Note: I wrote ‘cynical,’ not ‘inaccurate.’ It’s cynical because it admits something that most people don’t want to admit in public: if your party controls the redistricting process in your state and your state is due to either lose or gain a seat, you are going to enjoy seeing what happens to the other party’s legislators in 2012. To summarize Cook’s current findings: they forecast a current net loss of one seat for the Democrats from redistricting, mostly because the Democratic-controlled Illinois (-1 seat overall) state legislature has every intention of hosing an estimated four Republican Congressmen; but the Republican-controlled state legislatures of Georgia (+1 seat) and North Carolina (no change) are going to do precisely the same thing to Democratic Congressmen, so it all works out*.
As you might have guessed, the news that Illinois is apparently planning to rewrite the 2010 election results to eliminate all those pesky Republican freshmen is making me less than incensed that Georgia (and probably Utah) seem inclined to reinforce the lesson embodied in said election; personally, I’m just grateful that we took control of enough state legislatures to keep the Democrats from pulling more Illinois/Wisconsin shenanigans…
Moe Lane
*To be fair, North Carolina’s existing Democratic-designed gerrymandering is epic, and is the stuff of legends among political mavens.