Which members are likely to loose their seats due to reapportionment?

[Torie]

I think that in CA, they might draw Darrell Issa into some Mexican neighborhoods.

The geography of the state cannot sink Issa unfortunately. He inhabits one of the most GOP zones in the state, even more GOP than my little coastal gold coast Orange County CD. His CD just has a major military cast to it, as it hugs Camp Pendleton. Marines and their significant others, and friends, and those who service them, just don't vote Dem.

[Torie]

The geography of the state cannot sink Issa unfortunately. He inhabits one of the most GOP zones in the state, even more GOP than my little coastal gold coast Orange County CD.

Eh, it's only R+10 (same as my home district CA-4 about to return to tomorrow).

There's 3 districts more Republican than Issa's, including the 22nd:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CA-22nd.gif

And another 3 exactly as Republican

Yes, and I did not mean to suggest that a few other CD's were not a bit more GOP (Kern County is a very special place), but there are just not that many Dems nearby Issa to sic him to boot, and the GOP in any plan is going to get more than a single digit number of seats.  And sicing Issa will not be on the redistricting commission's agenda per se in any event.

[Torie]

Issa had an unfortunate nexus to Hezbollah, but in more recent times has gained a reputation as a hyper partisan bomb thrower, the latest iteration of which was his crowing how he was going to investigate the sh*t out of Obama administration if he got to be chairman of his committee if the GOP took over Congress. We shall see. That just isn't my style of doing business.

[Torie]

The speculation in the linked article does not make much sense to me. One thing that needs to be clarified is just how erose districts can get, and still be deemed legal. PA law is a bit opaque. If totally unleashed, most decidedly Dem precincts in Western PA can be sucked into the Doyle district. This business of the Doyle district as it picks up needed population shoving the Altmire district around to weaken it is certainly not something that I would do, or need to do. 

[Torie]

PA-13 needs to become a Dem sink Flyers. A lot of Dems need to be shoved into three CD's in the Philly zone, not two. If done right, the Dems could be held to those three CD's plus one for Pittsburgh, with the Holden and Altmire CD's basically Pubbie (I think they are both about 55% Bush 2004 (actually in checking, Altmire was 55% Bush, and Holden in PA-17 was 58% Bush (wow), and should stay about at those percentages - with Holden maybe even shaved down a bit, if some of his Pubbies are really needed elsewhere), even if they continue to be held by Tory Dems. The Pubbies would be wise not to try too hard to get rid of Altmire and Holden, since that would just waste too many Pubbie votes that are needed elsewhere to prop up the horde of Pubbies that were elected in 2010 in PA. Altmire and Holden both are pretty house broken when it comes to voting with the Pubs on key votes, so why sweat it?  We are focused more on policy aren't we?

Granted, other than drawing an octopus for the Pittsburgh district, just for my entertainment, I have not drawn PA yet. I guess maybe that should be my next state.

[Torie]

I guess Phil is implying that Altmire's CD will be chopped up into pieces, with the pieces appended to other CD's with entrenched Pubbie incumbents. I have not done a map yet, so I don't know if that is what the lay of land suggests needs to happen to make it all come together for them.

Phil you are a very bad boy for doing a Spade imitation. One Spade is enough! 

[Torie]

Granted, other than drawing an octopus for the Pittsburgh district, just for my entertainment, I have not drawn PA yet. I guess maybe that should be my next state.

I can assure you that 5 dems are needed in PA. I even gave Holden a swing district, instead of a lean R district, just so I could make the Republicans safer. There were just too many Republicans elected in Obama districts in PA for there to be an easy solution for the GOP.

I start out doing a back of the envelop mathematical exercise, before starting to draw anything for a state. For PA, let's assume that we can draw the two Philly CD's and the Pittsburgh one 75-25 Kerry over Bush on average, and that PA-13 is 2-1 Kerry. That takes a total Kerry pad taken out of circulation of about 90 points. We have a total of 17 CD's, so we have 13 left to draw, trying to make them all say at least 54.5% Bush, or 5.75% more GOP each than the state (Kerry carried PA by 2.5%, so one needs to add half of that, or 1.25% to get to even).

Thus we start with an average of each CD being 48.75% Bush or so,  for  a total score of minus 21 (17 x 1.25%), and then we add to that the 90 points corralled into the 4 Kerry CD's, leaving a positive score of 69 points to allocate to each of the 13 Pubbie CD's, generating a Bush 2004 percentage of 5.3 points per CD if perfectly evenly allocated (69/13 = 5.3).  (I am assuming here that the turnouts are fairly similar across the state, which is reasonable for PA with its relatively low Hispanic population.) So it is theoretically possible to draw 13 Pubbie dominated districts, at 55.3% Bush 2004 each, which is just about the number that makes a CD reasonably safe for the Pubbie, or at least will require a Tory Dem to hold it.

Of course, it is not possible to seamlessly move Pubbies around the state like that, and in effect move the excess Pubbies in say Perry County over to where there are needed say in PA-8.  And there are some legal constraints, and PA is not known for the wild gerrymanders that some states are, due perhaps to its rather thin veneer of CD decorum, sort of like MI perhaps. So I grant you it will not be easy. I suspect a couple of Philly area CD's are just not going to get to say 54.5% Bush (which I view as about the minimum number to take a CD out of the marginal zone (a Bush 2004 PVI of +3% GOP). We shall see.  The task in all events will probably require some rather vicious chops of the GOP zone in Lancaster and York Counties for example, with might prove discommoding. But the task is not facially hopeless.

But what one cannot do is make Altmire's and Holden's CD's hyper GOP. There are just not enough Pubbies to go around to do that, without shoving some other Pubbie CD's into the marginal zone.

Does this make sense to you, Sbane?