In Pennsylvania, the Gerrymander of the Decade?

There have been a lot of good candidates for the "gerrymander of the decade" award this cycle. North Carolina, Illinois and Texas have all dreamed up district lines that have gone...

Republicans in Pennsylvania, however, took a state that is two or three points more Democratic than the country as a whole, and created 12 districts (out of 18) that are more Republican than the country as a whole. They did so by creating what can only be called a group of Rorschach-inkblot districts in southeastern Pennsylvania.

The net result is a map that shores up their vulnerable incumbents, and that may well result in a 14-4 Republican edge by the end of the decade.

To see how this works, take a look at the following two charts. The first one shows the 2008 Obama percentage in each district under the old lines and the new lines, as well as the change (negative is toward McCain, positive is toward Obama).

A few quick notes: The new 4th district is just a renumbered version of the old 19th district, while Democrats Mark Critz and Jason Altmire were placed together in the new 12th district. Also, the new district percentages were compiled using Dave’s Redistricting Application; it doesn’t allow for precinct-splitting, so some of these numbers may be off by a 10th of a point or so.

The next chart is really a summary chart of the first. It shows the number of districts under both the old and new lines, sorted by Obama’s two-party vote share. Remember, a district that gave Obama 54 percent or more of the two-party vote leans toward Democrats; 53 percent or less leans Republican. I’ve also noted where Republican incumbents are in Democratic-leaning districts and vice-versa:

The PA-01 became a bit less hyper-Democrat because not because they added any GOP areas to it, but because it used to vote like 15% GOP and had to add a lot of population, and they added 35%-GOP areas from Delco (which had to be taken out to protect Meehan) and, unless I’m mistaken, some 35%-GOP areas from NE Philly along the NJ border. The PA-14 had to expand quite a bit, and it already had all of the hyper-Democrat parts of the Pittsburgh area, and the new areas added maybe vote 35% GOP, so the overall performance for the CD is a bit less Democrat. But both the PA-01 and the PA-14 serve the purpose of sucking in as many Democrats as possible.

And no, DJ, it would not be possible to “be creative” and draw a competitive PA-13. That’s *exactly* what got us in trouble in 2001, when Republicans wanted to draw a “winnable” PA-13 in which a Montco RINO could beat NE Philly pro-life Dem Borski, but Borski retired and Montco Dem Hoeffel won the seat (Montco Melissa Brown made it closer that one would have thought, but still couldn’t beat him), and the end result was that all of those Montco Republicans placed in the PA-13 were wasted when they could have been used to ward off Dem victories in PA-07 and PA-08 in 2006 and 2008 and for Gerlach to have avoided having come within a whisker of defeat in 2002, 2006 and 2008. A 15-3 GOP plan is outside the realm of the possible, since the Philly-area GOP-leaning CDs are spread thinly enough as is to even consider packing Philly-area Dems into 2 instead of 3 CDs, and if you didn’t pack Coal Country Dems into a CD it would result in 4 Dem-leaning or marginal CDs being created in the region. The possible 13-5 plan here is as aggressive a map as the GOP could draw without risking having the Dems win 9+ seats; in fact, I would have played it safer by drawing a 6th Dem CD in Western PA so as to make the PA-03, PA-05 and PA-18 relatively safe GOP instead of vulnerable to a possible Dem upset.

I’d like to see Bush 2004 voting percentages, but from the 2008 Obama percentages I think that Bush carried all of the GOP CDs (plus the redrawn PA-12) in 2004 except for the PA-08, where he probably got 49%.

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