| The one thing I think we can all be assured on is that they won't be so timid again, not after Kerry's and and especially Obama's margin in the state, Obama is the benchmark I'd use because he will be running again in 2012 and hopefully will win the state by an even bigger margin then giving coattails. Regardless many of the states areas and major Demographics are trending even more Democratic and doing so very fast.
Here are a list of the Republicans who must be targeted and how.
Dana Rohrabacher. No excuse for having someone this vitrolic a Representative. There's no way LA should have a representative who refused to meet President Bush at one time because he was too liberal and who would dress up with Minute Men if he could. Obama made progress in this current gerrymander which contains all the Republican coastal areas south of LA. The 46th has a large hispanic population that is growing quickly, and a large Asian population.
Democrats will probably take move hispanic areas out of CA-37 and CA-36 to make a coalition Hispanic VRA district. All they would need to do is increase it by 24 points from 16% to 40% and then use the large Asian population. Laura Richardson's district has plenty of Democrats to spare, as does Harman's, and Harman is a little to conservative for her district anyway. Doing this to Rohrabacher just gives me a certain pleasure, there's such a fitting irony to it. Hopefully he will be defeated by a Hispanic Democrat.
Ed Royce is another big, sore thumb. McCain still own it 51-47. It covers northern Orange County, I'd change that. The best way to change it would to be to lop off that southern hoof into Orange that goes around Loretta Sanchez's district and move the district North into some of the areas repesented by Grace Napiltano and Linda Sanchez, notable Cerritos. I'd make the new 40th about 56-43 Democratic to just to be safe and then I'd leave all the remaining Republican areas in the 42nd district, I'd buff it up with all the most conservative areas.
As I've said elsewhere Bilbary can be targeted. Susan Davis' district has become so overwhelmingly Democratic it can be diluted a little. Bilbary's district is trending out from under him for, an ironically, second time, losing the first time to Susan Davis. A little mixing up could create two San Diego districts that went around 59-40 for Obama and both would be Hispanic coalition VRA districts and would be hispanic majority by the end of the decade. The San Deigo can safely support two Democrats now, its time to get to it here.
CA-03 should also be made more Democratic. It can be done. I'd revert it to a district similar to its old boundaries; part of Sacrmento and North Sacremento County Amador County and Yolo. Yolo county is so liberal it would push the district back to the left and Lungren wouldn't be able to hold such a district. CA-01, Mike Thompson, doesn't need Yolo anymore. Its become so liberal anyway and the trend doesn't show any sign of stopping.
Ken Calvert is weak Republican and politician. He's been racked by scandal in the 90s and barely managed to win a swing district then. So Democrats did the sensible thing, (and I'm mocking them here), and gave him a safely Republican district. When that trended towards Democrats he nearly lost again. I see a trend here. If his district were finally to be made Democratic leaning he'd lose to a strong candidate. It can be done, but to do it I'd make Mary Bono Mack and John Campbell safe. One out of three ain't bad, and the Inland Empire can't support more than one Democrat safely right now and Calvert is the weakest of the three so he should be the one targeted.
And there you have it. A loss of five Republican Congressional seats and without going to such extremes as Republicans did in Texas. If we went that far we could probably knock out another two districts or so.
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