Posted on 06/26/2011 5:30:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
Add redistricting as another drag on Democrats in their march to win back the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012.
It’s hard to recruit new House candidates, or to fund-raise for incumbents, if you don’t know what the districts will look like.
Redistricting, or the redrawing of a state’s House districts, follows reapportionment, which allocates congressional seats to the states. The latter occurred in December, when the Census Bureau released state population totals and revealed how many House seats (and electoral college votes) each state will have for the next decade.
“Redistricting is a multi-year nerd fest for politicians, pundits, academics, lawyers, demographers, cartographers, and now even some hobbyists,” said Dave Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report.
This time, “12 House seats switched states, with ten states losing seats and eight states gaining,” said Wasserman, author of a nerdy little book called “Better Know a District.”
And unlike some democracies, where redistricting is a simple procedure, in America it can be a highly contentious affair in which politicians "gerrymander" boundaries for partisan and personal advantage, Wasserman explains.
His book is awash in statistics, scenarios and maps. It is not just for the political junkie to run home and open, like a kid with the Sears Christmas catalog; House expert Isaac Wood of the University of Virginia Center for Politics definitely recommends it for even the casual reader.
The power of redistricting rests with state legislatures. Thanks to the 2010 midterm election, Republicans hold more than 50 percent of the states’ legislative seats, giving them the best position to cut and paste lines since 1928.
In the next two or three election cycles, ten to 20 House seats likely will remain in GOP hands or flip from Democrats as a result of last year’s historic power switch.
Despite unions pushing for recall elections of GOP state senators in Wisconsin, Republicans there have skirted a crisis and will finish redistricting ahead of any potential statehouse switch.
All is not rosy for the GOP, however.
In Illinois, which will lose one U.S. House seat, Democrats have carved up six Republican districts and hope to elect five new Democrats. In California, a new “citizen-run” process could turn three or four Republican-leaning seats into opportunities for Democrats.
Yet Republicans could carve three North Carolina Democrats out of their seats and eliminate Democrat districts in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Missouri.
Every state (except for the seven with a single House seat each) will redistrict.
So far, eight have finished, leaving 35 to go.
There's no firm time-line, according to Wasserman, because “every state has its own set of candidate-filing deadlines.” The process will more or less be completed by mid-2012, save for a few lawsuits.
In 2010, Republicans won an impressive 12-7 shift in battleground-state Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation. So look for redistricting to protect that advantage, most likely by merging Democrats into heavily Republican districts.
In Northeastern Pennsylvania, for example, that means taking Democrat-heavy Scranton out of Democrat-leaning House District 11, now held by Republican Lou Barletta, and adding it to GOP-heavy District 10, held by Republican Tom Marino, ensuring the re-election of both freshmen.
One quirk this time is the rise of independents: More voters identify themselves as independents, not Republicans or Democrats, and switch party preferences from one election to the next.
That means “the effects of gerrymandering may now only be felt for an election or two … and not for the entire ten years,” said political scientist Jeff Brauer. He said that “certainly was one factor” in the past decade’s shifts in Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation.
Wood says average citizens should pay attention to redistricting: “They are often confused to find that they are in a new district, with a new representative, and are even more baffled when they see that their neighbor is no longer in the same district they are.”
Wasserman says redistricting’s technology has evolved from giant maps laid on gymnasium floors in the 1970s to today’s iPod apps, which creates its own unique problems.
“So in James Carville-Mary Matalin type households,” he jokes, referring to a politically split family, “mapmakers are being tempted to split the living room from the kitchen.”
Funny story out of my district. The uber RINO and his marxist buddy got cut out of the district and can’t tag team the conservative. LOL
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2739127/posts
Surprised democrat reps didn’t go AWOL over redistricting.
Add redistricting as another drag on Democrats in their march to win back the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012.The Demwits have controlled redistricting after pretty much every census basically since 1940. This article was made possible by the election of 2010!
Perhaps someone more familiar with the area can jump in here?
The problem of course will be that Pubs will cave in most re-dist. plans. They always do in order to please the MSM and who they consider Indies and those always-voting-Dems Pubs think they can attach to their cause. Minorities, feminists, and union membership. If Pubs would use their legis. advantages here, they could draw districts which would include Reagan Dems(those old union families) , many Indies now leaning Pub, TEAS, Libertarians and forget the lost causes. We shall see if they try that in Pa.,Wisc.and in the SW states.
I'd be willing to bet that Republicans control a lot more of the legislative seats in the states that GAINED House seats.
I wonder if RCP has that, much more relevant statistic available?
I would think you would be glad of that; the only good Dimocrat is one so grossly incompetent and/or negligent, he gets no legislation passed.
Not so.
In Texas, following the 2000 census, Tom DeLay very effectively pushed the local do-nothings into a very good redistricting plan, one that resulted in a large GOP pick-up and yet which survived the usual court challenges unscathed.
That was the gift that keeps on giving, since for the first time, predominantly Republican Texas has a predominantly GOP Congressional delegation.
Redistricting ping
Isn’t the Texas plan being challenged in court?
From what I’ve read (I’m not an expert), I think they’re going to shore up Barletta-11, Dent-15, and some of the suburban Philly GOP seats (Meehan-7, Gerlach-6, Fitzpatrick-8) by splitting off some of their DEM areas and adding them to existing DEM districts like Holden’s-17 and taking some GOP areas from Holden and Marino’s (10) to shore up 11, 5, 6, 7, 8. It doesn’t sound cut and dried to me-there will be a lot of shuffling- and I haven’t seen a map. But I know one GOP goal is to shore up those five seats and giving Holden a much larger share of DEM’s.
There will also be a seat eliminated in western PA, probably 12, so that will pit two Dems against each other out there and shore up some of the marginally GOP seats.
OK! Thanx! Just hope the locals know what they are doing.
I had seen quite a few stories where the plan was to put Scranton in PA-17...an I-81 district going from Scranton to Schuykill to potentially Harrisburg. Scranton and parts of Luzerne nearly *always* vote Democrat. Dauphin usually votes Republican but they do support Tim Holden.
Anyway, Republicans have controlled PA-10 for most of the last 30 years...PA-11 has typically been controlled by Democrats.
I would favor putting Scranton in PA-17.
In what countries is redistricting a simple procedure, and how do they accomplish the task without political strife?
I’m not familiar with the area but my reading of the election history in those places gives me the same thought as yourself. 11 will probably go back to the Dems and 10 could flip to them as well thanks to redistricting.
You are absolutely right! My point was he has done nothing to merit being reelected for the past 20 years, even if you are looking at it from a Democrat’s point of view. His main accomplishments are to be a reliable vote for Nancy Pelosi and a predictable voice whenever the race card needs to be played.
If they can give Scranton to Holden that sounds like a good idea.
I had the impression that they were going to give Holden the more Democrat areas of Harrisburg and spread around some of Holden’s more GOP (rural) areas to Barletta and maybe Dent. They could peel off some of Scranton and put it into Marino’s district and not do too much damage, I think.
This is a few months old, but sounds pretty on target. In any event, I think Holden’s going to get a much safer district and several neighboring districts are going to get safer GOP. It’s seems like a good bet that Altmire and Critz are going to have to toss a coin. Altmire has said that he would not participate in a contentious primary and risk losing the seat. We’ll see.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/mapping-the-future/a-safer-map-for-pennsylvania-r.html
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