by many on social media:

But according to Bre Paxton at The Federalist, Dowd deserves some criticism as well for his odd decision to conflate the House’s popular vote with the Democrats’ Senate losses.

“When discussing Senate races, the number of total votes cast in favor of one party or another at the national level is completely irrelevant. To win a senate seat, one must win the popular vote in one’s own state,” she noted.

“Control of the U.S. Senate is not automatically handed to whatever party happens to get more ballots cast in its favor at the national level because senate races are determined at the state level, not nationally.”

Yet Dowd conflated them anyway, not that he was alone. An astounding number of left-wing “reporters” and “journalists” have been pushing the idea of an unfair ‘House popular vote‘ since before the election.

Just to be clear, there’s no such thing as a “Senate popular vote” …

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Vivek Saxena

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