It might be possible to break up my 5th district (I’d love to have a GOP Rep., this district hasn’t elected one since Ulysses Grant won his 2nd term in 1872), but I’d be worried that might have the effect of putting the surrounding districts at risk and make them all competitive for the Dems. Getting greedy in an attempt to get an 8-1 GOP/Dem delegation (which could result in a 6 Dem/3 GOP in a bad GOP year with no Republicans west of Chattanooga’s 3rd) is not as preferable to packing the Dems tightly into Nashville and Memphis, getting a guaranteed 7-2 GOP/Dem delegation for the forseeable future.
You can see what happened when we tried that in PA when the GOP legislature drew the delegation to be 13 GOP/6 Dem (with 2 Dem seats potentially competitive, so 15 GOP/4 Dem if we were really lucked out in dumping the incumbents in the Kanjorski and (then) Hoeffel seats). Once in place for 2002, it resulted in 12 GOP/7 Dem when 1 Dem gerrymandered out of his seat challenged a “safe” Republican and beat him (Holden vs. Gekas) and after the fiasco election of ‘06, the Dems instead grabbed a 11 Dem/8 GOP majority taking out 4 of ours in one shot. Big “oops !”
Yeah that’s a good point. PA was a disaster. You’d need someone with surgical precision to draw up those districts, plus you’d have to watch out for rural ancestrial Democratic counties that might turn on you in a bad year. It’d be a creative (perhaps even fun) exercise, but the pitfalls are there as you said.
In TN, the 5th CD should be made *more* Democrat, not less, so as to allow the GOP to win the Tanner, Gordon and Davis CDs. I think a 7-2 GOP delegation is more than OK for TN.
As for PA, I’ve written about this before, and the GOP overplayed it’s hand and got too cute in the 2001 redistricting. It tried to draw PA-11, PA-12 and PA-13 in such a way that could be potentially winnable for the GOP, and by doing so it made the PA-04, PA-18, PA-17, PA-15, PA-06, PA-07 and PA-08 less comfortably Republican than they could be (the PA-10 is as GOP as it needs to be; we lost it because of the incumbent’s despicable personal behavior). Harrisburgh should have been placed in the Platts CD to the south, and Pottstown should have been drawn into the PA-11, thereby making the PA-17 unwinnable for Holden. Lower Bucks County should have been placed in the PA-13, and Lower Merion in the PA-01, and the Dem-leaning parts of Chester County should have gone into Pitts’s CD, thereby drawing GOP-leaning PA-06, PA-07 and PA-08. At least part of Allentown or Bethlehem could have gone into the PA-11, making the PA-15 more comfortably GOP. The Democrat areas in the PA-04 and PA-18 could have been placed in the two Pittsburgh-area RAT CDs and if it meant that Mascara and Doyle would survive and Murtha would lose, then so be it. We could have had a 13-6 delegation for the entire decade, instead of the fiasco we have today. It all comes from getting greedy and hoping against hope to carry districts that gave President Bush 42% in 2000.