Posted on 12/16/2006 9:28:43 AM PST by Alter Kaker
You more or less took the words right out of my mouth.
Yup, that is remarkable, but to state the obvious there are still two elections before the next round of redistricting, so the playing field is hardly set yet. The two major battlegrounds I'd say are Michigan and New York. Those are the big states with maps that currently favor the GOP where Dems have a good shot at unified control by 2011.
The Dems win by such huge margins in Chicago, that with snake districts, they could take out most of the GOP candidates now hanging on in only modestly GOP districts, in Chicago land. That could happen even while preserving minority dominated districts. Left in place would be maybe three GOP districts in northern Illinois, and three downstate.
The Democrats did draw such a map in 2001 but it was not selected by the Court. I remember seeing it, the ABQ district dove deep into the state to pick up Las Cruces. I think Udall's district was essentially unchanged but the rest of the state was split west/east into a Democrat-leaning and a hyper-Republican seat.
All I can find is that the judge's name was Frank Allen. The legislature's web site only has final maps.
If the IL RATS do redistrict, the IL-08 and IL-10 would remain the same. Kirk and Bean would trade House seats. The Downstate seats would stay the same. The RATS might try to create a RAT Hispanic seat with Kane and Will counties (eliminating Hastert who going to retire anyway). The RATS would then create a DuPage centered district that would put Biggert (my Rep.) and Roskam into it.
One would think that the fact that the GOP/DeLay just got burned by aggressive redistricting boomeranging on them would give Dems pause when considering it themselves. Especially with their IL gov also facing corruption charges, and Patrick Fitzgerald isn't done in Chicago.
I think that no matter who is drawing the maps, we are going to lose one Republican congressman from Michigan and at least one Republican congressman from Ohio in 2012. That's with the assumption that the next two elections are like those from '96 to '04 and we see minimal changes outside of open seats.
Also, I was thinking specifically of mid-decade redistricting. The change in many states from unified control to mixed control has no effect now, but will make a difference in 2012 if it persists in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio (whose system I don't fully understand but the executives appear to have the legislators as hostages.)
Ohio will lose two seats in the next apportionment and they will probably both be GOP seats. Michigan probably won't lose any seats so I'm guessing if the government is still divided they will go for a no-change incumbent-protection plan. New York will be a GOP bloodbath if the Dems take over the Senate before 2012..
AL: -1
IL: -1
IA: -1
MA: -1
MO: -1
NY: -2
OH: -2
PA: -1
AZ: +1
CA: +1
FL: +2
GA: +1
NV: +1
TX: +3
UT: +1
Based on the latest projections, these are the last 10 seats in and the last 10 seats out, along with their projected priority value.
CA-53: 725121
MN-08: 724363
NE-03: 722190
NJ-13: 722036
MI-15: 719647
PA-18: 719407
TX-35: 714536
LA-07: 711752
CA-54: 711566
GA-14: 710790
AL-07: 709229
NY-28: 707160
OH-17: 701909
MA-10: 700913
FL-28: 700177
AZ-10: 699641
CA-55: 698509
IL-19: 698466
MO-09: 697924
VA-12: 697202
Now, if I had to guess, I would guess that Louisiana will lose that 7th seat due to Katrina, and that Arizona will exceed the projections to gain a 10th seat.
In order to lose its 15th seat Michigan would have to drop about 800,000 people off its projected 2010 population and I think it's rather unlikely that the projections will be that far off.
In Illinois, it's possible that Mark Kirk will run against Richard "Guantanimo Bay is a Nazi death camp" Durbin.
With the GOP holding a scant 6 seats out of 29 in NY, I don't see how they can drop any further. The 'Rats are already overrepresented as it is. I would think in OH, more than likely, it would be 1 loss for each (would not the Kucinich and Tubbs-Jones seats be combined in Cleveland ?). I'd definitely say the 7th LA seat is toast since I don't think the census projections have taken the sudden pop drop into account. That might save AL from losing its 7th.
And RI I would think might drop to 1 seat, since it has barely grown, and is scarcely ahead of MT.
Based on census projections Rhode Island is nowhere close to losing its second seat. The lowest population for a state that would merit a second seat would be 1,002,999 and Rhode Island is projected to have a population of 1,116,652. In short, Rhode Island would have to lose population from its 2000 enumeration (1,048,319) in order to lose its second seat and that certainly won't happen. There are at least 40 seats projected to have a lower priority value than RI-02.
Now, what's far more likely, and I think this might very well happen, is for Montana to score a second seat. I was actually somewhat surprised when I realized it wouldn't based on census projections. Montana is projected to grow by 7.36% which is well below its 12.9% growth rate of the Nineties. A growth rate above 11.5% between 2000 and 2010 should give Montana a second seat and I think there's a definite potential for that.
Now, of course the actual figures will differ from the projections, but these should be taken as ballpark values.
I doubt Kirk will challenge an incumbent. More likely, Krik would run for the open Governor seat in 2010. These days, Kirk is sprouting how independent he is. How well he works with Bush and the RATS in Congress. With crooked RINOs and flaky conservatives running the state party, Kirk is the only Republican with star power.
off subject completely. But Time just completely whimped out on its time person of the year selection according to drudge at least. Who would you have picked? The comment about the Iranian President as the most likely selection, in the article, had they gone the route of actually picking an actual person is unfortunately possibly right.
As a group, I might have picked the Shias, in Iraq, in Iran, and in Lebanon, and potentially as time goes by, maybe in Saudi Arabia. They are on the march. No individual stands out. Thus a group choice seems indicated.
If New York loses two seats in reapportionment it'd be fairly simple to draw King and Fossella out of their seats. The central Long Island NY-03 King district would simply be dismantled and then the Staten Island anchored NY-13 Fossella district would necessarily have to pick up heavily Dem precincts from the current NY-08 Nadler district in Brooklyn. In the Upstate the Syracuse based NY-25 Walsh district is already Dem majority and the NY-26 and NY-29 districts could easily be merged, tossing Reynolds and Kuhl together (bye bye Kuhl).
To make the long story short, you end up with two GOP seats, one between Rochester and Buffalo and one in the Adirondacks (which would get most of the precincts Gillibrand and Arcuri don't want).
Even given that we are talking about NY, the GOP should be able to do better than 6 out of 29. Even before 2006 election, I wouldn't think the GOP was over-represented in NY. I would be surprised if the Dems have a larger percentage of the delegation after 2012 than they do right now. Of course, even under a more favorable map, the Dems could still have a lower percentage, which is really my point. Under the current map I would say an average outcome would be 10 GOP seats, 19 Democratic seats.
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