US House Redistricting: New York

[Linus Van Pelt]

Good heavens. I take it those tentacles are motivated principally by the need to keep your 20th and 22nd from becoming too swingy, rather than a worry about the Dem percentage of the districts themselves?

[Linus Van Pelt]

At any rate, given the bloc voting element in the Gingles test I think you could make a pretty good case that there are no VRA considerations anywhere in New York City except along the line where black and (outer) white Brooklyn meet.

Racialized Democratic party factions, on the other hand, there are aplenty.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Re, Buffalo: just noticed Hochul lives in Hamburg, which is south of the city and decidedly in Brian Higgins' district. The fact that she's already the member may suggest no-one cares about this, but if the legislature decides to care, the split here could look weirder than we have perhaps thought.

[Linus Van Pelt]

It's worth noting here that the current districts were negotiated at a time when gay marriage was pretty much off the radar of mainstream politics, 9/11 had not yet occurred, one could still claim coherently to support both the actually existing government of Israel and a negotiated end to the occupation in the near future, and the Vice President of the administration that had signed DOMA had just run with Joseph Lieberman and dominated the Jewish vote of all levels of religiosity against a ticket that showed every sign of replicating the old Reagan/Bush Sr. lens on middle east policy in which the highest priority was the Saudi alliance.

The assumption that Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews constitute radically different voting blocs at the federal level is mostly a product of events after this period. Strange as it seems now, putting Boro Park with Jerry Nadler actually did seem like it made more sense both politically and demographically (though not of course geographically) than putting it with Vito Fossella.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Unfortunately my old laptop is sufficiently on the fritz that it doesn't seem to be able to handle large states in the App anymore without taking about eight years to fill in each precinct, but: given that the black population in Brooklyn goes to the water on the SE side but not on any other side, why wouldn't a court just bring the Brooklyn whites up the west side of the black districts, combining the Orthodox Jews with Park Slope, Williamsburg, etc?

[Linus Van Pelt]

The map proposed by Assembly Democrats is here.

It seems New York legislators believe it should take us as long to download the map as it took them to draw it.