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The new Indiana district maps are out.

Karma. It's what's for dinner.

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  April 12th, 2011 at 01:30 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

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.

The Journal-Gazette sums up the state House map as follows:

…the proposed House map has eight districts with no incumbent; three districts in which two Republican incumbents reside; three districts in which two Democratic incumbents live; one district in which three Democratic incumbents reside and four districts in which a sitting Republican and a sitting Democrat live.

…which – by the roughest measure – implies a -2 Democratic result with the next election (assuming that the two parties split the new no-incumbent and GOP/Dem incumbent districts evenly).  However, the current split in the Indiana House of Representatives is 60/40 GOP/Dem, and under the one-year residency rule for Indiana state legislators this plan almost guarantees that at least five of them will not be in the next session.  Possibly more: with a bad run of luck, the number could stretch up to nine or ten incumbent Democrats losing their seats.

Which actually would be a suitable punishment for those legislators abandoning those seats, at the orders of Big Labor.  Not that anyone is ever going to admit that this may have had something to do with the redistricting process; and, in fact, it’s easy to argue that this is merely a coincidence.  But if it is a coincidence, it’s one that no Republican legislator in Indiana will be willing to mitigate for his or her Democratic colleagues.

You see, actions have consequences.  Expect that lesson to be reinforced a lot this year.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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  • earlgrey

    I will take a closer look when I get home. Thanks for the cheerful post. It has been a tough week already.

  • C. Marie

    of Indiana have few places to run. Should they run for another term or, worse yet, higher public offices, I pray voting Hoosiers remember the five week, half a million dollar debaclethese fugitives committed.

    Lest they forget here’s the I-74 Bring Them Home parody.

  • jcrestonm

    Great news. The 9th district (my home district) has been very competetive for several elections now. This should keep the district red. Lawrence County (heavily Republican) was previously a part of two different congressiional districts. This redistricting effort will cause many more GOP votes to come into the 9th district. Great news for us and even greater news for Todd Young, who (as Moe says) is a freshman congressman.

  • LibertarianHawk

    …in the state House races, this redistricting map notwithstanding.

    Part of that has to do with where I’m at — which is near Evansville in the southwestern corner of the state.

    Last year, three Republican candidates (Ron Bacon, Susan Ellspermann, and Wendy McNamara) took seats that had been held by Democrats.

    Bacon and McNamara won by the slimmest of margins — in fact, on election night, it appeared that both of them had lost. I think the final margin in McNamara’s race was something like 8 votes (with ~19,000 cast). Bacon won by about 150 votes (with ~15,000 cast).

    Ellspermann won by a larger margin — but is in a heavily unionized district.

    And this was at a relative high water mark for Republican performance. I’m guessing all three of them will be on the Dems’ target list in 2012….and I’d be surprised if all 3 were reelected.

    Maybe they’re outliers — but I’ll bet there are some others like them who rode in on the Republican wave, but will have a harder time in a more normal election.

  • http://www.skiloveland.com skicougar

    Here in Houston, the city has propsed new city council maps and as far as i can tell from knowing the city demographics by living in it; the proposers have followed the democratic mayors orders and it looks like Houston will gain 2 seats by splitting 2 heavy democrat districts into 4 heavy democrats districts.

    Houston gained a lot of Lousianna businesses after Katrina, I do believe they may give them right back.

  • http://www.skiloveland.com skicougar

    Here in Houston, the city has propsed new city council maps and as far as i can tell from knowing the city demographics by living in it; the proposers have followed the democratic mayors orders and it looks like Houston will gain 2 seats by splitting 2 heavy democrat districts into 4 heavy democrats districts.

    Houston gained a lot of Lousianna businesses after Katrina, I do believe they may give them right back.

  • freemanja1991

    or we are, in Houston?

  • a440hz

    Looks like a lot less of an attempt to “ride the freeway” or urban/poor areas to get demographic isolation, and more of an attempt to get population balance among the districts, but make the divisions on logical boundaries (mostly county lines, I would assume).

    IOW, it looks like something that makes sense and isn’t an attempt to game the system. Leave it to the right to be fair. :)

  • Finrod

    I came up with an objective measure a while back for whether a congressional district is gerrymandered or not, and eyeballing it, it looks like all the proposed Indiana districts pass my test.

    (The test: put a bounding box around the district, E-W lines thru the northernmost and southernmost points, N-S lines thru the easternmost and westernmost points. Inside this box, is there more state land area outside the district than in? If so, it’s gerrymandered.)

  • IJB

    And, on this basis, in state where Republicans hold the ‘trifecta’, this Congressional map falls well short – it insufficiently strengthens IN-02, and it totally *fails* to help IN-08. (It does do a good job in IN-09, and the most of the rest).

    I blame Daniels for this – his ridiculous fealty to county lines has torpedoed what should have been a solid 7-2 map – instead it’s more like a 5-2-2 map.

    That’s woefully inadequate.

    As Moe points out, however, they *did* do a good job with the Legislative maps (especially the State House map, apparently). And this is, no doubt, payback for the Fleebaggers walkout. They won’t be missed.

    I suspect this map will lock in Republican control of the Indiana State House, at least, for most of the decade.

  • IJB

    As Indiana Republicans achieved absolutely *nothing* on the labor front (because IN Republicans and Daniels caved…), so I’m really not sure what Labor’s going to be bothered to be “mobilized” about in IN.

    Basically, what you’re saying is, in one corner of IN, Republicans will likely lose 2 very marginal seats, and hold one more.

    But, elsewhere, this redistricting is likely to *add* seats, so it’ll probably be a net ‘wash’…

  • steve010

    . This from the NYT:

    The early (BHO) focus is on the same collection of states that Mr. Obama carried in 2008, with the exception of Indiana, which advisers believe is out of reach.