Author: drobertson

The Dems came extremely close to controlling the redistricting trifecta in CO, losing the state house of reps by a single seat. If the Dems had won that house seat last year, or if they could somehow convince one of the Republicans in the house to switch parties or support a Democratic redistricting plan, here is one way the Democrats could draw a reasonably compact 5-2 map of Colorado.

Denver Area:

The two districts that are the most changed under this map are the 3rd and the 4th. The new 3rd is a C-shaped district that includes the Hispanic areas in the Southern part of the state, the liberal rocky mtn ski towns, and some swingy areas in Jefferson county. Despite the fact that the Jeff Co areas are swing regions, this district is safely Democratic as those areas only make up about one third of the district’s population. A GOP candidate could get up to 60% of the vote in the Jeff Co part of this district and still lose overall due to the heavy Democratic lean of the other areas. The one problem with this district is that rep Ed Perlmutter actually lives here. This shouldn’t be a problem in terms of losing to a Republican (he’s more vulnerable in his old district than here), but he may not want to represent a district composed of so much new territory.

The new 4th is composed of Greeley, Fort Collins-Loveland, and some mainly Hispanic areas in Weld and Adams counties. Between the white liberals in Greeley and Fort Collins and the Hispanics in Adams Co, it should be all but safe democratic. I could see this district maybe going red in a midterm year with low Hispanic turnout, but even that would probably be a stretch, and getting less likely with every passing year as this area trends more and more democratic. Still this is probably the least Democratic of the 5 D districts on this map, which is a testament to how Democratic this map is more than anything else.

The 2nd district around Boulder is almost unchanged. The 1st has shed some areas in Denver Co to the 7th and gained some suburban areas around Littleton in order to shore up the 7th. The  1st is now less Democratic but still enough for Diana DeGette to be completely safe. The 7th has lost a lot of territory in Adams and Jefferson counties, but it has gained some African-American and mixed African-American and Hispanic areas in Denver along with some areas in Weld and Morgan counties. At 59% White it is the most minority-heavy of all these districts, and should be much safer for Democrats now. Lastly, the 5th and 6th serve as GOP vote dumps in Colorado Springs and the outer areas of the state, respectively.

UPDATE

There was some discussion in the comments of the potential effects of the VRA on Colorado. It is actually possible to draw a compact plurality-hispanic district in Denver and Adams Co. My initial guess was that this would wind up hurting Democrats significantly. This turned out to be partially true, but much less than I originally thought. The basic methodology of the map remains the same; Draw a C-shaped district combining the Denver suburbs, the Hispanic areas in South CO, and the liberal ski towns, and attach Fort Collins and Greeley to something other than ruralconservativeland. It turns out looking like this:



Denver Area:



Under this map, the 1st district is 43% W, 8 %B, 44% H. It is possible to make it as much as 39-ish percent white if you want to, but once it crosses the 50% non-white line there is no legal obligation to make it more non-white so I decided to leave it 43% white in order to make the surrounding districts safer. One big change under this map is that the 4th is now drawn down to Boulder instead of Adams Co. This saves the Democrats the trouble of having to find someone to run in what was under the first map their weakest district. The other change is that the 2nd district is now mainly a Jefferson Co based district, with a bit of Arapahoe Co and the SW tip of Denver Co thrown in. This is probably the worst thing for the Democrats on this map, as I suspect the PVI of this district is something like D+2 or 3, making it only a slightly D-leaning seat. It also has no incumbent, as rep Perlmutter’s home is still in the 3rd. This area is trending Democratic very quickly, though, so if the Dems have to draw a VRA seat then I wouldn’t totally freak out about this one. The 7th, having lost a lot of nonwhite territory to the 1st, now has taken on the majority-white sections of Denver. I don’t know where Rep Diana DeGette lives in Denver, however I would guess she probably lives in one of the mainly white areas, so she probably runs in the 7th under this map, opening up the new 1st for a Hispanic representative. The 7th, like the 4th, has probably moved towards the Democrats under this map. The 3rd, OTOH, has moved to the GOP here, as it has taken on the rural areas previously in the 2nd, a tiny part of Douglas Co, and Crowley and Otero counties in the south which are GOP leaning but have significant Hispanic minorities. Overall, this new 3rd is probably Likely D at worst. So the net shift to the GOP from creating a new Hispanic-plurality district is at most one district. The biggest loser under this new VRA scenario seems to be compactness and community-of-interest contiguity (I particularly don’t like the idea of splitting Denver Co between multiple districts), not necessarily the Democratic Party.

Arizona is gaining a ninth congressional district this year, and it is certain to be based in the Phoenix suburbs where the population has exploded recently. Generally it is believed that the new district will be Republican-leaning as are most of the Phoenix burbs, but it is actually possible to draw a compact new majority-minority district in the Phoenix area.

Phoenix Metro Area:

The new 9th district (light blue) is 39% White and 50% Hispanic. It encompasses east Phoenix areas drawn mainly out of the 2nd and 3rd districts with a little taken out of the 4th and 7th as well. To make up for that population loss in other districts, the 4th has taken on Tempe, which increases the white percentage in the district to 29% but those are mostly liberal white voters so it should be okay. The 3rd takes on some areas that had previously been in the 5th, and the 5th grabs Chandler from the 6th, evening out the population in the Phoenix area. Some other minor changes have taken place across the state to even out population changes, but nothing major that would change the partisan balance of power in these districts.

This new plan actually includes some things that conservatives could like. After losing Tempe and gaining Chandler, the previously swingy 5th district is now probably solidly conservative. The 2nd and 3rd have lost a considerable portion of their Hispanic populations, making them much safer for the GOP (this should help scandal-tainted rep Ben Quayle). And the new 9th is probably competitive for the GOP in a good year. I would consider it slightly leaning D, but with the gap in turnout between white and hispanic voters and the fact that SB 1070 may have changed the racial demographics slightly here since the census was taken mean that in a low-turnout midterm election this district may be close to a tossup. The only reason that the GOP would have reason to fight this district is that there is a possibility Rep Trent Franks has been redistricted into the 9th district under this map. He lives in Glendale, most of which is in this new 9th district. I highly doubt he would want to run in a majority-minority district, so he would probably fight this plan heavily. If this was a VRA-obligation, however, that might not matter.

As to whether the VRA requires this district, it may be open to interpretation. Important to note is that Arizona is one of the states that requires section 5 preclearance by the DOJ, so the Obama admin has a good chance to argue for the creation of a new majority-minority district if they wanted to. This district is pretty compact, but I think that Arizona could still make the case that you have to go out of your way to draw something like this. Overall I’m not sure if the Obama admin wants to challenge this in court, and I’m not sure if the Roberts court would be receptive to arguments for a new VRA district in Arizona, but I hope that the Obama admin at least tries here, because there is a chance they could succeed.  

One of the few states holding elections this year is Virginia, where the entire state senate and house of delegates will be up for reelection in addition to some local races. I will be doing a series of diaries offering my early assessment of how the races here in Northern Virginia could turn out, and what that could mean for 2012. This diary will cover state senate races, Part II the races in the house of delegates, and Part III the local races for offices like County Supervisor. These races seem very down in the weeds, but in a crucial state for 2012 like VA they can give an idea how strong each party is leading up to the presidential election.

The state senate is controlled by Democrats, who took the senate in the 2007 elections. The state senate is currently the last bastion of Democratic control in VA, so taking it back will certainly be the #1 goal of the VA GOP in 2011. The GOP has a fairly easy path towards taking back the senate; they need to flip three seats in order to regain control (a two-seat gain for the GOP would result in a tie, giving tie-breaking power to republican lt. gov Bill Bolling). The GOP could do this by defeating long-serving blue dog senators in extremely conservative districts in the southern part of the state. Many of these senators have been considered so entrenched that they haven’t faced a serious challenge in a while, but OTOH the GOP has had some success in winning against similar incumbents across the south recently. Regardless of what happens in the south of the state, there will certainly be a lot of contested races up here in NoVA, and that is what I intend to cover. The one caveat here is that we don’t know what redistricting will do to many of these districts. I will try my best to make predictions as to what redistricting could do to these races, but as with many races that is a major unknown here.

One of the resources I will be using heavily here are the great maps provided by the Virginia Public Access Project. They have maps down to the precinct level of all statewide and state legislative elections across Virginia available by county, house district, or senate district, not to mention all the other cool stuff that they have (maps of turnout, detailed info on redistricting, fundraising info, etc). I don’t know of any other state that has such a good resource available.

Let’s start with the easiest districts to predict. The 30th, 31st, and 35th are all highly democratic seats that will not be competitive this year. Safe D

Now on to the more interesting districts.

* 32nd District

Areas: McLean, Great Falls, Reston, Herndon

Senator: Janet Howell (D)

2009 Gov: 53% Deeds, 47% McDonnell



2008 Pres: 60% Obama, 39% McCain



2007 State Senate: Uncontested

Looking at WI voting patterns, it seems that there pretty much have to be three Democratic districts in the state: one in Milwaukee, one in Madison, and one along the western border with Minnesota. But if the GOP wanted to be really nasty, they could pack Madison in with the heavily Democratic regions along the Western border into one super-democratic district and allowing them to take over all the other districts in the state. This map accomplishes a pretty solid 6-2 split in the WI delegation for the GOP, while simultaneously strengthening the districts of reps Ryan, Duffy, and Ribble.  

The Democratic vote dump in the 2nd connects Madison, La Crosse, the counties just south of Duluth, and some other highly Democratic counties in the SW region, forcing reps Kind and Baldwin into one district. I would have added in Ashland Co, but rep Duffy lives there (reps Duffy and Ryan are both in the unfortunate situation of living in the most democratic areas of their districts, interestingly). Rep Ryan’s 1st is probably shifted the most to the right of any district in this map, due to his seniority in the house. It loses the Dem-leaning areas of Racine and Kenosha, and gains a lot of more rural territory. Some of this territory in the SW corner of the state is ancestrally Democratic (although it voted mainly GOP this year), but the rest of the area is very conservative, which has the effect of giving Ryan a pretty safe seat for as long as he wants it. Ryan seemed to have a lock on his old seat, but if the GOP is smart they’ll probably try to make it safer; his old district was won by Obama in 08 (although some of that may have been due to the fact that WI-01 borders Illinois and contains areas like Racine and Kenosha that are suburbs of Chicago). Perhaps more importantly, Ryan is actually incredibly conservative for a swing district like his, this analysis by Crisitunity back in 2009 found him to be the house GOPer in the 110th congress most to the right of his district (the GOP version of Nate Silver’s Most Valuable Democrat, if you will). This seems to suggest that in the future Ryan could be vulnerable in his current district, although he hasn’t shown any signs of it yet. Anyway, under this map, he probably wouldn’t be vulnerable anymore. Racine and Kenosha are moved to the 5th and 6th, respectively. Those districts have moved slightly to the left to help other districts, but they are still solidly GOP districts anchored in very conservative territory. The 4th in Milwaukee has gotten slightly more Democratic, and is now majority-minority (47% W, 33% B, 15% H), which helps the surrounding districts a little. The 8th is changed a little in partisanship; it has lost some light red areas in the NE corner of the state for deep red areas around Manitowoc and Sheboygan. The 3rd now stretches east from Eau Claire to Oshkosh. It is probably the most Democratic of all the districts other than the 2nd and 4th. And finally the 7th has now lost the most Democratic parts of the district is now much safer for rep Duffy.

The upper midwest has generally had very little history for gerrymandering in the past, so there could be a good deal of political fallout for the GOP if they decide to push a plan like this. They might be able to get away with chunking the south of Duluth counties into the 3rd, but something like this, although not terrible by the standards of states like CA, MD, or TX, would be the worst gerrymander WI has seen in ages.

At first glance, the GOP appears to be doing as well as it can in TN. They control the governor’s mansion, state leg, both senate seats, and every house seat outside of the two in Memphis and Nashville. But the seemingly ironclad Democratic stronghold of Nashville is actually possible for the GOP to crack. TN-05, which encompasses the city, has a PVI of D+3, which is low enough that it can be split among the heavily Republican precincts surrounding Nashville without doing too much damage to the GOP reps in those districts. And TN-05 is also 70% white, so the VRA does not provide an obstacle. I have attempted to draw a map that successfully cracks Nashville, giving the GOP 8 reps, without weakening the surrounding districts (especially the 8th, held by potentially vulnerable freshman Stephen Fincher, aka the gospel singer from Frog Jump).

Nashville Area:

Memphis Area:

The first step is to take the 9th and turn it into a Democratic vote dump, stretching it out to eat up some African American areas in the rural areas around Memphis. The 8th then comes down and takes the suburban Memphis areas currently in the fifth as well as most of the white areas currently in the 9th (leaving out the more liberal white areas). The new 9th is 23% white, 69% black whereas the old district was 36% white, 60% black. The idea here is to make the districts surrounding Memphis more conservative so that they can take Democratic parts of Nashville.

Nashville itself is split between the 8th, the 7th, and the 6th here. The 5th now encompasses only a small part of Nashville and now includes many more conservative suburban and rural counties. The 8th now stretches along the border of the state from Memphis to Nashville, having given up many rural areas to the 7th to make up for the 7th losing some of the Memphis suburban areas (more on why I did this trade-off later). Likewise, the 4th now stretches much further west into territory previously in the 7th to make up for the population that was taken out of the 4th and given to the 5th. The 6th is probably the least changed of all the districts used to split Nashville. It is still relatively compact and composed mainly of the northern suburbs of Nashville with some of urban Nashville thrown in. All three districts in the east are basically unchanged.

Demographics for all changed districts:

TN-09: 23% White, 69% Black, 5% Hispanic (Previously 36% W, 60% B, 3% H)

TN-08: 73% W, 20% B (Prev 75% W, 22% B)

TN-07 80% W, 12% B (Prev 85% W, 12% B)

TN-06 83% W, 11% B (Prev 90% W, 6% B)

TN-05 79% W, 10% B, 7% H (Prev 70% W, 24% B, 4% H)

TN-04 90% W, 6% B (Prev 93% W, 4% B)

Of all these districts, the one that needed to be protected the most was the 8th. The 8th was the most Democratic district in TN outside of Memphis or Nashville before, and the demographic changes seem to suggest that it has most a point or two more to the left with this redistricting. However, it has also become much more suburban and much less rural. This is very important, because while the rural areas have a very long history of electing blue dog democrats, the suburbs around Memphis are much more conservative and are solidly GOP at a local and national level, unlike the rural areas where Democrats still compete locally. Overall, the PVI of this district probably hasn’t changed too much, but I would suspect that it is now a good deal safer for Fincher.

I’m not actually sure that the GOP will do something like this, even though they probably could. It is a pretty atrocious looking map, and even though no majority-minority districts are split, it has looks a lot like something that would have happened in the pre-civil rights era south. There’s also not that much to be gained here; it’s only one congressional seat that we’re talking about. In the end, something like this, while possible, is probably not going to happen. But that doesn’t make it any less fun to draw. 🙂

In 2012, the Democrats are certainly going to have their work cut out for them if they want to retake the 25 seats they need to take back the house of representatives. Many of these gains will come from knocking off freshmen GOP reps who won in 2010, but in order to take back the house the Democrats will also probably have to run strong challenges against GOP incumbents who won reelection in 2010 but are potentially vulnerable in 2012. Often times, the person who was the challenger to an incumbent in the last election gets the nomination to challenge that incumbent in the next election by default (i.e. Dan Seals or Dino Rossi). These candidates may or may not be the best possible challengers (after all, they lost the last election), but it is often hard to tell whether their loss was due to a poor overall political climate, a tough district/incumbent, a badly run campaign, or some combination of the three. This diary is an attempt to make it at least a little bit clearer which of those factors was the case for all of the challengers on the Democratic side in 2010. Basically what I did is to take all the challengers in districts of a given PVI, group them together, and find the average percentage of the vote that they received. I ended up grouping multiple PVIs together in order to get more accurate averages, but that doesn’t matter much, as there is not a whole lot of difference between a district with PVI R+5 and a district with PVI R+7. Basically the question I am trying to answer here is: in a district with this partisan makeup, how well did Democrats do on average in 2010? Each candidate can then be compared to the average performance of democrats in 2010 in districts similar to their’s, in order to see whether they did significantly better or significantly worse than average. That should give us some measure of whether or not they were a good candidate.  

I’m not going to post all the data here in the interest of saving space, you can find the more detailed data in a Google Doc I compiled here . If you find any errors in this data, please let me know in the comments here and I will update ASAP. Here is the most important part, the average performance of Democratic challengers to house incumbents in each PVI grouping:

D+4-D+2:

Avg Dem challenger received 43.3% of the vote*.

D+1-R+1:

Avg Dem challenger received 35.5%.

R+2-R+4:

Avg Dem challenger received 34.9%.

R+5-R+7:

Avg Dem challenger received 33.7%.

R+8-10:

Avg Dem challenger received 31.9%.

R+11-13:

Avg Dem challenger received 31.1%.

R+14-16:

Avg Dem challenger received 30.0%.

*This one may be a little off, as there were only three challengers, Manan Trivedi in PA-06, Suzan Delbene in WA-08, and John Callahan in PA-15, that fit this PVI grouping

Now comes the important part: who did better and who did worse than average? Here are the good ones, the ones who did >5% better than the average performance of Democrats in similar districts:

Rob Miller (SC-02): +11.9%

Jim Reed (CA-02): +11.8%

Bill Hedrick (CA-44): +10.7%

Ami Bera (CA-03): +9.5%

Steven Segrest (AL-03): +8.6%

Steve Pougnet (CA-45): +7.2%

Tarryl Clark (MN-06): +6.1%

Ed Potosnak (NJ-07): +5.7%

Tom White (NE-02): +5.5%

Paula Brooks (OH-12): +5.5%

Timothy Allison (CA-24): +5.2%

Pat Meagher (CA-41): +5.1%

And the winner is… Rob Miller, running against Joe “You Lie!” Wilson in SC-02.

Now let’s take a look at the candidates that underperformed. Here are the candidates that did more than 5% worse than the average.

Philip Fedele (NY-26): -7.3%

Howard Kudler (NY-03): -6.8%

Joseph Kallas (WI-06): -5.6%

The GOP right now is in a very similar situation to the Dems after the 06/08 cycles. Having come off a very successful wave election where they picked up most of their potential targets, there simply aren’t as many Dem seats that the GOP can capture in 2012 as there were in 2010. Still, there’s actually a fairly decent list of seats that the GOP could target, not enough to give them gains like they had this year, but enough that they could pull off a 10-20 seat gain if 2012 turns out to be a good year for them. These are what I consider to be there best targets. I’m grouping these into three tiers. Tier 1 consists of seats that the GOP have a good chance of picking up. Tier 2 consists of seats that are probably uphill battles for the GOP, but certainly not out of their reach. Tier 3 consists of seats that are truly longshots, or are conditional on certain things happening that are far from certain right now.

Tier 1

*PA-04/12 (Critz/Altmire) Word is that these two will be packed into a seat together, and that seat will probably be pretty unfavorable to dems. If Critz and Altmire are forced to spend resources on a bloody primary battle that could hurt them in the general as well.

*KY-06 (Chandler) Anyone who wins by such a narrow margin as Chandler did is probably vulnerable in the next election.

*NY-23 (Owens) The margin between Owens and his GOP challenger was less than the vote won by Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman (Hoffman had dropped out but his name was still on the ballot). This seems to suggest that if the GOP could unite behind one good candidate here than they could win this district. Redistricting may determine how competitive this seat is, and that’s kind of a wild card right now.

*GA-12 (Barrow) Could be killed by GOP controlled redistricting.

*MI-09 (Peters) Peters won by a very narrow margin, and he will have to go into the next election with a GOP-drawn district.

*NC-08 (Kissell) The Gov has no say in redistricting under NC law, so this will be left up to the GOP legislature. It’s pretty easy to draw a terrible district for Kissell without really endangering anybody else.

*MO-03 (Carnahan) Pretty easy to see him losing in 2012. Whether or not he goes may depend on how much of STL is in the new district.

*CA-11/18/20 (McNerney/Cardoza/Costa) The CA redistricting commission is a wild card right now, but it seems likely to me that one of these guys will get a tough seat to run in. Some have speculated that McNerney’s seat will get axed to give a seat to the Inland Empire, and while it seems more likely to me that someone like Stark gets cut it’s still not impossible. Still, it seems like one of these seats will be competitive come 2012.

TOTAL: 9

That’s all the low-hanging fruit I can see right now for the GOP. Now on to the ones that will be a little harder for the GOP to pick up.

Tier 2

NC-07 (McIntyre) McIntyre is in a fairly similar situation to Kissell. If the NC GOP wants to be ambitious, they could try to take out both, which is certainly possible without fully going into dummymander territory. But it would be a little more ambitious. You could probably switch out NC-07 or NC-08 and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. They could kill either with redistricting, and possibly both.

IA-01/02/03 (Braley/Loebsack/Boswell)

File this under: “crazy gerrymanders that have no chance of happening”. Here are two majority-minority districts drawn in my home region of northern virginia:

True to the original spirit of gerrmandering my new districts look kind of like a pink dragon (the 10th) breathing green fire (the 11th) down along the I-95.

Demographics:

VA-10:

49% White, 9% Black, 0% Amer-Indian, 17% Asian, 22% Hispanic, 2% other

VA-11:

49% White, 21% Black, 0% Amer-Indian, 9% Asian, 18% Hispanic, 2% other

I suppose you could say that these districts are not “truly” majority minority, because they are white plurality and probably have a white-majority electorate due to lower nonwhite turnout. Those are both valid and logical points, but this is not supposed to be a valid and logical map so who cares. And the white-plurality thing is probably bound to happen no matter what, as many of the minority-heavy areas of NoVA are a giant mix of black, asian, and hispanic populations. There are a lot of precincts there, especially along the Columbia Pike corridor, that are almost split 25/25/25/25 white/black/hispanic/asian, give or take about 10% for each race, and some precincts down in Woodbridge/Dale City that are close to 33/33/33 white/black/hispanic.

The one problem with this map is that both districts are about 40,000 under population target. That is admittedly pushing it in terms of pop deviation, but it seems to be just barely tolerable. Any higher and the districts go above 50% white. If we were at a point where legislatures are going to these extents to gerrymander districts, I doubt anyone would be that worried about a 40,000 person deviation.

I propose that Obama pick up FDR’s old idea of packing the Supreme Court, appoint a bunch of hardcore liberals to the bench, then have Eric Holder sue Bob McDonnell to force him to draw districts like this, creating five majority-minority districts in Virginia. After that he can move on to suing Jerry Brown to get 40 majority minority districts out of California.

Many other people have posted their virginia maps, so here is mine. With split control of the state legislature, this is an incumbent protection map that locks in the 8R-3D split in the state delegation.

Northern Virginia



VA-08 (Purple)

This remains the most Democratic district in NoVA, and a safe district for Moran. It loses the areas south of Alexandria to the 11th, but picks up McLean, Herndon, and Sterling from the 10th. These areas were the most democratic parts of the 10th, so doing this shores up that district for the Republicans.

VA-11 (Bright Green)

(*full disclosure: I worked as a paid canvasser for the Connolly campaign in 2010, but that hasn’t biased the way I’ve drawn this map. Really. I no longer have any ties to Gerry Connolly or his campaign*)

This once-swing district has now become solidly Democratic, almost as much as the 8th to the north. Gerry Connolly is now safe, one of the few improvements for democrats under this map. It picks up the areas south of Alexandria from the 8th, loses western Prince William (the most Republican part of the district) to the 1st, and loses the most Republican parts of Fairfax County in Oakton, Burke, and West Springfield to the 10th. It now stands as an amalgamation of heavily Democratic Dale City, Woodbridge, and Occoquan in Prince William with the most democratic areas of Fairfax county south of Route 7 (roughly). Also interesting is that Keith Fimian’s home in Oakton is now in VA-10, so if he wants to run for congress again maybe he can try to teabag Frank Wolf.

VA-10 (Magenta)



This was the fastest growing district in Virginia by far, needing to shrink by about 110,000 people in it’s previous incarnation. Previously a slightly GOP-leaning swing district that voted for Obama in 08. Republican Frank Wolf has the district completely locked down due in large part to his ability to secure federal earmarks for projects like the Silver Line DC Metro extension in this area. But after Wolf retires, this district would have been extremely competitive and a fiscally moderate, socially liberal dem might even have been slightly favored here. This redistricting aims to prevent that. The district cedes areas like McLean and Herndon in Fairfax Co that leaned to the Dems to the 8th. It now only has tentacles that reach into Fairfax and eat up basically all the Republican precincts there in areas like Great Falls, Burke, and Oakton. It also gives up the slightly D-leaning swing region of Manassas to the 1st district, and picks up some Appalachian counties from the 6th. I  still haven’t made this district totally republican, as that is almost impossible. It is competitive in the case of a Wolf retirement, but definitely less than before and the Republican running to succeed wolf would have an advantage. And in 6 or 8 years it’s easy to see this district returning to swing status, as the population growth in Loudon County is making it more and more democratic.

Eastern/Central VA



VA-01 (Blue)

This district was Republican leaning in its previous incarnation, however the fact that it is growing more democratic as the population shifts from the shrinking southern areas around Hampton Roads and Williamsburg to the DC exurbs makes it possible that when Wittman retires the old incarnation of this district could go dem. The new incarnation is not that much more Republican, if at all, owing to the need to shore up the 2nd and the 10th. It loses Fredricksburg, previously one of the most democratic parts of the district, to Eric Cantor’s 7th district. It gains the Manassas area from the 10th, and some of western Prince William from the 11th. The 2nd took up some extremely red areas in the Poqouson and York County areas. Overall the shift is maybe a point or two in the GOP’s favor.

VA-02 (Dark Green)



This district was about two points more Democratic than the 1st to the north, allowing Glenn Nye to win in 08. Republicans will want to prevent that from ever happening again, and this map accomplishes that. This district has taken on the City of Poqouson and much of York County, which it needed due to population loss in the Hampton Roads area. These new areas voted 75% for McCain and 80% (!!) for McDonnell. So this definitely means Scott Rigell has a safe seat barring some kind of total implosion.

VA-03 (Dark Purple)

Very little change here. Still safe blue. Due to population loss had to take on the heavily democratic area of Mechanicsville outside of Richmond.

VA-04 (Red)



Very little change here, too. Had to shrink a tiny bit due to population growth, so I gave the town of Emporia to the 5th which needed more population due to the total facelift I gave it plus the fact that the entire SW area of virginia had been losing population. Still a solid red district.

VA-07 (Grey)



This district has gotten a lot more compact now, but it has stayed solidly republican. The area that previously stretched north into the rural areas has been taken out and given to the 5th district. In exchange, the district has gained Fredricksburg from the 1st. And, as previously mentioned, the heavily blue area of Mechanicsville has been given to the 3rd. Overall, the district hasn’t really changed much in terms of partisanship, but it looks much better, IMO.

Western Virginia

VA-06 (Teal)



This solidly republican district has shed a bit of it’s redness in the interest of helping shore up Hurt in VA-05. It has taken on the liberal Charlottesville area and ceded the Lynchburg area. This district has probably become significantly more democratic, although it is still very republican. Goodlatte won by 62% in 2008 and had no major-party opponent in 2010, so he should be safe, but a blue dog might be able to win this seat under open-seat conditions in a good year for dems. Tom Perriello would have a good chance at this seat if it were open, although I personally hope he is senator/governor by then.

VA-05 (Yellow)



This is probably the most changed district in this map. It has lost Charlottesville, previously the most liberal area of the district and home of its soon-to-be-former congressman Tom Perriello. In exchange, it has gained the northernmost part of the 7th, the tiny town of emporia from the 4th, and the city of lynchburg from the 6th. This gave it a little too much population, so I gave some of the westernmost part of the district to VA-09 to compensate for the 9th’s population loss. I may have gone overkill on this district. It was previously a republican leaning district, now it is an extremely safe district that even a blue dog in an open seat in a democratic wave year would have a lot of trouble winning.

VA-09 (Cyan)



Not much has changed here. This was a safe republican district before, and Rick Boucher held out largely due to his personal popularity, so Morgan Griffith doesn’t need much shoring up. The district has been losing population faster than any other district in VA, so it had to take on some areas from the 5th, but these don’t change the basic shape or the partisanship of the district at all.

This map should hold it’s 8-3 partisan composition for the forseeable future. The only thing that could change that is a Frank Wolf retirement, but the 10th is designed pretty much as best as possible to hold in that case. With Loudon county trending Democratic, though, this district should be a top democratic target in 6-8 years. This map has delayed the 10th’s transition to a Democratic target by a few years at least, though.

Some people (including myself) have raised the possibility that Republicans could simply do a mid-decade redistricting once they pick up the state senate in next year’s elections (which I and many other people on here believe is more than likely than not). However, what doing this map has taught me is that it is pretty close to impossible for Republicans to get a better than 8-3 split in congress. The only way for them to do better is to weaken the 10th significantly (and make the 11th more Republican leaning). Wolf could probably hold on in this kind of scenario, but in my view that would make it far too easy for the Democrats to pick up this area once Wolf retires (he is 71 so that may not be long). If they weaken the 10th too much, the Dems could even maybe knock off Wolf in a few years. So there’s not much potential benefit to the Republicans in a mid decade redistricting. An 8-3 split (that could become 7-4 at worst) is pretty damn good for them in a very purple state like VA.