US: House Redistricting Massachusetts

[Dan the Roman]

The only way to abolish the 8th without turning another district into a de facto 8th, in my view, would be to attach Somerville, Cambridge, and part of Boston to enough of Barney Frank's district to give him an edge among his current voters and supporters in new territory, while giving the 9th enough precincts of Boston to get vote totals up without hurting Lynch's incumbency.

Feh, this isn't really true. You can put Somerville and possibly Cambridge in the 7th and the rest of Boston in the 4th and both Markey and Frank would be safe against a challenger from either place.

The 7th then becomes a much greater Democratic voter sink. Which causes problems, because the collorary of such a move would be moving Winchester, Woburn, and Stoneham into the 6th.

[Dan the Roman]

The numbers weren't there in 2001 when Finneran tried it, even stretching up to Lynn to barely make 50%. Boston has gotten more ethnically diverse since then, but I can't see a lawsuit happening nor are there minority legislators willing to sign off on it, and such a Republican move would be so transparently political that it is doomed to fail.

Also, any changes could be accommodated by changing the 8th's borders with the 7th district, I think. You're not going to see Quincy leave the 10th this way because Southie still has to link with its exurbs.

Possibly. I don't think such a lawsuit would be all that useful in Massachusetts. But it would be good to know, one way or another, if section 2 requires the creation of 'coalition' districts (as Boston + Chelsea probably is, and certainly much more 'compact' than anything in the South), or if those areas can be cracked, as some are proposing to do.

If the answer is that they aren't required, that knowledge would be useful elsewhere in the country.

We're seeing this in NJ legislative redistricting, where the GOP wants to create explicit minority coalition districts and the Democrats are trying to crack them and flood the whiter suburbs.

Any MA case would not provide resolution because block voting by racial groups, a key criteria of Gingles, is not present in large parts of the 8th. Whites in Somverville and Cambridge, especially the latter, vote just as liberally as non-whites.

You have the added issue that the coalition nature of any such district would not be Black-Hispanic, but by necessity would also have to include Asians, who vote very differently from the other two.

Its a terrible test case.

It also pisses people off when the Stan Rosenberg-Mike Moran team is by far the best that the GOP could draw. Rosenberg wants two Western MA districts, and Moran wants Boston intact. Neither cares particularly about anything else. If you try and do both, you are almost guaranteed to end up with a map about as favorable as the GOP could have expected from a court.

[Dan the Roman]

I am shocked, shocked to find out that a Republican wants a Dem vote sink in Boston.

The immediate Boston suburbs of Newton, Quincy, and Brookline are very, very Democratic as well. You have to go all the way out to the Worcester suburbs before taking in any real GOP territory, and by that point, you've just got way too much population included in the district.

Wow.  What is Brown, Liberal Politician Kryptonite?  I've never seen someone rise so much so fast.

Romney aside, Massachusetts politics is extremely congenial between the two parties. Republicans in the state legislature rarely see organized opposition from the state Democratic party. No Republican incumbent has lost a race for re-election in decades (though I do expect that to change in 2012 given the number of seats the GOP picked up in the House).

Susan Pope?

[Dan the Roman]

How Republican?

I'm guessing it gave Obama less than 53% of the vote, and Kerry slightly more.

I presume you could get Obama down even lower. IIRC, I was able to create a Gore 52% district back when I was playing around with redistricting Massachusetts years ago. (The district I created, of course, looked almost identical to this one.)

The problem with Gore numbers is that Nader did very well in 2000, so even though Gore did marginally worse than Kerry, Bush did 4% worse in 2000 than in 2004. As a consequence the Bush percentage is a much better indicator.

Otherwise you end up with the 10th District looking a lot more Republican than it is. It does have a base, but its hard for a Republican to get over the 44% hump there.