North Carolina Legislative Redistricting

[Nyvin]

No, just no.  With how gerrymandered these districts were, they will not be gaining seats.  That's partisans dreams.

Jim knows that, he's just trolling.

The districts are not as gerrymandered as some fantasize.

Having super-majorities in a state that votes 3% Republican is not normal.   No matter how much you try to spin it, the maps help Republicans massively.

[Nyvin]

No, just no.  With how gerrymandered these districts were, they will not be gaining seats.  That's partisans dreams.

Jim knows that, he's just trolling.

The districts are not as gerrymandered as some fantasize.

Having super-majorities in a state that votes 3% Republican is not normal.   No matter how much you try to spin it, the maps help Republicans massively.

The population distribution in North Carolina is not normal (in a statistical sense). The mean, which you have cited, is not representative.

57.3% of voters were in precincts where Trump received a majority of the two-way vote. If each precinct elected its own representative and the representative had a weight vote, Trump supporters would would have 57.3% of the vote. As you aggregate such vote into larger units, they tend to be more likely to support Trump.

That's a complete nonsense argument considering precincts don't have anywhere near equal population.   Some have a few hundred (or few dozen...) while others have tens of thousands.   

The kind of legislature that would produce would be nightmarishly unequal.

[Nyvin]

Krazen also testified, though he identified himself as the head of the North Carolina GOP, and pointed out that Trump carried 76 counties in 2016.

Say again?

The head of the North Carolina GOP testified. He explained that the reason for the Democratic legislators being so few is because they are concentrated in a few counties, while Trump support was widespread across the state. His advocacy was robust, just as Krazen's arguments are.

He was quite a contrast to all the other persons who were probably all organized (very few made the same point).

I guess we should go back to the 18th century style of only letting land owners vote.

[Nyvin]

Going by 2016 numbers it looks like the safe dem seats in the Senate map are

3 northeast AA seats (3, 4, 5)
3 Wake County (14, 15, 16)
2 Durham (20, 22)
1 Cumberland (21)
1 Orange/Chatham (23)
1 Guilford (28)
1 Forsyth (29)
3 Mecklenberg (37, 38, 40)
1 Buncombe (49)

Total of 16 seats,  which is one more than they hold now, but that's just the vote sinks that are pretty much unavoidable using whole county groups.

The tossups in the map are probably 7, 9,  17, 18, 19 (meh...), 39, and 41.    A few others are probably lean R'ish, like 27.

Two of those (17, 18) are in Wake County, which is moving left at 100mph, so prospects there look really good.

This is an improvement for dems,  it was obvious this wasn't going to be a big win for them from the start.

The House map is too much work to go through now.