Per SCOTUS, initiative created redistricting commissions may be l'histoire

[ag]

Roguemapper at RRH is finalizing a 48D 5R map of CA.

The pressure from national Democrats would be too much for the CA Dems not to go for as many seats at they can.

Read some more at RRH. It isn't realistic, and isn't going to happen. But hey, draw a map yourself!

Experience shows that there is very little that you cannot do if you have reliable 60% of the vote in a state and are willing to go ugly. Yes, this would require doing some ingenious unpacking of Dem concentrations and packing of Rep voters.  The maps would look horribly gerrymandered. But, in the political environment created by such a ruling, the most obvious gerrymander will, suddenly, be viewed as highly desirable - the more manifest, the better. And, given the Supreme Court precedent, political motives in gerrymandering will be perfectly protected: all Dems in CA would have to show is that they drew maps to harm the Republican party, and not for any other reason. Under the circumstances, Dems would be most happy to oblige.

[ag]

On second look, restricting Republicans to just 10 seats in California won't be so hard to do. And even Jerry Brown won't stop the greedy democrats in the legislature if the SCOTUS delivers such a decision on party line.

Exactly. And fajita strips there will be all over. I also can easily see quite a few other places where no fajitas are necessary. I mean, Matsui is sitting on 70% of the vote in Sacramento - she has many more votes than necessary to shore up Bera forever. Thompson is hoarding the Wine Country. There is a lot of fruit hanging around there, that should be picked.

Reserving 10 seats for the Republicans with the rest being reliably Dem would not seem very hard. It would be interesting, if that could be brought down to, say, 7, without undue danger of actually creating competition. I wish DRA were not so slow with California - would take me forever to draw it, and it would, probably, crash midway anyway. Could somebody with a better computer try?

[ag]

On second look, restricting Republicans to just 10 seats in California won't be so hard to do. And even Jerry Brown won't stop the greedy democrats in the legislature if the SCOTUS delivers such a decision on party line.

What's the fourth seat?

There are so many things that could be done. Think very ugly. For instance, 1 and 4 could be merged, the rest cut into pieces and attached to coastal areas. I mean, by shifting 3 a bit south, you could both strengthen it and bring up 5 - tonnes of spare Dems there and in 2.  Meanwhile, Matsui´s district could be used to strengthen Bera - no problem there. So, choose between La Malfa and McClintock, if you like. Denham, of course, would go fast, and getting rid of Valadao will not be difficult either. Knight should be doable, no? So, 4 should work easily. The question is, can one do 7 or 8?

[ag]

BTW, the one I would REALLY like to get rid of is Rohrabacher. Is there a good way of doing that?

[ag]

On second look, restricting Republicans to just 10 seats in California won't be so hard to do. And even Jerry Brown won't stop the greedy democrats in the legislature if the SCOTUS delivers such a decision on party line.

What's the fourth seat?

There are so many things that could be done. Think very ugly. For instance, 1 and 4 could be merged, the rest cut into pieces and attached to coastal areas. I mean, by shifting 3 a bit south, you could both strengthen it and bring up 5 - tonnes of spare Dems there and in 2.  Meanwhile, Matsui´s district could be used to strengthen Bera - no problem there. So, choose between La Malfa and McClintock, if you like. Denham, of course, would go fast, and getting rid of Valadao will not be difficult either. Knight should be doable, no? So, 4 should work easily. The question is, can one do 7 or 8?

You boys keeping the VRA in mind?  Where are the Dem areas around the Valadao CD? The Matsui CD will need to be used to help ax Denholm, and buttress Bera. And in in order to cut down the the two Pub CD's east and north of Sacto, the map would need to get really ugly I suspect. I don't think it will happen. The Central Coast is not that Dem, and Monterey County is VRA territory. And the Dem incumbents won't stand for it to boot. I suspect 2 Pub seats is the realistic number (some Dem psephological guru quoted at RRH agrees with me). Most of the surplus Dems will be used to buttress Dem marginal seats, and even that will require a lot of subunit chopping, that in and of itself is controversial. The City of Sacto for example will need to be chopped. Time for some maps!  

My point is, if this happens, thene demonstartive chopping might, actually, be seen as politically desirable - at least for a while. Sure, Sacramento would be chopped. Hell, they might want to chop San Francisco into a spagghetti salad: just to make a very ugly point.

BTW, what would, exactly, be the VRA restrictions here? How many Hispanic-majority districts are needed (and, surely, they do not need supermajorities). This is the list of majority-minority districts now.

6th (Matsui) 38.9% white plurality
9th (McNerney) 37.2% bare Hispanic plurality, do not believe would be proteced
10th (Denham) 46.4% white 40.1%  Hispanic - the beauty, could, probably, be made into majority Hispanic, while making it Dem.
11th (DeSaulnier) 48.6% white plurality
12th (Pelosi), 44% white plurality, 33.4% Asian
13th (Lee) 34.2% white, 22.8% Asian
14th (Speier) 36.9% white, 33.5% Asian
15th (Swalwell)  37.5% white, 30.1% Asian
16th (Costa) 58% Hispanic - ok, protected
17th (Honda) 49.7% Asian - ok, I guess, this could be defended through VRA as well, and not much margin there.
19th (Lofgren) 41.4% Hispanic, the rest split between White and Asian pretty evenly - would one need to retain this? probably not
20th (Farr) 50.7% Hispanic - ok, off limits.
21st (Valadao) 71% Hispanic - funnily, this will be one of the districts that will be gerrymandered away from the Reps, but it would, surely, work as a VRA district, besides other possibilities
22nd (Nunes) 44.8% Hispanic - is this protected? otherwise could be used as a source of Hispanics to shore up the numbers elsewhere.
25th (Knight) 45.8% white, 35.3% Hispanic - adding more Hispanics here to make it a Hispanic district in the process of gerrymandering the incumbent out? Or just split it in some funny way?
26th (Brownley) 46.1% white, 43.2% Hispanic - quite a few Hispanics can be used to shore up whatever is necessary.
27th (Chu) 37% Asian, 29.2% white, 26.9% Hispanic - not protected, is it?
29th (Cardenas) 68.7% Hispanic - excess Hispanics, could be used.
31st (Aguilar) 49.4% Hispanic, and, in any case, will likely be made majority Hispanic, while shoring it up.
32nd (Napolitano) 62.6% Hispanic - Hispanics to spare.
34th (Becerra) 65.4% Hispanic - Hispanics to spare
35th (Torres) 69.4% Hispanic - Hispanics to spare
36th (Ruiz) 46.6% Hispanic and should be made majority Hispanic while shoring it up.
37th (Bass) 38.6% Hispanic, 24.6% black - not really protected, is it?
38th (Sanchez), 61.2% Hispanic - folks to spare, though, perhaps, shouldn´t be.
39th (Royce) 34.1% white, 32.6% Hispanic, the rest Asian
40th (Roybard-Allard) 86.5% Hispanic - do not tell me you cannot share this bounty for fear of VRA.
41st (Takano) 55.9% Hispanic - ok, yeah, this one should be left alone.
42nd (Calvert) 46.6% White, 36.2% Hispanics - get them out of there.
43rd (Waters) 46% Hispanic - ok.
44th (Hahn) 68.4% Hispanic - quite some space.
46h (Sanchez) 66.6% Hispanic, same
47th (Lowenthal), tied white/hispanic at 34.1%
51st (Vargas) 68.5% Hispanic - space to play
53rd (Davis) 43.1% white, 31.8% hispanic, no particular protection

Notice, that in at least couple of cases majority Hispanic districts could be created while hurting the Republicans. And most of the rest are fairly safely majority-Hispanic (and likely will be even more so post 2020).

[ag]

On second look, restricting Republicans to just 10 seats in California won't be so hard to do. And even Jerry Brown won't stop the greedy democrats in the legislature if the SCOTUS delivers such a decision on party line.

What's the fourth seat?

Ed Royce's district. Give him Pomona.

Actually, you are right.

[ag]

BTW, the one I would REALLY like to get rid of is Rohrabacher. Is there a good way of doing that?

The map I am currently drawing gives him a district that voted for Obama by 11 points in 2008 (and Loretta Sanchez gets a 68% Hispanic district), although Brown lost by 7 in 2010. It's a swing seat, with a slight D lean. Of course he might just jump to the adjacent seat and take on Mimi Walters in the primary.

And I totally forgot about Valadao. There are about 4-5 easy pickups for the Democrats.

That is, if you are soft. If you choose to be brutal, you can eliminate both LaMalfa and McClintock. I mean, cut Santa Rosa and Sacramento into strips. No VRA issues there. Some Dem incumbents would object, of course. But brutal is brutal.

[ag]

BTW, the one I would REALLY like to get rid of is Rohrabacher. Is there a good way of doing that?

The map I am currently drawing gives him a district that voted for Obama by 11 points in 2008 (and Loretta Sanchez gets a 68% Hispanic district), although Brown lost by 7 in 2010. It's a swing seat, with a slight D lean. Of course he might just jump to the adjacent seat and take on Mimi Walters in the primary.

And I totally forgot about Valadao. There are about 4-5 easy pickups for the Democrats.

You are draining Hispanic percentages. That's the problem. Where is Valadao going to pick up more Democrats?  The Dems will pick up that seat anyway in time, and immediately if he vacates. It's trending Dem fast.

Do not forget that Hispanic percentages are growing. And there is no shortage of Hispanic voters even now: there are literally millions of them in districts where they are just behind whites. In fact, it would be possible to make new majority Hispanic districts for some of the Rep incumbents.

[ag]

BTW, the one I would REALLY like to get rid of is Rohrabacher. Is there a good way of doing that?

The map I am currently drawing gives him a district that voted for Obama by 11 points in 2008 (and Loretta Sanchez gets a 68% Hispanic district), although Brown lost by 7 in 2010. It's a swing seat, with a slight D lean. Of course he might just jump to the adjacent seat and take on Mimi Walters in the primary.

And I totally forgot about Valadao. There are about 4-5 easy pickups for the Democrats.

You are draining Hispanic percentages. That's the problem. Where is Valadao going to pick up more Democrats?  The Dems will pick up that seat anyway in time, and immediately if he vacates. It's trending Dem fast.

Draining Hispanic percentages? If you are talking about including Pomona in CA-39, CA-35 is not that adversely affected by it. The Hispanic percentage in CA-35 is at 62% and it is a solid Democratic district along with a CA-31 that is a couple points more Democratic than the current district. CA-31 is 50% Hispanic.

As for Valadao's district, it is very easy to draw a Democratic district there as long as you avoid most of Tulare and Kings County. You basically put all the small farming towns in Fresno County plus Hispanics in Kern County and a sliver of south Fresno together and you have a solid Democratic district.

Overall, I got 44-7-2. One of those swing districts is Issa's. So he will not be coming back to Congress. A Republican can win in that district, but not Darrel Issa.

Can you show the map?

[ag]

Ugly. But so is life.

[ag]

When you are drawing those DRA maps for a Dem gerry, I would ignore the 2008 pres numbers. The Dems would certainly want to be no worse than Brown in 2010 to protect against midterm defeats.

2010 was not a mere midterm, but a BIG Republican victory year. Even then many House incumbents performed reasonably well: they were incumbents. Depends on what the objective is: if it is to build a firewall, you may be right. But if the objective is to win most seats most of the time, one can take certain risks: and hope that incumbents would know their districts.

[ag]

How many seats would the democrats get with this map?
Would the majority leader be in trouble?

7 would be the max meaning they would lose 7 seats. Factor in a loss of 2 seats in AZ, and you have a net loss of 5. If we give the two swing districts to the Republicans, that is still a gain of 5 districts in CA for the Democrats.

Do you believe the democrats would be able to draw an even more anti republican map?

It's possible but it gets hard to draw strong enough Hispanic districts at that point and the seats start to become vulnerable in waves. I made sure to strengthen most of the current swing districts, if only by a couple points. Trying to get an additional seat is likely not worth it.

So, who survives?

[ag]

How many seats would the democrats get with this map?
Would the majority leader be in trouble?

7 would be the max meaning they would lose 7 seats. Factor in a loss of 2 seats in AZ, and you have a net loss of 5. If we give the two swing districts to the Republicans, that is still a gain of 5 districts in CA for the Democrats.

Do you believe the democrats would be able to draw an even more anti republican map?

It's possible but it gets hard to draw strong enough Hispanic districts at that point and the seats start to become vulnerable in waves. I made sure to strengthen most of the current swing districts, if only by a couple points. Trying to get an additional seat is likely not worth it.

So, who survives?

Mclintock, Nunes, McCarthy, Cook, Walters, Calvert and Hunter. Issa and Rohrbacher get the swing districts. I will try to post the numbers for each district and maybe a write up time permitting later on today.

Beauty.

[ag]

The odds the Dems will draw a map such as sbane's, and Brown will sign off on it, are vanishingly small. It just isn't done that way, and neither the electorate, nor the incumbent Dems, will stand for it. Until the program crashed, it is pretty realistic without upsetting the apple cart too much to hold the Pubs down to one seat in Norcal, flushing Denholm and combining the other two Pub seats up there. It does require a nasty chop of Santa Rosa and a traveling CD over Napa to do it however. Basically Santa Rosa chops up about half of one of those seats, and Matsui's CD would take down about a quarter (taking Yuba County and the Dem part of Nevada County, and the balance (mostly Placer County), would move into the Pub sink seat. Then CA-03, the Garamendi seat, could be used to help eviscerate the Denholm seat, taking in Marin, the southern part of Napa, Yolo County, and then move into the Denholm seat.

Things are sometimes done in new ways. A court-prdered Republican gerrymander elsewhere would make a lot of people willing to try new things.

[ag]

Why can the people not create redistricting commissions but they have the right to enact voter ID laws? Isn't that also included in the "times, places and manner" of holding elections?

This is a partisan lawsuit, similar to the latest ACA lawsuit, initiated by the Republican party of Arizona. It would be extremely naive to assume otherwise.

If you're referring to the Indiana voter ID law that reached SCOTUS, that was initiated by the legislature. 

Just because partisans have interests in the outcome doesn't mean that the decision is therefore partisan. 

It will be viewed as partisan. And will be followed, most likely, by a partisan redistricting of AZ. At that point, it will be irrelevant, whether the Supreme Court decision was taken for purely legal or partisan considerations. There will be a very strong desire to say "F.ck you!" And a great opportunity to do that: completely legal, BTW, though, of course, partisan.

[ag]

In fact, I would make a further point. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that partisan gerrymandering is entirely constitutional. They are, of course, right on this. This is a problem with the constitution - but the Supreme Court is the wrong body to address that. The remedy should be legislative. The problem, of course, is, that whenever one of the parties has a power to implement a solution, it has no incentive to do so. In fact, "unilateral disarmament" in partisan states would result in quite horrible consequences for the party that decides to do so: it would be giving up its strongest weapon. This is, of course, why referendum has been the chosen tool for implementing reform here: it is extremely difficult to implement otherwise.

Now the Supreme Court is poised to block of that route. This, of course, makes banning gerrymandering even harder. In fact, it, really, leaves only one weapon available to the opponents of partisan gerrymanders: gerrymandering the political system to death. With modern gerrymandering techniques, as soon as one party comes to power in the state it can, basically, ensure its legislative dominance. Opponents of gerrymandering should encourage that. Draw the most ridiculously partisan maps. Make the system so unworkable - and so hated by the population - that the parties be forced to negotiate a proper constitutional reform on this. The good thing is, the Presidency and the Senate are not gerrymandered: so anti-gerrymandering politicians could still be elected at the federal level. If the outrage is strong enough, a constitutional ammendment would take care of this. But that outrage has to be provoked.

[ag]

What we have to understand is that gerrymandering IS a serious problem, irrespective of its constitutional permissibility. The founders could not foresee many things. For instance, they could not foresee the DRA. And DRA (and its "professional" analogues, of course) is a horrible tool. Whereas the old Mr. Gerry could make mistakes if he cut to finely, today these things could be done with increasingly horrid precision, pretty much destroying electoral accountability.

[ag]

What we have to understand is that gerrymandering IS a serious problem, irrespective of its constitutional permissibility. The founders could not foresee many things. For instance, they could not foresee the DRA. And DRA (and its "professional" analogues, of course) is a horrible tool. Whereas the old Mr. Gerry could make mistakes if he cut to finely, today these things could be done with increasingly horrid precision, pretty much destroying electoral accountability.

I understand all that.  But the Constitution is what it is; you don't ignore it just because you think that by doing so you are solving a problem.   Otherwise what is the point? 

Well,that means that the only solution is then to redistrict Republicans to 5 seats in CA.