redistricting – Page 4

Missouri GOP, African-Americans kill Russ Carnahan’s seat.

This could very well be the prettiest redistricting map that you’re going to see this cycle:

You see, Missouri is in an interesting place where the state is: losing a Congressional seat; just coming off an election cycle where they flipped a seat to the GOP (making the current ratio 6 GOP / 3 DEM) ; and in possession of an almost veto-proof Republican legislature. So, Missouri Republicans decided to handle the situation by creating a 6 GOP / 2 DEM district map that cut up Russ Carnahan’s district and forced him to compete in a heavily African-American district (as per the Voting Rights Act) against incumbent William Lacy Clay. They also more or less left Emanuel Cleaver’s seat alone – Rep. Cleaver does not represent a majority-minority district, by the way; this will be important later. And then the legislature sent the map to Democratic governor Jay Nixon, who promptly vetoed it.

Oddly enough, when it came to the override, four Democrats crossed over to vote for the map, thus overriding the veto! Oddly enough, all four are African-Americans (who readily admitted that they were protecting Clay’s and Cleaver’s seats)! And oddly enough, Russ is not taking it well! And by ‘not taking it well’ I mean ‘engaging in profanity-laden, bitterly sarcastic invective,’ although I’m not entirely certain that Russ can actually spell any of those words*. It’s probably not helping that the Carnahan name may be a bit… colored, in Missouri African-American eyes… by virtue of past history.

Continue reading Missouri GOP, African-Americans kill Russ Carnahan’s seat.

The new Indiana district maps are out.

Karma. It’s what’s for dinner.

A lot of people are going to concentrate on the US House maps. If you compare the old one:

…to the new one:

…you can see why: there are four freshmen Republicans in Indiana, and this map directly helps at least three of them (particularly IN-09’s Todd Young, who gave Baron Hill a somewhat surprising upset last year). It also will encourage IN-02’s Joe Donnelly to abandon his own district in order to run for and lose either the Senate or the Governor’s race in 2012. All of this fairly obvious; but it’s the state house races that are interesting. And possibly a bit of applied vengeance.

Continue reading The new Indiana district maps are out.

#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.

#rsrh Cook’s incredibly cynical 2012 redistricting scorecard.

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.

#rsrh Let the MA redistricting wars begin!

This morning, the US Census bureau released the demographic data that the Massachusetts legislature will need to redraw its Congressional Districts. The actual data is only up on the Census website in limited form, but the Boston Globe summarized the information: Boston and Springfield lost population, while Lawrence, Plymouth, Revere, Shrewsbury, & Worcester gained some. This should give at least a rough approximation of where the lines are going to be drawn. I’ve broken down the current cities by CD and Representative:

CD	Rep	Gain/Loss	City
1	Olver	Neither
2	Neal	Loss	Springfield
3	McGovern	Gain	Worcester
3	McGovern	Gain	Shrewsbury
4	Frank	Neither
5	Tsongas	Gain	Lawrence
6	Tierney	Neither
7	Markey	Gain	Revere
8	Capuano	Loss	Boston
9	Lynch	Loss	Boston
10	Keating	Gain	Plymouth

Continue reading #rsrh Let the MA redistricting wars begin!

#rsrh MA Democrats embrace Thunderdome.

If there’s a silver lining to not winning any Congressional races in MA in 2010, it’s this: the Democrats there are unlikely to avoid a full-bore deathmatch over redistricting. The ‘problem’ there is that MA will be losing a Congressional seat, thanks to the 2010 Census – which means that somebody’s going to be taking it on the chin.

The Boston Herald runs down the options. You’ve got the guy whose wife is in jail for tax fraud (Tierney), the guy who just got the scare of his electoral life and is responsible for our current home mortgage mess (Frank), the freshman (Keating), the retiree (Olver), and two guys reportedly thinking about making a run at losing to Senator Scott Brown in 2012 (Lynch, Capuano). None of the above are acting like they want to let go of their seats… though even if they did, they wouldn’t show it.

If I had to guess, I’d say that the House member most likely to get left out after the dust clear would be… Niki Tsongas. She’s only been in office for several years, she’s a legacy pick, and… well, she’s a female Massachusetts Democrat. Let us just say that the Massachusetts Democratic party is not renowned for being a bulwark of feminist empowerment.

Moe Lane

#rsrh Definition of ‘frustration.’

Discovering that the third-party spreadsheet you’ve been working from for the last hour doesn’t have the one piece of information that you need to demonstrate just how stuck the Democratic party is going to be next cycle when it comes to redistricting.

I mean, they’re stuck any way you look at it – they managed to lose just the right number of state legislative seats and/or ballot initiatives to totally make their few state-level wins effectively worthless when it came to redistricting* – but it’d be nice to show.

:twitch:

Moe Lane

*Seriously, redistricting was one of the few reasons that I can think of that would make the Democrats actually want California, and the voters just handed redistricting over to a commission. Oops?

54 of 99.

That’s the current number of state legislative chambers* that the GOP will be controlling, starting next year: there are still five state legislative chambers still undecided, so the number could go as high as 59 of 99. That represents a flip of eighteen state chambers (and the gain of both houses in the state legislature in six states) by the GOP; couple that with a +7 to +10 gain in governorships and it was a good night for the Republicans on the state level.

This is important for two reasons (besides the obvious one that this makes it easier to pass conservative/Republican policies): first, it cuts deeply into the available pool for up-and-coming Democratic legislators who would like to be Federal Congressmen and Senators – or, for that matter, governors. Second, it neatly spokes the wheel of the Democrats’ long-term project to have control over the redistricting process. In 2011, the redistricting process will require the maps to be redrawn in eighteen states; and it was always the goal of the Democratic party to have unilateral oversight over that process, the better to eliminate troublesome Republicans via gerrymandering. Thanks largely to the RGA, that’s a lot less of a problem than it was before: of the eighteen states that are going to gain/lose seats, at least thirteen will have Republican governors, which will help keep the shenanigans down.

In short: Tuesday was a great night for the GOP, on pretty much every level that you would care to name.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Nebraska has an unicameral legislature.

The [epithet] and the redistricting knives.

If you do political blogging or reporting for a while, you end up hearing this question a lot: Why should I bother to come out and vote for the [insert epithet here meaning ‘not as ideologically sound as I am’]? This would be normally responded to with a polite “That’s a good question” and a variable-length stream of blather before the question is actually answered, but let’s cut to the chase. You bother to go out and vote for the [epithet] because:

Voting for the [epithet] in the House helps get you a Speaker with control over the Rules Committee, and somebody friendlier as Chair of Oversight and Government Reform. Look them both up.
Voting for the [epithet] in the Senate helps get you an atmosphere where half the judiciary/executive branch appointments that you would object to strenuously quietly die stillborn.

That’s the way it works* – but you’re thinking to yourself, Well, at least I don’t have to vote for an [epithet] for governor. – but alas, no. You do. In some ways that’s the most critical place where you would have to if necessary, in roughly half the races out there this cycle. Why?

Redistricting. Continue reading The [epithet] and the redistricting knives.

State races are vitally important this year.

This is why.

In the 43 states where the congressional redistricting process is in partisan hands, Democrats control both houses of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion in 15 states, while Republicans hold 8 states, and 20 states are split between the two parties. Going into 2010, Democrats control redistricting in nearly twice as many states as Republicans, but states where the GOP controls the process – for instance Florida, Texas, and Utah – are also the most likely to be adding congressional seats. And for the first time since it joined the union in 1850, California may not add a congressional seat.

…37 states will elect new governors and 36 new state legislatures next fall. That means that every state house race – especially in states like Tennessee, where the legislature is closely-divided – has the potential to have effect on the next decade’s political landscape.

(Via 73Wire, via The Other McCain)

Let’s look very quickly at the eight states listed here as being the ones most likely to lose seats: Continue reading State races are vitally important this year.