Tag: House

Former Iowa GOP chairman Mike Mahaffey told CQ Politics that he is thinking about running against Representative Leonard Boswell in Iowa’s third Congressional district next year. (Hat tip to WHO-TV’s Dave Price.) Boswell barely defeated Mahaffey in his first bid for Congress in 1996.

CQ Politics highlights a big obstacle for Mahaffey if he runs:

A Boswell-Mahaffey rematch after a 14-year hiatus would also take place on quite different turf from their first race. The 3rd District in 1996 was located mainly in southern Iowa and was heavily rural; Boswell was aided in that race by the fact that he had spent his life outside of politics in farming. But redistricting, performed in a non-partisan procedure in Iowa, move the district’s boundaries north and east to take in the state capital of Des Moines, to which Boswell relocated from his rural hometown.

It will take a lot to convince me that Mahaffey, a small-town lawyer and part-time Poweshiek County attorney, poses a serious threat to Boswell in a district dominated by Polk County. So far IA-03 doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s list of competitive U.S. House districts, even though the DCCC still has Boswell in the Frontline program.

Iowa is among the small number of states that use a bipartisan (or nonpartisan) commission to perform redistricting every 10 years. The resulting maps are often very competitive and fair when compared with those of many other states.

However, I started thinking anout what would happen if, hypothetically, the party in charge of the legislature controlled redistricting rather than the commission. What would such a map look like? How would the current incumbents be affected?

The map the I created was designed to help Democrats because currently the legislature is under Democratic control and the governor is a Democrat. In this hypothetical scenario, Republicans cannot block the plan through filibusters or avoiding a quorum. Also, since Iowa is set to lose one of its districts after the 2010 census, my plan uses four districts rather than the five that currently exist.

My main goals were to:

-Maintain Democratic advantages in eastern Iowa

-Protect Leonard Boswell

-Dismantle Tom Latham’s district and force him to run against Steve King

Here is the current map:

And here is the map that I ended up creating:

Here is some information about this new districts:

1st District (Blue)

Obama-55.21%

McCain-44.79%

Major Cities: Davenport. Dubuque, Waterloo

The new 1st district has all but two of the counties of the current 1st (Jones and Fayette). It picks up all of the counties along the Minnesota border, as well as a number of adjacent counties (basically the northern bits of Latham and King’s districts). It is still considerably Democratic, although less so than before. However, the district is still largely centered in Democratic-leaning northeastern Iowa, so it should elect Bruce Braley or another Democrat easily enough.

2nd District (Red)

Obama-58.89%

McCain-41.11%

Major Cities: Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Burlington

This district keeps all of the counties currently located in Dave Loebsack’s southeastern district, and it gains Jones County from the 1st, as well as a few Republican counties from Steve King’s 5th district (Decatur, Ringgold, and Taylor). It also picks up 6 of the 12 counties in Leonard Boswell’s 3rd district (5 of those 6 counties went for McCain, so this takes some of the pressure off of Boswell). The result is a very Democratic district in southeastern Iowa that is now able to dilute Republican influence from some of the neighboring districts. Loebsack or another Democrat would have no trouble getting reelected here.

3rd District (Purple)

Obama-60.03%

McCain-39.97%

Major Cities: Carroll, Des Moines, Fort Dodge

This district retains roughly half of the counties in Leonard Boswell’s 3rd district, but also picks up Democratic counties from the 4th and 5th districts. Over half of the population in the district lives in Polk County (Des Moines). My main goal was to protect Leonard Boswell since he seems to have frequent trouble in his current district. He would be more than safe here; this district went for Obama by over 20 points, making it the most Democratic district in Iowa. If Tom Latham wanted to run against Boswell, he would first have to move to the 3rd (his Ames home is located outside of the district), and even then he would have a difficult race given the new nature of the district. Steve King’s home in Crawford County has also been moved into this district, but it would be hopeless for him to run here, given his ultraconservative profile. This district would favor most any Democrat.

4th District (Green)

Obama-50.46%

McCain-49.54%

Major Cities: Ames, Council Bluffs, Sioux City, Storm Lake

At first, I thought it would be impossible to put western Iowa into a Democratic district, but it was indeed possible. Obama only won this district by about 1%, but making it much more Democratic would have put Braley or Boswell in danger. The 4th keeps most of its current western base, but loses several western counties to the other 3 districts (including Crawford County, where Steve King lives). It gains many of the counties in Tom Latham’s current 4th district, including Dallas and Story (where Latham lives) and Fayette County (located in the current 1st dstrict). This district has much of Latham’s former territory, so he would have the best chance of winning in this district. But first he would probably have to face Steve King in a Republican primary. If the primary was divisive enough, or if King was the GOP nominee, this marginally Democratic district could be won by a moderate-to-conservative Democrat.

So while none of this will probably ever happen, I thought that it would be interesting to examine a hypothetical scenario.  So what do you all think? Comments, suggestions, ideas?

Yesterday Taniel at the Campaign Diaries blog posted about 68 Democratic-held U.S. House seats that could potentially be competitive in 2010. Iowa’s third Congressional district is not on that list.

IA-03 did not make Stuart Rothenberg’s list of competitive House seats for 2010 either.

The National Republican Congressional Committee released a list of 51 targeted Democratic-held House districts in January. Lo and behold, IA-03 is not on that list either.  

I realize that Boswell only won the district with 56.3 percent of the vote in 2008, but I don’t hear any chatter from Iowa Republicans about recruiting a candidate to run against him. The focus is on the governor’s race and the Iowa House.

I bring this up because the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has kept Boswell on its list of “Frontline Democrats” for 2010. John Deeth recently noticed that Boswell is “by far the senior member” of the 41 Frontline candidates. Almost all of them were first elected to Congress in 2006 or 2008. The others with more terms under their belt represent districts significantly more conservative than IA-03 with its partisan voter index of D+1.

For Deeth, this is yet another sign that IA-03 deserves better than Boswell. I view it as a sign that the DCCC is wrong. Boswell definitely needed to be in the Frontline program the first five times he ran for re-election, but he was a safe six-term incumbent in 2008, and there’s no reason to believe he won’t be a safe seven-term incumbent in 2010.

According to the Iowa Secretary of State’s office, Iowa’s third district had about 433,000 registered voters as of May 1, 2009. Of those, about 399,000 were “active voters.” More than 156,000 of the active voters in IA-03 are registered Democrats. Only about 118,000 are registered Republicans, and about 124,000 are registered no-party voters.

Why should you care if the DCCC erroneously classifies Boswell as vulnerable? Frontline Democrats are exempt from paying DCCC dues, which are used to support Democrats in competitive races across the country.

Look, I would still prefer to elect a new Democrat to IA-03 in order to avoid a potential matchup of Boswell and Tom Latham in 2012. But since Boswell has no plans to retire, let him pay his DCCC dues just like every other House incumbent whose seat is not threatened next year.  

On a related note, Deeth recently cited Progressive Punch lifetime ratings as an argument for replacing Boswell. It’s worth noting that Boswell’s voting record in the current Congress is much better than his lifetime Progressive Punch score suggests. (For instance, he was not among the Blue Dogs who voted against President Barack Obama’s budget blueprint.) Yes, IA-03 should be represented by a more progressive Democrat than Boswell, but I’m cutting him slack as long as he’s not casting egregious votes in the current Congress.  

I see no reason to keep him in the Frontline program, though. We will genuinely be playing defense in dozens of House districts next year. Until there is some sign that Republicans are making a serious play for IA-03, Boswell should pay his DCCC dues.

One year ago I tried out an experiment where I plotted US Representatives’ voting records against the presidential lean of their districts, in an effort to identify what representatives were not the most liberal or conservative, but who most overperformed or underperformed their districts. After some hemming and hawing, it was called the PVI/Vote Index. The point of the exercise was to give some clarity and focus to one of the most frequently heard refrains of the liberal blogosphere: “We’re going to primary that ratfink so-and-so,” usually delivered without much consideration as to what kind of candidate that district might actually support.

It’s time to revisit the topic, partly because another year has gone by, and aggregators have released another year’s worth of data, letting us look at the 110th Congress as a whole (instead of just 2007). Also, with the creation of the blogger/labor Accountability Now PAC for purposes of nudging (or primarying) recalcitrant Dems, with Progressive Punch adding a similar function to their website, and with even the Cook Political Report (subscription req’d) tipping a toe into this type of analysis, it seems like other people are starting to zero in on who is and isn’t a good fit for his or her district.

As before, the Index is based on a pretty simple idea: rank every district from 1 to 435 in terms of how Democratic its presidential voting record is, rank every representative from 1 to 435 in terms of how liberal his or her voting record is, and find the difference, with a larger difference in one direction or the other meaning that representative is overperforming or underperforming the district’s lean. (There are a host of methodological issues that go along with this assumption, and I’ll discuss some of them over the fold. In the meantime, let’s get right to the numbers.)

Let’s start with Democrats who are underperforming their districts (in other words, Democrats whose voting records are less liberal than their district composition would ordinarily support):

We need to talk methodology briefly. I’ll do this as a Q&A in order to make it a little livelier.

What the heck is DW/N? As my primary vote-aggregating resource, I’m using DW/Nominate scores, which are a tool I used in a number of vote-scoring-themed diaries last summer. The main advantage DW/N has over other scores is that they aggregate absolutely every vote, instead of cherry-picking. (ADA ratings and CQ party unity scores, for instance, pick so few votes that it’s terribly insufficient gradation among representatives; nearly all Dems have an ADA score of 90, 95, or 100, while nearly all have a CQ score in the 96-98 range… which is why I don’t use either of those metrics.) In each case, I’m using the DW/N score of whatever representative ended the session holding the seat, even if someone else held it the majority of the term.

On the other hand, most everyone else (Progressive Punch, National Journal, CQ, the ADA) uses a 0-100 score, with 100 being most liberal, which is easy for people to mentally convert to the A-B-C-D-F grading scale. By comparison, DW/Nominate scores are difficult to interpret. The scores generally run from – 1 (most liberal) to 1 (least liberal). The scoring algorithm seems to measure similarities between voting records among representatives; a number further away from 0 indicates a greater amount of distance between your record and those of other reps. In fact, if your voting record doesn’t look anything like anybody’s elses, you can exceed the 1 to -1 range (as with Ron Paul’s 1.4).

You may recall last year, to do this project, I created one averaged-out liberal rating using both Progressive Punch and National Journal scores. While I’d very much like to use Progressive Punch scores again — I think they do the best job of the “just right” amount of vote cherry-picking and turning it into an easy-to-understand score — they’ve already turned their attention to the 111th Congress now in session and their old scores from the 110th have already vanished from public view.

And rather than try to average out DW/Nominate and National Journal scores, I’ve just decided there’s too much apples and oranges going on there. This is partly because of the different scoring techniques, which results in some odd discrepancies… National Journal’s method is insensitive to ‘purity’ votes (i.e. voting against something not because you disagree but because it doesn’t go far enough) so the furthest-left or right members of the caucuses (like McDermott, Kucinich, Stark, DeFazio, Woolsey, Waters, or Capuano for the Dems, or Paul for the GOP) tend to get buried in mid-caucus or even treated as centrists.

More importantly, though, there are 19 seats for which there is no National Journal composite score for both 2007 and 2008, mostly because the seat changed hands in a special election (or because of a lot of absences, either for sickness or leadership duties). As a result, what I’ve decided to do is run entirely separate tables based solely on National Journal numbers. As you can see, many of the same people appear relatively in the same places. Members for whom there are scores, and the PVI of their districts, are rated 1-416 instead of 1-435. (The missing parties are Pelosi, Lantos/Speier, Millender-McDonald/Richardson, Crenshaw, Norwood/Broun, Rush, Hastert/Foster, Carson/Carson, Jindal/Scalise, Baker/Cazayoux, Wynn/Edwards, Meehan/Tsongas, Wicker/Childers, Andrews, Gillibrand, Gilmoor/Latta, Pryce, Davis/Wittman, and Cubin.)

Here are the tables based on National Journal composite scores instead. (There is a rating for both 2007 and 2008, so I averaged the two to get one score for each. Again, representatives and districts are ranked only 1 to 416 in this series, because scores aren’t available for 19 seats.) Here are the underperforming Dems:

A new poll of “battleground” districts:

A new survey by Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research in the 40 most marginal Democratic seats shows Democratic incumbents holding strong in the territory where nearly all expect Republicans to reclaim lost ground. With Congress poised to vote on the president’s budget, the Democratic incumbents are winning over 50 percent of the vote – stable over the last three months – and hold a double-digit lead against their generic challengers even in the 20 most difficult seats. Meanwhile, in the 15 most marginal Republican districts the incumbents are far from safe. They beat their generic Democratic challengers by just 6 points and fail to top 50 percent in the vote (48 to 42 percent). Republicans are still on defense while President Obama remains very popular across all of these districts. …

This memo is based on a survey of 1,500 likely voters in the 40 most competitive Democratic-held districts and the 15 most marginal Republican-held districts conducted for Democracy Corps by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research April 16-21, 2009.

Interesting stuff. Some hard numbers from the survey (PDF):

• Obama approval (all districts): 55-35

• Democratic incumbents: 52-39

• Republican incumbents: 48-42

Dem incumbents were tested against generic Republicans and vice-versa, so it’s an apples-to-apples comparison – and not a good one for the GOP. Obama’s approval, interestingly, was basically the same in D and R districts, even in the “Tier 1” most vulnerable Dem seats which went to McCain by an average of six points.

The full memo is here (PDF), and the list of districts polled is here (PDF).

Last October, Representative Michele “Crazy as Steve King” Bachmann (MN-06) disgraced herself on “Hardball” and sparked a ridiculously successful fundraising drive for her Democratic opponent, El Tinklenberg. I was impressed by the enthusiasm and kicked in a few bucks for Tinklenberg myself, but I was dismayed to see bloggers continue to help him raise money even after he’d raised more than $750,000 and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had promised to spend an additional $1 million in his district. Within a few days of Bachmann’s notorious comments, Tinklenberg had more money than he needed to run a solid media and GOTV campaign during the final two weeks before the election.

Since most Congressional races against incumbents are longshots, I wanted to see the netroots expand the field by raising $50,000 or more for a large number of unheralded challengers.

Instead, the fundraising frenzy for Tinklenberg continued.

Yesterday Markos linked to this piece from CQ Politics about how Tinklenberg’s campaign committee was the largest donor to the DCCC in March, giving a total of $250,000:

You may recall that his Republican opponent was Rep. Michele Bachmann, whose mid-October comment that Obama “may have anti-American views” angered Democrats nationwide and spawned an avalanche of contributions to Tinklenberg in the waning days of a campaign that Bachmann won by 46 percent to 43 percent, with a third-party candidate taking 10 percent.

Apparently the money was coming in too fast for Tinklenberg to spend completely: he raised $3 million for his campaign, of which $1.9 million came in after October 15, and had $453,000 in leftover campaign funds at the end of 2008 and $184,000 at the end of March.

I’m not saying it wasn’t worth getting behind Tinklenberg. Bachmann is among the worst Republicans in Congress, and this district rightly seemed winnable. However, the netroots clearly funneled way more money to Tinklenberg than he could spend effectively. We got carried away by emotions and were not thinking strategically.

What if a million of the dollars we sent to the MN-06 race had been spread around 10 or 20 other districts? A bunch of the candidates I wanted to support as part of an expanded field got blown out by large margins, but an extra $50,000 could have made the difference for Josh Segall in AL-03, or for several candidates who weren’t on my radar, such as Bill Hedrick in CA-44.

The netroots rally for Tinklenberg started out as a good cause but took on a momentum of its own. It didn’t help that Tinklenberg sent fundraising e-mails to his new donors every day or two during the home stretch, even after he had more than enough money to close out the campaign.

Maybe the majority of blog readers who gave $10 or $20 or $50 to Tinklenberg wouldn’t have given to some other longshot Congressional challenger. Maybe people need an emotional trigger before they are willing to open their wallets. But in future election cycles, we need to be smarter about how we focus our energy and our fundraising efforts during the final weeks of a campaign. There’s no shortage of wingnuts worth targeting. Also, a fair number of good incumbent Democrats will probably need our help in 2010, depending on how the economy looks 18 months from now.

Any ideas or suggestions on how to raise money effectively during the next cycle would be welcome in this thread.

The FEC’s April 15th deadline for candidates to file their first quarter fundraising reports has come and gone, and now it’s SSP’s turn to rake together all the interesting numbers for House incumbents and the (very few) challengers who have filed.

As always, all numbers are in thousands and are adjusted for rounding. “CoH” indicates cash-on hand, and the “Raised” column contains strictly funds raised through donor contributions, not loans. An “X” in the “Frontline” column indicates a Democratic incumbent’s participation in the DCCC’s Frontline program.

A few quick notes:

• The average amount raised by a Frontline participant was $255K, with each member having an average CoH of $269K.
• The biggest raiser of the Frontline class was John Adler, who raked in $461K. The weakest? Carol Shea-Porter, who only took in $111K. She never makes our lives easy…
• Challengers who outraised incumbents: Beth Krom (D, CA-48), Steve Chabot (R, OH-01) and Jack McDonald (D, TX-10).
• Fuel for the retirement watch: Check out the weak hauls of GOP Reps. Henry Brown ($22K), Frank Wolf ($2K) and Bill Young ($1K). Delaware’s Mike Castle will want to pump up the volume now that he’s facing a top-tier challenger, but he’s also sitting on a fairly hefty war chest.
• ID-01: Bill “Brain Fade” Sali, who is supposedly mulling a rematch with Democrat Walt Minnick, brought in nothing — and he’s still carrying about $100,000 worth of debts from his previous two campaigns. Not exactly an encouraging sign for those of us who love to have Sali to kick around.
• LA-02: Joe Cao raises $143K, but only banks $61K at the end of the quarter. Not impressive at all — but even if he was raking in Mark Kirk-like sums per quarter, he’d still lose. So what’s the point?

There’s suddenly been a lot of discussion of the Republican-held districts in California being the next big treasure trove of Democratic pickups in the House, surprising considering that California has a very bifurcated political geography and, on top of that, one of the most aggressively pro-incumbent gerrymanders. This started with a study published by the California Target Book showing precipitously declining GOP registrations, and continued with the DCCC‘s announcement that it would go big in 2010 in the eight districts where Obama won that are still occupied by House Republicans.

For instance, CA-26 has shown a drop in the GOP’s registration edge from 2002 to 2008 from 11% to 6%, CA-45 has seen a similar drop from 11% to 4%, and perhaps most out of left field, Buck McKeon’s CA-25 has dropped from 9% to 1%. In CA-03 (where Dan Lungren barely escaped in 2008), it dropped from 11% to 2%, and in CA-44 (where Ken Calvert escaped even more narrowly), it dropped from 16% to 7%.

What’s driving these changing registrations? Is it just ticked-off moderates realizing that something’s amiss with today’s GOP and changing teams? I’m sure there’s some of that happening, but that can’t by itself explain the size of those numbers. What’s driving this seems to be the changing demographics of who’s moving into and out of these districts. With the GOP’s declining fortunes among Latino and Asian voters (fueled by the GOP’s own self-defeating hardline extremism on the immigration issue), it can’t help that those are where most of the growth is happening in most of these districts.

While the magnitude of the demographic sea change in California isn’t as great as the non-white growth in Texas (which I wrote about prior to the 2008 election), it’s still impressive to see. This chart details the changes in each group from the 2000 census to the 2007 estimate, for each House district that’s held by the Republicans. (‘White’ means non-Hispanic white.)

District	Rep.	Kerry %	Obama %	Total gain	White gain	Af.-Am. gain	Asian gain	Hispanic gain
CA-02	Herger	37	43	67,021	27,716	1,337	5,805	29,851
CA-03	Lungren	41	49	146,160	45,010	20,391	38,477	44,250
CA-04	McClintock	37	44	112,419	62,724	3,839	18,398	25,547
CA-19	Radanovich	38	46	101,949	20,874	9,436	8,596	66,772
CA-21	Nunes	34	42	108,725	6,981	1,405	11,334	88,698
CA-22	McCarthy	31	38	128,449	7,546	16,822	6,942	96,609
CA-24	Gallegly	43	51	44,034	– 9,600	– 1,413	7,750	49,124
CA-25	McKeon	40	50	143,246	– 26,236	25,300	15,935	119,934
CA-26	Dreier	44	51	51,417	– 14,604	– 1,491	26,625	47,452
CA-40	Royce	39	47	29,403	– 43,083	5,837	23,992	48,880
CA-41	Lewis	37	44	136,950	– 734	16,196	16,845	107,741
CA-42	G. Miller	37	45	47,896	– 4,641	– 1,397	15,719	46,613
CA-44	Calvert	40	50	198,959	35,183	12,632	19,101	126,396
CA-45	Bono Mack	43	52	225,020	50,882	13,581	18,181	135,086
CA-46	Rohrabacher	42	48	16,612	– 18,782	2,464	23,496	12,397
CA-48	Campbell	40	49	78,712	2,273	4,327	45,264	31,105
CA-49	Issa	36	45	132,037	32,752	2,981	20,122	76,245
CA-50	Bilbray	44	51	68,851	10,987	992	22,038	35,297
CA-52	Hunter	38	45	21,746	– 16,440	1,424	12,635	20,083

Bear in mind that not all of the Latino persons listed here are able to vote, either because they aren’t citizens or are too young, so this is more of a time-bomb in some districts, like the ones in the mostly-agricultural Central Valley. Case in point is CA-21, which (along with CA-45) is the only of these districts to have moved into an outright Latino plurality this decade, but is still one of the most Republican districts in the state.

On the other hand, some of the more suburban districts, like CA-44 and CA-45 in Riverside County, are poised to flip pretty soon (although these are two of the most hard-hit districts anywhere by the foreclosure crisis and the collapse of the construction industry, so it’ll require a lot of watching in these districts to see who stays and who goes). And even more surprisingly, CA-25 is zooming in our direction, at least demographically, making the drop to a 1% GOP registration edge maybe not that unexpected. (There’s only one district that seems to be bucking this overall trend, where most of the growth is white, and that’s CA-04… oddly enough, the district of all these where we came closest in 2008 to picking up the House seat, although the circumstances there were unusual.)

As in Texas, these changes aren’t going to happen overnight. But in the red parts of California, as with Texas, in the next decade, we’re either going to see a GOP that changes its message (and, well, everything else) to appeal to a more diverse America, or that starts hemmorhaging seats in its once-red strongholds.

Ohio is, in reality, a knife edge “purple” state. Voters here (as opposed to bloggers) are kitchen table Democrats (econ issues) but drift rightward on social issues and are extremely susceptible to crafty framing on wedge issues.

The world had to endure the last four years of hell because 118,000 Ohio voters put The Shrub back in office for two reasons. One was Tom Noe’s ill gotten booty (and it WAS MUCH more than what has been revealed) that he pumped into the GOP here and because they came out to vote for The Hate Amendment.

Recently, we have seen press speculation about Rep. Tim Ryan already working on running for Lt. Gov. with Ted Strickland and eventually becoming Gov.

Of course, there’s a back story. Let’s call it “Ted’s Grand Plan.”

Class, let’s review…

The Ohio House in the General Assembly is barely in Dem control but the Senate is an absolute disaster on every level and completely hopeless. We currently control the STATE redistricting board by one vote. If we lose either AG or SoS, (or the Ohio House) control would flip.

Richard Cordray would have been my choice for the US Senate but he agreed to Ted’s request to move into the state AG spot to replace the disgraced Marc Dann. (Thus eliminating one strong contender for the US Senate) Good move in terms of better government. He’ll do a great job.

You’ve gotta remember that Gov. Ted is all in for Lee Fisher as Senator, so with Cordray settled in at AG, that’s one less obstacle for Fisher.

Ryan was the other obstacle. So, Ted offers him the title of governor heir apparent. (Which is, in fact. all this discussion really means.) Ryan (and Ted) are taking the very long view.

Ryan’s current US House is District is one of four obscenely gerrymandered Dem “quarantine” districts that the GOP created at nearly 70% (or more!) Democratic turnout. This was to confine Dem voters to as few districts as possible in order to create as many GOP majority Districts as they could.

The strongly Dem districts are held by Marcy Kaptur, Dennis the Menace, Ryan and Marcia Fudge (formerly held by the late Tubbs-Jones) The latter district is the only one that will survive as such an overwhelmingly Dem district –on the grounds of minority representation.

Ohio will lose two House seats after the current census. Marcy, Dennis and Ryan’s districts will all have to lose some measure of Democratic majority in order to create more Dem majority districts, which cannot be done with these three districts running far too Democratic.

Which is what makes the specter of a Cafaro candidacy so nauseating. If that District becomes even vaguely competitive, she’ll blow it.

[Ed. Note: I would mention that that OH-14 is one of the most closely divided US House Districts to be represented by a GOPer. I say: “blow that sucker right off of the map!” Just eliminate it altogether.]

So here’s the plan: We control the Ohio redistricting process and threaten the GOP with… well… exactly what they did to us. And THAT is our leverage when, during US reapportionment, the Ohio House produces a Dem majority map and the Ohio Senate produces another one of their obscenities.

So had it not been for Judge Brunner’s decision to run for the US Senate, Ted had his plan all worked out. But now, if we lose control of Ohio SoS, the wheels completely come off. That’s why there is already a big hubub over who will run for SoS. Now the buzz is for Franklin County Commissioner Marilyn Brown. (Judge Brunner is supporting her, but I bet Ted was consulted.)

But if you look at the big picture, you can see why people are making these kinds of announcements which seem so far removed from when anything will actually happen.

OK, I’m going back to the real world now..

So I decided to have a look at how my state’s congressional districts could be redistricted come 2010. It looks like we’ll miss getting a 14th seat by about 100k people (so close…), so I had to make a plan with 13 seats. This was interesting because based on the 2008 census estimates, each seat would have over 700,000 people

In NC, redistricting is done solely by the legislature, which is now under Democratic control. While it could hypothetically shift to the GOP in 2010, our numbers are good enough that that would be unlikely.

I focused mainly on protecting the 8 Democratic incumbents (espescially Kissell and Shuler), seeing as the 5 districts still in GOP hands are pretty Republican for the most part.

Here is my map:

1st District – G.K. Butterfield (D-Wilson). This is a solidly Democratic, black majority district that covers much of northeastern North Carolina. I didn’t make many big changes to this district, mostly because it was hard to pinpoint specific black areas and how much the black populations there have changed.

2nd District – Bob Etheridge (D-Lillington). This mainly rural district narrowly went for Obama after voting for Bush in 2000 and 2004. I added more black areas in Wake County to make it somewhat more Democratic and moved some Republican parts of Johnston County to the nearby 3rd district. Etheridge has been elected 7 times so he is probably safe here.

3rd District – Walter Jones (R-Farmville). This is a solidly Republican coastal district where Obama got only 37% of the vote, and Jones is fairly popular so I didn’t change very much, Just for kicks, I drew Jones’ home into the 1st district, but he can still run in the 3rd.

4th District – David Price (D-Chapel Hill). This rapidly growing district includes much of the Triangle and RTP. Obama won 62% here mainly thanks to Durham and Orange counties. I transferred some of the populous Wake County parts of this district to the 13th and 2nd districts to make them more Democratic.

5th District – Virginia Foxx (R-Banner Elk). This is GOP country. It would have been a challenge to make this district more Democratic without harming some of the neighboring districts. The 5th lost Democratic Watauga County, but I added Republican parts of Guilford County (Greensboro) from the 6th district and most of Rockingham County from the 13th district.

6th District – Howard Coble (R-Greensboro). Coble is NC’s longest serving congressman, first elected in 1984. I kept his Republican district mostly the same but gave some of his Guilford territory to Virginia Foxx. Coble will keep his job for as long as he wants.

7th District – Mike McIntyre (D-Lumberton). This district went for McCain by 6 points, but on the state and local level it is mostly Democratic. I added some more areas in Sampson County but didn’t change very much. McIntyre is a conservative Blue Dog who matches his district well and the 7th has only had 3 congressmen in the the last 50 years, so he is safe.

8th District – Larry Kissell (D-Biscoe). After narrowly losing to Robin Hayes in 2006, Kissell finally defeated him in 2008, while Obama won the district by 8 points. To make it more Democratic, I gave parts of Republican-leaning Union County (Jesse Helms grew up there) to Sue Myrick’s 9th district. In return, the 8th picked up some Democratic urban areas of Charlotte from the 9th.

9th District – Sue Myrick (R-Charlotte). This district is made up of the Republican-leaning suburbs of Charlotte and it has been held by former Myrick since 1995. McCain won the 9th by 10 points and Myrick will be safe for a long time. In addition to trading urban areas of Charlotte with Republican parts of the 8th district, I put all of Gaston County into the 9th district (I will explain).

10th District – Patrick McHenry (R-Cherryville). This is the granddaddy of GOP districts in NC and has been in Republican hands since 1969. I took in all of Rutherford and McDowell counties from Heath Shuler’s 11th district. I also drew McHenry’s lifelong Gaston County home into the 9th just to annoy him 🙂

11th District – Heath Shuler (D-Waynesville). I gave McHenry Rutherford and McDowell counties, but in return I took in Mitchell and Avery counties from the 10th. I added Democratic trending Watauga County (App State) to Shuler’s district to make it more Democratic.

12th District – Mel Watt (D-Charlotte). This is the infamous 12th district, which has been declared unconstitutional 3 different times. It’s a black plurality, very Democratic district that follows the I-85 corridor. I didn’t make many changes, mainly because I didn’t know much about the specific racial concentrations within each county.

13th District – Brad Miller (D-Raleigh). After narrowly going for Bush in 2000 and then Kerry in 2004, this district gave Obama a whopping 58% of the vote in 2008. It was gerrymandered by then State Sen. Brad Miller 2001 to elect him when NC gained a 13th seat in 2000. I made it more Democratic by adding some urban areas of Wake County. Miller will be safe until he decides to move up to higher office.

Please let me know what you think and if there are any changes or improvements that I can make.

Thanks and enjoy!