I had heard that Darcy Burner – best known for being a Democrat who couldn’t beat a Republican in Washington state during the two worst election cycles for Republicans in living memory – spoke yesterday at Netroots Nation in Providence, RI (I happen to be in town myself for the much cooler Breitbart Awards conference that the Franklin Center/the Heritage Foundation is putting on). Feeling | Read More »
Cook Political Report has more or less formalized their 2012 redistricting scorecard; their final score is a gain of one Republican seat, based solely on redistricting. Cook notes that this total actually represents about 10 to 15 seats being fortified for the GOP, given that the majority of legislators who benefited from redistricting were Republicans. This will no doubt infuriate Democrats, but then: elections matter. | Read More »
I dunno. They’re certainly scurrying around like… things that scurry… in Albany tonight. This report suggests that the fix is in for the state legislature, and that Governor Cuomo is going to cave on his promise to support reform today, in exchange for promises of reform tomorrow; but it also suggests that the NY legislature has decided to let the courts design the Congressional maps, | Read More »
I say “threatened” because if the NY state legislature doesn’t come to a deal by Wednesday, this is the map that is very likely going to be the one to get used: …and there’s going to be several Members of Congress who will be very unhappy if that happens. Including Steve Israel of the DCCC.
Some background, for those who need it: Texas, thanks to explosive growth over the last ten years, picked up four Congressional Districts after the last Census. The Democrats, who are (naturally enough, I suppose) angry that this growth has been at the expense of their own caucus (the 2010 Census generally demonstrated that a lot of people have been voting with their feet on this | Read More »
OK, here’s the background: NY is losing two seats in Congress, thanks to the 2010 Census. Well, more accurately, thanks to the urban blue model of governance that has had folks fleeing those urban areas in droves – but never mind that now. As has been noted previously, the New York legislature is having a devil of a time coming up with a map that | Read More »
So, we’re having ourselves a situation in New York with redistricting. The basics: New York, like many blue states that have been blue states for a while, has seen its population ratio to the rest of the country drop sufficiently that it’s losing two Congressional Districts this cycle. So they’re all trying to figure out how to redraw the map for an optimal destroy-your-enemies approach: | Read More »
Ted Cruz is an old friend of RedState, of course: so we made sure to spend a couple of minutes talking about the race, how the ongoing redistricting dispute in Texas is making everybody’s elections difficult, and about CPAC generally. And if you’re wondering why a Texas federal Senate race would be affected by redistricting, it’s because nobody really wants to have three primary dates | Read More »
And I wish that I had been there to see both the Democrats and the three-person judicial panel bug their eyes out at Texas’s lawyer when he calmly pointed out that any hypothetical screwing over of minority Democrats when it came to redistricting took place not because they were minorities, but because they were Democrats. I don’t know if that argument’s going to actually fly | Read More »
Sorry about the sound quality: we’re in the middle of a solar storm today, remember? At any rate, I talked this afternoon with Michael Williams, who is running in TX-25, assuming of course that the courts d0n’t decide to fold up the new Congressional maps for Texas into a variety of paper airplanes and fly them out of the window. The short version is: the | Read More »
Details here and here: the short version is that the USSC decided that a lower court erred because it had, to quote the New York Times, “not paid enough deference to the Legislature’s choices and had improperly substituted its own values for those of elected officials.” The underlying issue is that there is an ongoing dispute over how the new Texas federal Congressional map should | Read More »
Yeah, normally I categorize this sort of thing as ‘cutting and running,’ but the man just fought off colon cancer. That stuff is nasty and even I have limits to my dearth of sympathy towards Democratic legislators. Anyway… NY-22 is currently D+6, but who knows what will happen after the next redistricting? …Actually, according to Ed Koch this is a – his words, not mine | Read More »
Come, I will conceal nothing from you: the Ricky Gill campaign is busily bringing up the odd detail that his likely opponent for CA-09 – Rep. Jerry McNerney, who was essentially accused by ProPublica last month of having that district redrawn for his benefit – has not yet moved into CA-09. Given that McNerney’s been putting this move off since at least last July, I | Read More »
[UPDATE: I've had folks note that the original map is not quite the same as the final, approved map. There's been some tweaking of districts; not enough to particularly change any of the practical results found below, but enough to be noteworthy. Fair enough.] I was over at Larry Sabato’s site today* and I came across this report that an attempt to referendum the Ohio | Read More »
Before we talk about this race, some quick background on this district: as you probably know, California did some pretty severe internal redistricting after the 2010 Census. What you probably didn‘t know – but probably suspected anyway – is that the Democrats who run the state managed to pervert was supposed to be a nonpartisan process by the blatant use of astroturf, front groups, and | Read More »
The new redrawn Pennsylvania Congressional map is out, and it’s… well. If you ever wondered whether elections have consequences, then wonder no more. Executive summary: two of the least powerful PA Democratic Congressmen have been thrown into Thunderdome and told to fight each other; the other five PA Democrats have been, ah, reassured that their seats are safe; and the nine PA Republicans have had | Read More »
So… the Maryland redistricting map was revealed and signed into law recently, and – shock! Surprise! – the Democratic-controlled legislature managed to hack into one of the two Republican seats. The short version: they went into Roscoe Bartlett’s MD-06, switched out a bunch of districts to make it more competitive, and then put central Maryland into the redistricting blender and hit ‘puree.’ Because, well, central | Read More »
No, really: all three African-American Congressmen from Illinois are loudly complaining that the current redistricting map as drawn may be in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Illinois Republicans are currently suing to have the map overturned, largely on the grounds that under the usual interpretation of federal law the new map needs to have more than one majority-Hispanic district. As this | Read More »
(Via The Campaign Spot) And… it’s subtle. Executive summary: Ohio loses two districts, overall. Republicans Steve Austria and Mike Turner end up competing with each other in the same district. Democrats Marcy Kaptur & Dennis Kuchinich, ditto. Democrat Nancy Sutton loses her district and gets thrown into a district that heavily favors her new Republican opponent Jim Renacci – and she doesn’t get to bring | Read More »
Or at least scream: it turns out that the redistricting map for Michigan signed off on by Republican governor Rick Snyder last week seriously discombobulates long-time Democrat and House Judiciary Ranking Member John Conyers. The new map (which, incidentally, handles Michigan’s loss of a Congressional seat by effectively eliminating Democrat Gary Peters’ seat and making the rest more party-friendly) pretty much took Conyer’s MI-14 seat | Read More »
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