Tag: House

Now that it’s 2011, the redistricting games will soon begin in earnest, with more detailed Census data expected in the coming weeks and some states holding spring legislative sessions to deal with drawing new maps. Long ago I planned to do state-by-state rundowns of the redistricting process as soon as 2010 election results and Census reapportionment were clear. Now that time has arrived, and it’s time to look at Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, and Maryland.

Previous diary on Alabama, Arizona, and Arkansas

Previous diary on California, Colorado, and Connecticut

Previous diary on Florida, Georgia, and Hawaii

Previous diary on Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa

The rest below the fold…

Kansas

Districts: 4

Who’s in charge? Republicans

Is that important? Nope

With an all-Republican delegation, GOP mapmakers may simply try to ensure that Kevin Yoder avoids a close race in the next decade.

Kentucky

Districts: 6

Who’s in charge? Split (Dem Governor and House, GOP Senate)

Is that important? Perhaps

I have heard rumors that Republicans hope to stall the redistricting process past the 2011 state elections, expecting to topple both Gov. Beshear and the Democratic House majority this November. But assuming a continuation of the status quo, Ben Chandler should get a slightly more favorable district than the one he nearly lost in 2010.

Louisiana

Districts: 6, down from 7 in 2002

Who’s in charge? Split (GOP Governor and House, Dem Senate)

Is that important? Not really

The outcome of reapportionment in Louisiana has scarcely been in doubt since Jeff Landry was elected last November. He will be forced against fellow Republican Rep. Charles Boustany in a coastal district. Meanwhile, Cedric Richmond’s VRA-protected seat will have to absorb a lot of new population near Baton Rouge, and Rodney Alexander’s underpopulated northern seat will expand southwest a bit.

Maine

Districts: 2

Who’s in charge? Nonpartisan commission

Is that important? No

Maine does not even traditionally redraw its maps before the election year ending in 2. Sometime in 2013, the commission will make some boundary adjustments, and both Mike Michaud and Chellie Pingree should remain reasonably secure should they still be in office two years from now.

Maryland

Districts: 8

Who’s in charge? Democrats

Is that important? Perhaps

The question here is how aggressive Democrats perceive they can afford to be. They already constructed a master gerrymander in 2002, moving the delegation from a 4-4 split to a thoroughly safe 6-2 Democratic edge. Now, some are pushing for a 7-1 map that remakes Andy Harris’s Eastern Shore seat for a moderate Dem like Frank Kratovil. However, such a map presents serious issues: how to maintain VRA-mandated black majorities in the 4th (represented by Donna Edwards) and 7th (Elijah Cummings)? How to keep the four other Dem incumbents completely safe? With today’s redistricting technology, it can probably be done, but the 1st cannot be made securely Dem lest other districts be jeopardized…only politically competitive enough for Kratovil to stage a comeback.

As devoted Swingnuts are aware by now, the Census Bureau has produced its first batch of redistricting-level data. Because Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia all have state-level elections this year, they get bumped to the head of the line. So that means we now know the current population of each congressional district as presently drawn. While the Census Bureau didn’t exactly make this data available in the most accessible format, the greasemonkeys down in the Skunkworks at SSP Labs have crunched the numbers, and here’s what they look like. Note that the “Deviation” column means how far off each current district is from the new ideal (and in the case of LA and NJ, we divided by their new seat totals of 6 and 12 respectively):

Conventional wisdom has it that turnout is the key issue in midterm elections. In view of that, how well did individual House Democrats do in convincing their 2008 voters to back them again in 2010? This post looks only at total votes, not margin of victory or defeat. Members who did not run in 2008 (Bill Owens, Mark Critz, Scott Murphy) or who had no Republican opponent in 2008 are excluded. The remaining 198 members’ average 2010 vote was just 61.2% of their 2008 vote. Curiously the median was also 61.2%. These folks managed to retain at least 70% of their 2008 vote:

rep                   dist 2008          2010 retention

Pelosi             CA 8 204,996 167,957 81.9

Pingree           ME 1 205,629 166,196 80.8

Schrader         OR 5 181,577 145,319 80.0

Hirono             HI 2 165,478 132,290 79.9

McDermott       WA 7 291,963 232,649 79.7

Eshoo               CA 14 190,301 151,217 79.5

Giffords         AZ 8 179,629 138,280 77.0

Titus               NV 3 165,912 127,168 76.6

Blumenauer     OR 3 254,235 193,104 76.0

Speier             CA 12 200,442 152,044 75.9

Matsui             CA 5 164,242 124,220 75.6

Lee                   CA 9 238,915 180,400 75.5

Woolsey           CA 6 229,672 172,216 75.0

Lujan               NM 3 161,292 120,048 74.4

Bright             AL 2 144,368 106,865 74.0

Inslee             WA 1 233,780 172,642 73.8

Honda               CA 15 170,977 126,147 73.8

Dicks               WA 6 205,991 151,873 73.7

Tonko               NY 21 171,286 124,889 72.9

Himes               CT 4 158,475 115,351 72.8

Sarbanes         MD 3 203,711 147,448 72.4

Richardson     CA 37 118,606 85,799 72.3

Lofgren           CA 16 146,481 105,841 72.3

G Miller         CA 7 170,962 122,435 71.6

Larsen             WA 2 217,416 155,241 71.4

Schiff             CA 29 146,198 104,374 71.4

Napolitano     CA 38 119,795 85,459 71.3

Stark               CA 13 166,829 118,278 70.9

Sherman           CA 27 145,812 102,927 70.6

Roybal-Allard CA 34 98,503 69,382 70.4

Farr                 CA 17 168,907 118,734 70.3

A Smith           WA 9 176,295 123,743 70.2

McNerney         CA 11 164,500 115,361 70.1

Here we have 24 reps from the west coast vote-by-mail states of California, Oregon, and Washington and 9 from the rest of the country. David Wu and Peter DeFazio went unopposed (at least by Republicans) in 2008 and Brian Baird retired, so every eligible rep from Oregon and Washington shows up on this list. We also see a lot of people from completely uncompetitive districts. Nancy Pelosi and Jim McDermott put up nice numbers, a function of their dogged, relentless campaigning…heh. A function of most of their constituents being unwilling to consider voting for a Republican under any circumstances.

It would be more interesting to limit the list to people who actually faced a credible threat and thus had to run a serious campaign. As a first approximation, cut out anyone whose district is D+10 or better. Here’s the top 10:

rank rep   dist   2008       2010       retention pvi

1 Pingree   ME 1 205,629     166,196     80.8      8

2 Schrader OR 5 181,577     145,319     80.0      2

3 Giffords   AZ 8 179,629     138,280     77.0      -4

4 Titus       NV 3 165,912     127,168     76.6      2

5 Lujan       NM 3 161,292     120,048     74.4      7

6 Bright     AL 2 144,368     106,865     74.0      -16

7 Inslee     WA 1 233,780     172,642     73.8      9    

8 Dicks       WA 6 205,991     151,873     73.7      5

9 Tonko       NY 21 171,286    124,889     72.9      6

10 Himes       CT 4 158,475     115,351     72.8      5

8 of the 10 are in blue districts and 6 of these are D+5 or better. And then there’s Bobby Bright. Now for the bottom 10:

rank rep     dist     2008       2010 retention pvi

110 Grayson       FL 8 172,854    84,167 48.7 -2

111 Boyd               FL 2 216,804    105,211 48.5 -6

112 Childers       MS 1    185,959 89,388 48.1 -14

113 L Davis       TN 4 146,776    70,254 47.9 -13

114 Ortiz             TX 27 104,864    50,179 47.9 -2

115 C Edwards   TX 17    134,592 63,138 46.9 -20

116 Kosmas         FL 24 211,284    98,787 46.8 -4

117 Etheridge     NC 2 199,730   92,393 46.3 -2

118 C Gonzalez   TX 20 127,298    58,645 46.1 8

119 Taylor           MS 4 216,542    95,243 44.0 -20

9 of the 10 are in red districts, and 4 of those are really red. Charlie Gonzalez’ appearance on this list is  misleading as he was never in any trouble. He didn’t get his people out, but he didn’t need them. In any case, it’s understandably a lot harder for Dems to hold on to their presidential-year voters when a lot of them are normally inclined to vote red.

So the two basic rules appear to be: 1) People are more likely to vote in midterm elections when they can conveniently vote by mail, and 2) the bluer your district is, the less likely your voters are to swing against you in a red wave year. I did a simple regression analysis to compute members’ predicted retention based on the PVI of their districts and whether their state predominantly uses vote by mail. Using only the D+9 or lower district as the sample, each point of PVI increased retention by an average of about 0.25 percentage points and vote-by-mail increased it by an average of 7 points. The “diff” column shows the difference between actual retention and predicted retention. So here is the adjusted top 20 as measured by differential:

rank rep        dist    diff

1 Pingree     ME 1    19.6

2 Bright         AL 2    19.1

3 Giffords     AZ 8    18.9

4 Titus           NV 3    17.0

5 Lujan         NM 3    13.4

6 Schrader   OR 5    13.3

7 Himes         CT 4    12.3

8 Kratovil       MD 1    12.3

9 Tonko         NY 21    12.2

10 Perriello     VA 5    11.8

11 Sarbanes   MD 3    11.6

12 Arcuri           NY 24    10.0

13 Boswell       IA 3    9.6

14 Yarmuth       KY 3    9.0

15 Peters         MI 9    8.9

16 Courtney   CT 2    8.9

17 C Murphy   CT 5    8.8

18 Altmire       PA 4    7.2

19 Heinrich     NM 1    6.9

20 Boren         OK 2    6.8

And it’s still Chellie Pingree by a nose. Interestingly, the top 19 consists of 18 freshmen or sophomores and one Boswell. (Yep, the much-maligned Leonard Boswell arguably ran the best campaign of any House Dem with actual experience of serving in the minority.) This seems counterintuitive given that newer members have not had much time to build up goodwill and thus should be more vulnerable to losing support in a red wave year. Instead, it appears that these newer reps were used to having to scratch and claw for every vote and thus adapted more easily to an unfriendly environment than veteran reps who were used to winning easily did.

There was a big gap between #3 and #4 and an even bigger gap between #4 and #5. These four super-overachievers come from dissimilar districts and had dissimilar records and this time I don’t see a pattern:

Pingree was one of the few Dems to win by a bigger margin in 2010 than 2008, and this doesn’t appear to be any unobserved Maine-specific effect (Libby Mitchell coattails? heh) as Mike Michaud had a differential of just +4.8. This race did not get much attention, although it was considered competitive at one point. Was Pingree’s remarkable retention number a function of a sloppy campaign in 2008 or a brilliant one in 2010, or both?

Bright almost never voted with the Dems, but Gene Taylor didn’t either and Bright only retained 30% more of his 2008 vote than Taylor did! It still wasn’t enough to get him over the hump, but he came a lot closer than similarly situated dudes like Lincoln Davis, Chet Edwards, and Travis Childers.        

Gabrielle Giffords was the other red-district rep to make the unadjusted top 10. Her district is far more purple than Bright’s but she also took many more risks than he did, voting for TARP, the stimulus, cap and trade, health care, and financial reform. This did not appear to hurt her much with the Dems and swing voters who voted for her in 2008. Like Pingree, she got zero up-ballot help but unlike Pingree she just barely held her seat. Her voting record may have motivated the people who opposed her in 2008 to stick around and pull the lever for that megatool Jesse Kelly.

Unlike the top 3, Dina Titus got some indirect help in the form of Harry Reid’s fearsome operation. Titus probably deserves some credit for her strong showing, though. Shelly Berkley isn’t a perfect comparison (much higher baseline Dem vote but also a much less threatening opponent) and with a D+10 district just missed the regression sample, but her differential would have been +4.9, and 12 points is a big spread in any case.

Here is the adjusted bottom 20:

rank rep             dist          diff

100 B Miller           NC 13    -8.0

101 Nye                     VA 2    -8.1

102 Loretta Sanchez CA 47    -8.1

103 Space               OH 18    -8.1

104 Cuellar           TX 28    -8.3

105 Doggett           TX 25    -8.6

106 Boyd                 FL 2    -9.0

107 Taylor           MS 4    -9.9

108 Donnelly           IN 2    -9.9

109 Grayson           FL 8    -9.9

110 Filner             CA 51    -10.1

111 Hinojosa             TX 15     -10.2

112 Ortiz               TX 27    -10.8

113 Pallone           NJ 6    -11.3

114 Kosmas           FL 24    -11.3

115 Visclosky         IN 1    -11.6

116 Carnahan       MO 3    -11.9

117 Etheridge         NC 2    -12.4

118 C Gonzalez       TX 20    -15.2

119 Costa               CA 20    -17.8

There may be some unobserved variation related to demographics or state election laws, as the only state to put a rep in both the top 20 and the bottom 20 was Virginia. Glenn Nye managed to retain 20% less of his 2008 vote than Tom Perriello did despite voting with the Dems less often. Texas in particular was a sea of apathy for Dems, as the best performer was actually Chet Edwards at -6.9! That said, Bob Etheridge’s failures are his own, not North Carolina’s. Heath Shuler managed a +4.6 differential.

If you rightly ignore Gonzalez who won by 29 points, Jim Costa turned in the worst performance by a country mile. It’s true that his district is young and poor and heavily Hispanic, but so is Raul Grijalva’s, and Grijalva had a +3.6 differential without the benefit of vote by mail! (Grijalva’s big mouth probably ran up Ruth McClung’s vote total as opposed to depressing his own, as his margin of defeat was worse than even the hopeless Rodney Glassman’s in some counties.) We’ll see if Costa takes his narrow escape as a wake-up call, as commission redistricting is likely to put him in a less friendly district.

Just eyeballing the data, it appears that richer districts generally had more retention than poorer ones (note the 3 Connecticut dudes in the top 20 and the many south Texans in the bottom 20) so I may rerun the numbers once I find enough time to enter the median income of all the districts.

Some conclusions: Chellie Pingree and Leonard Boswell are underrated. Don’t be surprised to see Bobby Bright, Dina Titus, Frank Kratovil, Tom Perriello, and/or Michael Arcuri resurface. Keep an eye on Ben Lujan. Russ Carnahan and especially Jim Costa need to step it up. It may be premature to speculate about Gabrielle Giffords’ future (early signs are good), but she was a beast as of 2010. Vote by mail is great. The Texas Dems’ 2010 turnout was uglier than the Texas Longhorns’ 2010 offense.

Thoughts? (How do you post clean tables from spreadsheets? I tried saving them as PDFs but was unable to convert them to photos.)    

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?

Now that it’s 2011, the redistricting games will soon begin in earnest, with more detailed Census data expected in February or March and some states holding spring legislative sessions to deal with drawing new maps. Long ago I planned to do state-by-state rundowns of the redistricting process as soon as 2010 election results and Census reapportionment were clear. Now that time has arrived, and it’s time to look at Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa.

Previous diary on Alabama, Arizona, and Arkansas

Previous diary on California, Colorado, and Connecticut

Previous diary on Florida, Georgia, and Hawaii

The rest below the fold…

Idaho

Districts: 2

Who’s in charge? Nonpartisan commission

Is that important? Nope

Idaho competes with Hawaii for the prize of least interesting congressional redistricting process of the decade. The commission will move some precincts around to achieve population equality, and Reps. Labrador and Simpson will likely stay in office with huge majorities throughout the 2010s.

Illinois

Districts: 18, down from 19 in 2002

Who’s in charge? Democrats

Is that important? Extremely

This will be the first time in a long while that Democrats control redistricting in Illinois, and as their only obvious major gerrymandering opportunity of the decade, they will milk the state for every seat it’s worth. In such a blue state with an 11-8 Republican majority in its congressional delegation, big swings should not be difficult. They will likely eliminate a GOP seat in the Chicago area (my guess: force Bob Dold and Joe Walsh together in a more Republican North Shore district), though there’s been some discussion of eliminating a downstate district instead (say, Bobby Schilling’s or Aaron Schock’s). That is only the beginning. Lessening the minority percentages by just a little in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 7th could ruin suburban Republicans like Adam Kinzinger and Peter Roskam, while liberal urban districts like the 9th and 5th could easily stretch westward to lessen GOP fortunes in nearby seats. In using Dave’s application, I found it possible to create an ethnically diverse, heavily Democratic 11th District for Kinzinger simply by lowering the African-American percentages for Rush and Jackson to the 52-53% range.

I think the Democrats will seek to gain perhaps three seats, for an 11-7 Democratic edge. Given the necessity of VRA protection in those four Chicago seats, any more would be pushing their luck. The most likely Republican casualties are Dold, Walsh, Kinzinger, Roskam, and Schilling, though at least one of them will likely be strengthened by the new gerrymander.

Indiana

Districts: 9

Who’s in charge? Republicans

Is that important? Yes

The bad news for Democrats is that Joe Donnelly is almost certainly toast — split up South Bend and Michigan City between two districts and he will be running in a much more GOP-friendly seat than the current Obama-supporting 2nd District. The silver lining is that Republicans can’t make things much worse for them otherwise. Democratic vote concentration in Lake County and Indianapolis will ensure solid vote sink districts for Pete Visclosky and Andre Carson, and Gov. Mitch Daniels has urged his party not to go crazy with boundary lines (this probably applies more to legislative districts, since only the 2nd will be significantly politically altered in this case).

Iowa

Districts: 4, down from 5 in 2002

Who’s in charge? Nonpartisan commission, with legislative approval

Is that important? Yes

Since the commission will not want to combine two Democrats (Braley and Loebsack) or two Republicans (King and Latham), it is almost sure that Tom Latham will face Leonard Boswell in a politically competitive Des Moines/Ames district. Latham has generally overperformed GOP baseline in his district while Boswell has had a number of tough races over the years and will be 78 next year. I could see the latter retiring if forced to run against Latham. But time will tell. Boswell’s tenacity — winning races since 1996 that, more often than not, have been relatively close — may ultimately pay off.

Well, I started thinking about ways the Connecticut Democratic Party can get Ted Kennedy, Jr., into politics without potentially screwing over Rep. Chris Murphy of CT-05, the bold young soul in a bid for the Senate seat held by retiring independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman. And I thought, “Well, what about starting him off with a nice House seat?” And that evolved into wondering about exactly how to negate the fact that CT-05 represents a pickup opportunity for the Republicans, provided they field a good candidate, now that Murphy is moving on to (hopefully) bigger and better things.

I came up with this map.

What I’ve done here is I’ve basically cracked the existing CT-05, giving pieces of it to CT-01 (pink), CT-04 (red), and the new south-central-based incarnation of CT-05 (blue). I can’t guarantee Rep. Jim Himes in CT-04 is going to be thrilled, considering he had a closer-than-expected reelection campaign against Dan Debicella (drawn into Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s CT-03 [purple] on this map); Rep. John Larson in CT-01 should be fine, considering the sizable Democratic tilt of Hartford. I think Democrats will have to concede one district as “fair fight” and hope the state’s strong Democratic proclivities and a mediocre Republican bench are enough to keep it in friendly hands, and I think they’d rather trust an incumbent member of Congress to hold it down rather than the likes of First Selectman Mary Glassman, whose ticket didn’t even come close to prevailing in the Democratic gubernatorial primary last year. Having two close districts, as they did last year, is a bit uncomfortable when the Republicans remain capable of winning statewide at least on the state government level.

I’m not too knowledgeable about Connecticut politics in particular. My idea here is that by drawing CT-03 a bit west, CT-04 a bit north, CT-01 over into the northwestern corner of the state (making it much more compact in the process), and CT-02 more into the north-central than the south-central part of the state, I could create a new, open-seat CT-05 without jeopardizing the Democrats’ control of the congressional delegation. This CT-05 is specifically drawn for Kennedy, who lives in Branford (just east of the new boundary with CT-03, in the vicinity of New Haven). With a seat tailor-made for his political debut, Kennedy might be less tempted to upset the apple cart by making a damn-the-torpedoes run at the Democratic nomination-a scenario the Democratic establishment in Connecticut and the DSCC would surely like to avoid.

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%

Now that it’s 2011, the redistricting games will soon begin in earnest, with more detailed Census data expected in February or March and some states holding spring legislative sessions to deal with drawing new maps. Long ago I planned to do state-by-state rundowns of the redistricting process as soon as 2010 election results and Census reapportionment were clear. Now that time has arrived, and it’s time to look at Florida, Georgia, and Hawaii.

Previous diary on Alabama, Arizona, and Arkansas

Previous diary on California, Colorado, and Connecticut

Extend a thought today to Rep. Giffords, her family, and the families of those killed yesterday in Arizona.

The rest below the fold…

Florida

Districts: 27, up from 25 in 2002

Who’s in charge? Republicans

Is that important? Yes, but how important?

To date, Florida’s map has been one of the most effective Republican gerrymanders in the country, with Democrats packed efficiently into six ultra-safe seats: the VRA-protected black-majority 3rd (stretching from Jacksonville to Gainesville to Orlando), 17th (in north Miami), and 23rd (in Palm Beach/Broward), and three liberal, mostly white, urban districts: the 11th (Tampa Bay), 19th (Palm Beach/Broward), and 20th (mostly Broward). There are two seats you could call swing districts – the 8th, around Orlando, and the 22nd, on the north end of South Florida’s wealthy Gold Coast, and at the moment they are both represented by Republicans (Dan Webster and Allen West, respectively).

With the state gaining two seats, the GOP should superficially be primed for more gains, but 19-6 is a pretty lopsided majority in a state that voted for Obama and closely matched nationwide margins in 2000 and 2004. Worse for the Republicans, voters passed referenda in 2010 aimed at curtailing gerrymandering in the state. The language of the initiatives – using terms like “compact” and “existing political/geographic boundaries” – was definitely open to interpretation, but if GOP legislators preserve monstrosities like the 16th, for example, they are likely to face lawsuits on the basis of Amendment 6 (whose own validity is being questioned in court right now by Reps. Brown and Diaz-Balart). Even if Amendment 6 is struck down by the district court, though, it is hard to imagine Republicans carving out another two seats. My guess is they will seek to protect their 19 incumbents, add a new GOP seat along the Gulf Coast, and add a new Dem seat in Central FL (near Orlando or Kissimmee, perhaps) to soak up liberal-leaning voters currently represented by Sandy Adams or Dan Webster.

I have mapped Florida multiple times on DRA and have tried to create a 21-6 GOP majority. As I usually draw the new central district, it could potentially be won by a moderate Republican with appeal in the Hispanic community. But it would be a strong Obama ’08 seat and good territory for a Dem legislator like Darren Soto. Really, 20-7 is about the best any party can hope to do in a swing state, even one that tilts its own way.

Georgia

Districts: 14, up from 13 in 2002

Who’s in charge? Republicans

Is that important? Sort of

Republicans should have no trouble adding a new GOP seat in the Atlanta suburbs (most likely around Gwinnett, Rockdale, Walton, and Newton Counties), but from there it gets more complicated. Most observers agree they will make Sanford Bishop’s district VRA-protected, adding mostly black areas of Macon to protect Austin Scott from competition in the 8th, but we seem to be divided over whether they will target John Barrow for defeat. Arguments for: he’s white, it’s not a VRA-protected district, and his bases of support in Augusta and Savannah could easily be lumped with neighboring safe Republican districts to ruin any chances he had for reelection. Arguments against: a VRA lawsuit would be inevitable because black voters currently hold sway in the district’s Democratic primaries, Jack Kingston and Paul Broun don’t particularly want a bunch of new Dem-voting constituents, and there are a lot of rural African-Americans in eastern and east-central Georgia who have to go somewhere and will comprise a large portion of the district however it is drawn.

Personally, I don’t think they will target Barrow much; they may attempt to dilute his black % a little bit, or they may do the opposite to make serious primary competition more likely. Either way, there are too many Democrats in that part of the state for mapmakers to crack the district very effectively.

Hawaii

Districts: 2

Who’s in charge? Nonpartisan commission

Is that important? No

Well, this is the snoozeville of congressional redistricting right here. Dem incumbents Hirono and Hanabusa are already fairly safe and native son Barack Obama will be on the ballot in 2012. The commission will very slightly tinker with the lines and it should mean nothing for either woman’s reelection prospects.

Later: Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa!

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)

Now that it’s 2011, the redistricting games will soon begin in earnest, with more detailed Census data expected in February or March and some states holding spring legislative sessions to deal with drawing new maps. Long ago I planned to do state-by-state rundowns of the redistricting process as soon as 2010 election results and Census reapportionment were clear. Now that time has arrived, and it’s time to look at California, Colorado, and Connecticut.

Previous diary on Alabama, Arizona, and Arkansas

The rest below the fold…

California

Districts: 53

Who’s in charge? Nonpartisan commission

Is that important? Heck yes

Boy, is this the big kahuna. With California’s delegation comprising 12.2% of the entire House, and 17.6% of the whole Democratic caucus, the Golden State was already a dominant player in the nationwide redistricting wars, but with its recent switch from legislative control (which would have meant a Democratic gerrymander in 2011) to a nonpartisan commission, any semblance of certainty is out the window. The commission must preserve VRA-protected minority seats, of which there are at least 12 (Barbara Lee’s 9th, Jim Costa’s 20th, Xavier Becerra’s 31st, Judy Chu’s 32nd, Karen Bass’s 33rd, Lucille Roybal-Allard’s 34th, Maxine Waters’s 35th, Laura Richardson’s 37th, Grace Napolitano’s 38th, Linda Sanchez’s 39th, Joe Baca’s 43rd, and Loretta Sanchez’s 47th) and  several more if you interpret the law as protecting Latino-majority/plurality districts represented by non-Hispanic whites.

Republicans say the losers in California redistricting will be white Democrats representing less-than-completely-solid seats (such as Jerry McNerney and Dennis Cardoza), seats likely to be broken up and redistributed between other districts (such as Lois Capps), or seats likely to be turned into VRA-protected minority districts (such as one of the San Fernando Valley Dems: Berman, Sherman, or Schiff). Democrats say that the current map is not that gerrymandered in their favor, and is instead an incumbent protection gambit; they argue that nonpartisan redistricting will ruin as many GOP incumbents (Ken Calvert and Gary Miller, say) as Dem incumbents. In any case, few solid predictions can be made at this point, and I’d like very much to hear what those of you at SSP think will happen. If forced at gunpoint to predict something about the new map, I’d say a seat will be shifted from the Bay Area to the Inland Empire, and that Jerry McNerney is the likely “eliminee,” though it could also be a longtimer like George Miller or Pete Stark. Also, a competitive Central Coast district will be recreated à la the California 22nd in the 1990s, hurting the reelection prospects of both Lois Capps and Elton Gallegly. Demographics will also compel the commission to create a couple new Hispanic districts, at least one of which will be a reconfiguration of a seat now represented by a white L.A. Democrat.

The commission’s membership has been finalized and its work should be complete by sometime this autumn. I, for one, greatly look forward to the fireworks.

Colorado

Districts: 7

Who’s in charge? Split (Dem Governor and Senate, GOP House)

Is that important? Not really

The bare Republican majority in Colorado’s House should ensure a safer seat for Scott Tipton in the 3rd (represented by a Republican from 1992 to 2004 and a Democrat from 2004 to 2010), but otherwise won’t change the partisan dynamics much in Colorado. Overwhelming Democratic edges for Diana DeGette in Denver and Jared Polis in the Boulder area may be diluted a bit to create a rock-solid constituency for Ed Perlmutter, but that will be the only tangible benefit for Team Blue.

Connecticut

Districts: 5

Who’s in charge? Democrats

Is that important? No

An overwhelmingly Democratic legislature will draw districts for an already all-Democratic House delegation. Jim Himes and Chris Murphy should get slightly safer seats at the marginal expense of rock-solid incumbents John Larson and Rosa DeLauro, but that will be the extend of remapping drama in the Nutmeg State.

Later this week: Florida, Georgia, and Hawaii!