Replies

“Oh yeah I mean what county a guy is from, that’s much more important than optimizing the partisan balance of the districts!!!! Can’t trust those a-holes from the next county over!!”

It wasn’t that they didn’t trust someone from one county over, it’s that the powers that be wanted to make sure that the district would elect someone from Hall County, and feared that a candidate from Gwinnet might win if it was too much of a suburban CD. So he drew the new GA-09 to include a bunch of rural counties and exurban counties west of Athens, making it ridiculously Republican. Spreading those Republicans around would have made the GA-10 and GA-07 safe instead of potentially competitive, and it would have allowed them to draw a safely GOP GA-12 (instead of a CD that reelected its RAT incumbent), but it was more important for the Hall County bigshots to make sure that Hall County got to pick a congressman.

BTW, I misremembered the person pushing a Hall County CD. It wasn’t the Speaker of the House, but the President of the Senate, Lt. Governor Casey Cagle. Cagle is from Hall County, as is Gov. Nathan Deal. Those are the two Republicans responsible for the GA-09 being über-Republican at the expense of other CDs.

I know, I was being sarcastic with that line.

Personally I don’t give a rat’s patoot where someone is from and dislike that being a factor in redistricting ahead of partisan optimization.

If my Congressman could be a conservative from the other end of the state, I’d be thrilled.