Posted on 12/15/2011 8:32:14 PM PST by neverdem
Taking into consideration that Murtha's district was in contention for Gerrymander of the century, I assumed by the headline the new districts would make a lot more sense.
Your maps confirm my suspicions :-)
Well I’m registered in Centre because I go to PSU but home district is in Schuylkill
Lou Barletta managed to win a district just as Dem as Holden’s redrawn district will be. I still don’t understand what Holden’s magic allure is. George Gekas should’ve beaten him a decade ago, but he hadn’t really run a competitive race in 20 years at that point.
Thanks for the maps. Can you link the sources?
I just did a Google image search.
Thanks for the ping!
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%.
Thank you.
We need to draft Barletta to run against Casey...
People in my county love Tim Holden. Many Republicans I know split their ticket to vote for him EVERY time.
We have our work cut out for us, that's clear.
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