#rsrh Mickey Kaus’ excellent CA redistricting point.

On the question of whether Democrats have taken secret control of the redistricting process in California… really, at this point, how could you tell?  Right now (assuming Wikipedia isn’t smoking crack) the California partisan breakdowns are as follows:

D R V
State Assembly 52 27 1
State Senate 25 15
Congressional Districts 34 19

…and, looking at the partisan breakdowns of Californian Congressional districts, I’m missing how a hypothetical Democratic conspiracy can make currently-Republican districts less Republican without also making rather more Democratic districts less Democratic.  This is where the devil’s bargain of racial gerrymandering bites Democrats on the hindquarters again; California’s heavy urbanization takes too much off the board when it comes to electoral skullduggery.

As Mickey puts it, the worst-case scenario would be the status quo.  Which is what I’m expecting will be the end result, mind you.

5 thoughts on “#rsrh Mickey Kaus’ excellent CA redistricting point.”

  1. Problems for Rs is that there are a ton of white-majority, heavily (O60%+) districts in LA and SF. If you traded a bit of those districts with Republican portions of marginal Republican districts like CA-11 (currently barely represented by an R), CA-4, Bono Mack, etc., you end up with another 3-4 Democratic districts.

  2. Agreed. I’ve looked at this, and from what I can tell, it might be, like, -1R Congressionally, status quo in the CA State Senate, and the CA GOP may actually gain a little ground in the CA Assembly.

    As long as the Commission follows the law as written, there’s not much they can really do in the way of gerrymandering…

  3. Actually, he may be wrong. Norcal is likely to loose a seat to SoCal. Not that such a situation is likely to change the partisan makeup, though.

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