MIping
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Posted on 05/28/2011 7:37:53 PM PDT by Clintonfatigued
A draft redistricting plan in Michigan would place two incumbent Democratic congressmen in the same district, the Detroit News reports.
The Republican plan would, as many observers have expected, place longtime Rep. Sandy Levin and Rep. Gary Peters, now in his second term, in the same suburban Detroit district.
Michigan is set to lose one House seat in the next Congress, giving it 14 seats. Republicans hold all the power in the redistricting process, controlling the governorship and both houses of the state legislature.
Some have suggested that Peters would run for another office rather than challenge more senior Democrats like Levin, the ranking member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Someone should send this to Illinois DemocRATS, accompanied by a plate of crow. It’s payback time!
Kinda figured Peters would be the one to bite it.
MIping
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Be not deceived! God only knows how many ways the Republicans could screw up a sure thing.
Please Lord, let them do it right!
HA!
And that’s just one seat.
No democrat holds a higher seat in Michigan than county level.
Electionwise, we’re redder than Texas at the moment, LOL!
The democrats were wanting to make deals in the name of “fairness”. They wanted to get rid of Richardville and Nofs to decrease GOP strength in Lansing. The GOP told them to take their deal and shove it. Now they’re trying to Recall Shirkey because he took a democrat “entitled” seat.
Not much we can do there besides this one seat. Peters is in a seat that was ours for decades as it is.
They are eliminating Peter’s winnable (for us) seat?
That’s hardly comparable to the Illinois Kwamemander. Sounds like the best the rats can hope for. Not being able to eliminate a Black Detroit seat hamstrings us a little.
All the while the Districts in Detroit (where all the population was lost) remain?
GOP redistricters in MI could have drawn a comfortably Republican MI-11 (and MI-09) in 2001 had the placed Pontiac in Levin’s MI-12 (connected through the eastern, heavily Jewish Democrat portion of West Bloomfield. They also could have drawn safer MI-04 and MI-08 by placing Lansing and East Lansing in Kildee’s MI-05, and a safer MI-06 and MI-07 by placing Kalamazoo in the MI-03. The GOP chose to draw, in general, simpler lines that split up fewer counties so as to stay within the confines of the state constitutional provisions that I believe only apply to drawing state districts.
Now in 2011, I hope that MI GOP
redistricters keep in mind that a district that only votes 52% GOP in presidential elections could easily fall to the RATs, and the trick is for Democrat seats to have as many Dems as possible and GOP seats to have given Bush between 54%-58% (drawing 60%+ Bush seats in MI is overkill and will tend to hurt Republicans in surrounding districts.
For years I’ve tried to draw just three Dem seats in the Detroit metro area while keeping two black-majority districts, and the problems are that (i) the white Dem areas in the current MI-12 and MI-15 can’t be connected without resulting in black areas such as Pontiac, Southfield, Inkster and Ypsilanti being excluded from the two black districts and (ii) it would leave Dem areas in surrounding districts. So I think we’re stuck with four Dem CDs in the Detroit area, which should make surrounding districts very Republican if they’re drawn correctly. I hope that redistricters use the excuse of having to draw VRA districts to split counties like crazy in the Detroit area and place the Grosse Pointes in the MI-10, Grosse Ile and marginal Downriver communities in a new MI-07 and other such moves.
Thanks Impy.
The Federal Government won’t let anyone eliminate a Black (or Hispanic) majority seat cause of the Voting Rights Act.
And that’s been helpful in the South cause it forced democrat redistricters to make Black seats in 1992 rather than spreading the black vote to elect more democrats.
But in MI in 2011 it hurts us.
Republican legislators should hire you to do all the remapping.
It’s not comparable to IL at all. In IL, they are aiming to gain 4 new Democrats, while in MI, we get nothing (after all, eliminating a Dem doesn’t mean +1 R unless we TAKE another seat). OH will be a problem, too, as perhaps 1 or 2 of our guys will have to go because of the fewer seats due to population. As it stands, looking at WI, MI, IL, IN, OH & PA, we may only get 1 seat (IN-2) while losing upwards of 5-6 seats in all those other states. Only if the IL gerrymander blows up in the Dems’ faces (and perhaps a few might not go how they want, a la GA in 2002), will we be able to stave off a bigger loss.
Yeah, it’s ass. -1 seat we could have won and that’s it.
I don’t know what’s up in Ohio but they gotta find a way for the rats to eat it as much as possible. I don’t know how they’d draw only 3 rats seats though.
GA 2002, yeah I hope so.
If we shore up the districts we drew last time in OH, PA, MI etc. and eliminate one Dem seat in each, and get rid of Dem gerrymanders in TN, IN, NC, etc., that’s a pretty good result, and should be enough to hold a House majority for the next decade. We need to avoid getting greedy, irrespective of what the Dems do in IL.
There’s not much to do here in TN. Our supermajorities are the result of a Democrat gerrymander. We could risk grabbing an 8th seat (my 5th Dist.) by unpacking the adjacent 7th, but in doing so means that in a bad year for us, the Dems could pick up a few seats in reaction. We’re another premier example of a Dem gerrymander blowing up in their faces. Ruthless NC redrawing by the majority GOP could offset any potential losses in IL (if only because there are too many Dems currently holding GOP-lean or competitive seats).
Thinking about TX for a moment, I wonder if out of those 4 new seats if we’ll only get 1 or 2 out of them given the VRA constraints.
My point about TN is that simply by drawing a map that is *not* a Democrat gerrymander we’ll lock in our 2010 gains for the rest of the decade. I wouldn’t try to get too greedy with TN-05; I’d just add Dem precincts from Clarksdale or historically Dem counties to Nashville’s west or east. But there are plenty of black-majority areas in the TN-08 and TN-07 that can be moved to the black-majority TN-09, and the über-Republican TN-07, TN-01 and TN-02 can be unpacked a bit to make all of the GOP districts 60%+ Bush CDs.
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