It's hard to tell how a nonpartisan commission will draw maps. As we've seen with Iowa's first round of maps, they can make some unusual choices. For this map, I tried to hew as closely to the existing districts as possible, within reason; there are some odd territorial splits (such as WA-09 jumping across Puget Sound) that might make more sense to a local than to a East Coast resident like myself.
I tried to limit city and county splits where possible, but sometimes it was unavoidable. The biggest split is Tacoma, half of which I had to put in WA-06 and half in WA-09. I also tried to either ignore partisan data or encourage competitive districts. Thanks to the way the map is set up currently, the latter was pretty easy to accomplish; there are five districts that I would consider competitive (WA-02, 06, 08, 09, and 10).
Everyone was aghast at the proposed map that came out of one of the houses of the Arkansas legislature recently. The consensus seemed to be that it was a dummymander, as likely to end up with a 4-0 Republican delegation as it was a 3-1 Democratic delegation. I would argue that 2-2 split would be the safest, and sanest, way to draw the map. So I've come up with a few maps that would likely give that split.
Buyer's remorse is setting in quickly, according to Democratic pollster Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.
GQR polled 50 House districts currently held by Republicans which are expected to be major Democratic targets in 2012. The results indicate that the Republican House majority is already endangered, less than three months into Speaker John Boehner's regime.
The Republican incumbents in these districts, 35 of them freshmen, remain largely unknown and appear very vulnerable in 2012 (depending on redistricting). In fact, these incumbents are in a weaker position than Democratic incumbents were even in late 2009, or Republican incumbents were in 2007 in comparable surveys conducted by Democracy Corps.
These incumbents, identified by name, have an average approval rating of 35 percent across the 50 districts, with 25 percent disapproving. Another 38 percent were not able to give the candidates a rating, suggesting lack of visibility. This is about 10 points lower than the approval rating Democratic incumbents held in July of 2009 (with comparable disapproval rating).
More importantly at this early point, just 40 percent of voters in these districts say that they will vote to reelect their incumbent (asked by name in each district), while 45 percent say that they "can't vote to reelect" the incumbent.
This leads to a congressional race that is dead-even in the battleground. After winning these seats by a collective 14 points in 2010, these Republicans now lead generic Democratic challengers by just 2 points, 44 to 46 percent, and stand well below the critical 50 percent mark. The race is dead even in the top tier of the 25 most competitive seats‚ 46 percent for the Democrats versus 45 percent for the Republicans. In the next 25 seats, the Republicans have a slight 42 to 47 percent advantage.
You can find a list of the 50 districts polled here. House junkies will recognize most of the usual suspects there - IL-13 and IL-16 are probably the biggest surprises.
In the summer of 2009, the 40 vulnerable Democrats tested in this poll actually had a six-point lead; 36 of them wound up losing. And at this time in 2007, the 35 most vulnerable Republicans had the same six-point lead; 19 of them lost reelection.
Compared to that, a 2-point lead for GQR's 50 most vulnerable Republicans doesn't look very strong. And if even half these seats are lost, there goes the Republican majority.
Now, the Republican incumbents have a couple things on their side. One is time; a lot can happen in the next year and a half. Another is redistricting; while Republicans don't control the redistricting process for all these incumbents, they can make some of them safer, and they can also endanger a few of the remaining Democrats to balance out losses.
Still, these are bad early indicators for the new Congress. Voters don't know their new representatives very well, and they don't like them especially well, and they seem quite prepared to vote Democratic in 2012.
Here is my take on an 8-0 Maryland. I must thank abgin for this incredible inspiration of using stripe-style gerrymandering (the famous map he did of NY). I employed this technique in reverse - I asked myself, how can I link all of these heavy Dem areas to Republican areas to dilute their votes? I thought of where their votes are concentrated, and the biggest source is Northern Maryland and the Baltimore Suburbs.
So, I set out to link Dem heavy areas to Republican areas in Northern Maryland, and it worked well. The map is not too bad looking, although Ruppersberger and Sarbanes would have trouble fitting into this map, but they can move. Hoyer and Van Hollen would have decent district and maintain a lot of their territory. Barlett and Harris are completely drawn out, and I managed to make two VRA districts that are 51% black, while they take in as many heavy R precincts as possible in Northern Maryland the Baltimore Suburbs so they can leave liberal white areas and other AA areas to shore up other districts.
I wanted the Obama-McCain lean to be roughly 60%-40%, and I did well in that regard, I think only one is 57% Obama and the rest are over 58% Obama, so all districts are around D+5 to D+8, with the VRA districts being more Dem heavy. The only district I think that would be in trouble would be the Eastern Shore based one, but if Kratovil runs, it is his. So, here you go!
After seeing a lot of people predict that Ben Nelson and Scott Brown will lose because of their states' respective presidential voting patterns, I was reminded of a section of one of my political science textbooks from last semester. In Chapter 6 of The Politics of Congressional Elections, the author, Gary Jacobson, details the events leading up to each set of congressional elections from 1980 to 2006 as well as the overall results. One thing I found particularly interesting at the time was that the percentage of Senate seats won by the party of the presidential candidate that also won that state has been on the rise over the past decade. Here are the relevant passages from page 218-219 of the book:
The same trend toward greater consistency in voting for president and U.S. representative in 2004 (Figure 6-3) appeared in Senate elections as well, resulting in a four-seat addition to the Republicans' Senate majority. . . The Democrat's main problem was again structural. They had to compete with the more-efficient distribution of Republican voters. Although Gore had won the national vote in 2000, Bush carried thirty of the fifty states, including twenty-two of the thirty-four states with Senate contests in 2004. Democrats had to defend ten seats in states Bush had won, including five left open by retirements, all in the South, where support for Democrats has been eroding for several decades. Meanwhile, Republicans were defending only three seats in states won by Gore. . . Seven of the eight Senate seats that changed party hands in 2004 went to the party that won the state in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections; Salazar's victory was the lone exception. . . More generally, twenty-seven of the thirty-four Senate contests were won by the party whose presidential candidate won the state's electoral votes, tying 1964 for the highest level of congruence in president-Senate election results in the past half century. When the 2004 winners were added to the continuing Senate membership, fully 75 percent of Senators represented states where their party's candidate won the most recent presidential election, the highest proportion in at least fifty years.
So what does this mean for the parties going into 2012. More below the fold.
The key difficulty in drawing up target lists of potentially vulnerable House Republicans is, of course, redistricting. It's simply hard for us to know what most districts will look like come 2012. But some seats simply can't or won't change too much, whether by virtue of geography, politics, law or custom. I'm thinking, for instance, that the 2012 edition of Charlie Bass's NH-02 is unlikely to look very different from the 2010 version - and that Bass will be his usual weaksauce self, all but inviting a top-tier challenge. And Bass's next-door neighbor, the corrupt Frank Guinta, will probably wind up in the same boat.
These can't be the only two guys to make our early lists, though. Who else do you think will have a pretty stable district, and ought to face some trouble?
This is a quick attempt at South Carolina with 7 seats and 2 Minority Majority districts.
SSPers speculated that there should be a second VRA seat in South Carolina, as there is a substantial black population. Personally I do not think South Carolina should have gotten another seat, the data on Daves App shows South Carolina at 4.5 Million or so, and 2010 Census showed it at 4.6 M or 663,710 per district. I however feel that as long as the US House stays with 435 seats and the size of each constituency rises with each census apportionment, the utility of VRA seats are going to collapse onto themselves.
We see instances like Mel Watt (NC), Corrine Brown (FL), and Sanford Bishop (GA) that getting 50% of their districts Black is a hard order when trying to make a district that has at best moderate gerrymandering.
South Carolina has a large African American population 30% in the 2000 Census; however the population is way too spread out to make a coherent congressional district within a state. As seen here
And my map seen here
It just is too agressive to get a 50% district and a 49% district. Also notice that the 4th district (yellow) is just barely contiguous. This gerrymander will only see Clyburn, Scott and Dowdy keep their seats I believe. It does really put Joe Wilson into a very strange district.
Everyone says Georgia can't eliminate John Barrow, but I don't really see why not. His district isn't VRA Protected like Sanford Bishop, so far as I know. And anyways, 4 out of 14 VRA for Georgia is better than, say, 1 out of 7 in Alabama.
Here's my take:
Chatham Co. only gave Obama a margin of 15,000 votes, and if you add in the two suburban counties, it is only 50-50. That plus all the GOP rural areas combine Barrow and Kingston into a Lean/Likely GOP district. (Light Blue) 60% White
from the 51% White Barrow's current district is
Sanford Bishop (Green) gets a 46% White district, a slight improvement. He adds Macon, making GA-8 completely safe for Austin Scott (periwinkle), who gets a 65% White district.
The new 1st district (Dark Blue) is 66% White and fit for someone like St. Sen John Bulloch or St Sen Jeff Chapman, who ran for Governor in 2010.
The 4th, 5th, and 13th remain similar
Phil Gingrey's district is eliminated, but since he is pushing 70, he'll probably just retire.
Tom Price's 6th (Teal) isn't going blue anytime soon. It could be a problem around 2020, though, but the new redistricting will be approaching by then.
Rob Woodall's 7th (Gray) has to shed quite a bit of population, now being 63% White and nearly all in Gwinnett County. This is the district I'd worry about most going Blue in the decade, particularly if the White percentage keeps dropping. The 22% who are Hispanic or Asian is a wild card, as many don't vote, at least not yet.
The New 11th (Green) is 60% White, with 10% the Hispanic/Asian wild cards. Somehow, I can find no veteran State Senators from the district, so I'm not sure about the bench. It's mostly suburban Republicans, though.
Westmoreland's purple 3rd is still safe for him, as are Graves' 9th (Northwest) and Broun's 10th (Northeast).
On the east side, including Augusta, is the other open seat, the new 14th.
Now on to Washington, and their bipartisan incumbent protection map.
There it is.
And the Seattle area is here:
In Eastern Washington, the two swing counties, Whitman and Spokane, are split up. That's the only big difference. McMorris Rodgers (Yellow) and Hastings (Red) are safe. Herrera Beutler (Purple) now has to extend a bit further East, as it loses Longview, Pacific Co., and Olympia, making it much safer for her, probably going from Toss-Up to Lean R.
Dicks' 6th (West), which needs to be made a bit safer for when he retires, as the Western lumber counties are trending a bit away from us, adds Pacific Co., Longview, and Olympia from the 3rd, loses some of S. Kitsap Co., as well as Central Tacoma, and remains a swingy Tilt D district.
Reichert's 8th (Purple) gets much bigger, losing the Microsoft Area to the new 10th (Pink) and taking up nearly all of the non-Coastal Northern Coast Counties from Larsen, making his Green 2nd a bit safer in the process (he nearly lost this year). This means Larsen needs to take up more Suburbs, making Inslee (Blue) take a bit of Seattle, moving McDermott (Gray) into some low-income suburbs as well as Seattle, and making Adam Smith, the new Armed Services chair, in light blue, take in the AFB and Army Base, as well as all of Tacoma.
We need to gain 25 seats in order to retake the House of Representatives. It should also be stated clearly that the best possible chance we will have to re-take a House majority is in 2012. Presidential Year demographics skew in our favor and Presidential percentage of the vote matches House percentage near perfectly.[Obviously if we lose the White House we didn't retake Congress]
It is true that our attention appears to be on what will happen in the next Congress but remember over the next two years there are only two realistic options, compromise or gridlock, It is easier to prefer grid lock, but however we got to this very unfortunate situation we have to focus on getting out. If you don't like comprise, we can put Nancy Pelosi back in the Speaker's office and she is an excellent check on compromise.
However to do this all of us have to attempt to be on the same page, and as importantly learn the rules that can aid us in this endeavor. With that understanding I present the 25 rules to gain 25 Seats. First the list followed by the explanation.
1. All Republicans are every Republican.
2. Ignore incumbency.
3. Candidates matter less than you think.
4. How a member votes in Congress matters less than you think.
5. Run where the water is warm.
6. Fund all candidates in warm water.
7. Be wary of cold water.
8. Be wary of reruns.
9. Persuasion is overrated.
10. Start with the base and work out.
11. Remember who the base is.
12. Partisan performance is two numbers, Obama 08 high/Kerry 04 low
13. Don't under challenge.
14. Look for ethical weaknesses but don't over rely on them.
15. Remember and reinvent field.
16. Being a House Republican shouldn't be fun.
17. Use new media to expand who can help your campaign.
18. Let candidates be themselves.
19. Run with the President where it is wise, be careful where it is not.
20. If you can't use any National Democrats, you probably can't win.
21. Make sure to run with Local Candidates.
22. Peopleraise while you fundraise.
23. Know your vote Goal
24. The last votes are in ideas you haven't thought of yet.
25. Start now
