US House Redistricting: New York

[TJ in Oregon]

Why would a court dismantle Turner's district instead of some combination of Ackerman, McCarthy, and King? The Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in southern Brooklyn form a pretty clear community of interest. If anything a fair map would unsplit the Jewish pockets instead of cracking them.

[TJ in Oregon]

Well, I didn't even get to church this morning because I have a bad head cold and stayed up all night doing homework, so you're probably marginally more right with God than I am at the moment anyway. I'm planning to go to Nones on Wednesday instead.

I was playing around with upstate and it's actually possible to make every district along the eastern border pretty likely Democratic most years assuming Bill Owens doesn't get complacent. You just have to make clever use of Westchester, Poughkeepsie, and the Capital District.

That's why the old map is not a Democratic gerrymander overall even though the downstate portion is somewhat (see pages of argument about Orthodox Jews). The old upstate map is quite friendly to Republicans in many places, in particular the areas around the earmuffs. From my perspective, New York politics is perhaps too strange of an animal for me to even be able to determine what a safe district for each party is upstate, but it certainly looks more like a Republican gerrymander upstate to me.

[TJ in Oregon]

I stopped paying it serious attention as soon as I saw what was done to the Capital District and that the earmuffs still existed.

The earmuffs are terrible, but would you like the capital district to look like? TimothyinMD's map looks pretty much the same as muon's in that area. Pretty much all of them are ugly in some way around there.

[TJ in Oregon]

One quick point I would like to make here in the Orthodox Jewish seat argument is that if such a seat is drawn to grant representation specifically to the Orthodox Jewish minority is that for such a seat to do just that, the main premise would be that the seat needs to be drawn so that the Orthodox community is able to elect the representative of their choice. It does not need to be majority Orthodox Jewish. We often use this standard with other minority groups throughout the country in redistricting. Note, I am not arguing that the Orthodox Jewish community is large enough that representation should be legally required, but if it is, the district needs to be drawn so that other groups will not drown out the Orthodox vote. This means that the other groups cannot be too heavily partisan against the Orthodox prefered candidate (which right now seems to be Turner).