After the revelations of the past few days, this news comes as no surprise, but it’s still welcome nonetheless:
By a vote of 6-5, the commission to redraw the state’s 40 state legislative districts has passed a new map drawn by Democrats.
Tiebreaker Alan Rosenthal sided with the Democrats after spending a month on the commission, and the last week holed up at the Heldrich Hotel in New Brunswick.
“I wanted it to be a tough decision. It was. It took five hours of deliberations before I decided on the Democratic map,” said Rosenthal, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University.
Rosenthal said it was the “more conservative, less disruptive map”
“It is a map, I believe, that gives the minority party a chanee at winning control fot he Legislature, even in what is essentially a Democratic state,” he said. “I’ve tried to be diligent, I’ve tried to be honest, and I’ve tried to be fair in my participation.”
The map (click image for full size):
A PDF version of the map can be found here.
UPDATE: This site from the NJ Democratic Party has town & demographic breakdowns for the Dem map.
UPDATE 2: I’ve crunched the Obama/McCain percentages for each of these districts, based on the town breakdowns at the link above. Important note: The numbers for districts 28, 29, 31 & 33 are incomplete. Newark is split between the first two, and Jersey City is split between the second two, but we don’t know the exact splits. Also, two portions of district 9 and one portion of district 13 is described as “county subdivisions not defined” in the spreadsheet – not clear what that means. Full table is below the fold. I’m now convinced I made an error somewhere along the way and that these numbers are not accurate. I’m going to take the table down until I can figure out what happened.