Gerrymandering poll

[minionofmidas]

I voted Georgia, but Florida is a close second and New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Maryland are all very bad too.
The old Texas plan wasn't perfect, but it was hands-down the best plan of any big state(say, 13 seats and more). That's why it's sad it was now replaced by a blatant gerrymander, even though that too is better than many others.

[minionofmidas]

Well, Illinois is a case of bipartisan incumbent protection. That's why the map hardly changed except all the downstate districts grew antlers and fangs.

The New Jersey map looks very strange. Also, the state doesn't have a single really competitive seat but 5 of 6 Republican seats and only one of 7 Democratic ones are borderline competitive using fairvote figures. I'm not sure who was in charge of redistricting in New Jersey in either 1990 or 2000, so I can't say anything on motives. But the result appears to me to be a Republican gerrymander.

[minionofmidas]

All five CT districts were won by Gore and yet the state's Reps knew what they were doing when they redistricted it the way they did. (The general outline is pretty much god-given, but the devil is in the detail). Voting patterns for the House and the Presidency are similar in many states, but highly divergent in others. I guess NJ is pretty similar to CT.
But of course if it was the Dems that's all a lot of nonsense.

[minionofmidas]

I've just checked. New Jersey had Republican majorities in both state houses and a Rep governor at the time of redistricting. However, it's actually redistricted by a -well, not nonpartisan- by a bipartisan commission. It's got 13 members, the majority and minority leaders of both houses and the chairmen of the two largest parties all appoint two members each. These twelve appoint the 13th before they start working.
It's strange. All the other parties with commissions have quite competitive, logical districts (apart from the Hopi Corridor in AZ).
What's going wrong in Jersey? Too much party control maybe? Kinda like: "Okay, we let you keep Holt safe, if you don't target any of ours" thing? In that case, if I'd been a Democrat, a democrat, or both, on that commission, I'd have said no.

[minionofmidas]

Maine has only two congressional districts, and while the boundary line is fairly jagged, it is not nearly along the lines of being a gerrymander.  

Did they keep Kennebec the only split county?

[minionofmidas]

If the Democrats were in charge of the previous redistricting, which they were, then how in the hell did it get unfairly gerrymandered in favor of the Republicans?

The Democrats are their own worse enemy in Congressional races here. While voter registration is fairly even, or even slightly in favor of the Democrats, many of the registered Dems are more conservative than the statewide Democratic Party which is dominated by the Miami area left wingers and the Tallahassee area center/left crowd. The party gives money to, and otherwise supports, candidates who are wayyyy to the left of their mainstream Democratic voters within that district, so the Republicans win in areas where they have disadvantages in terms of enrollment.

If you take districts like Florida-5, 7 and 8, they should be seats won by the Democrats, but they consistently put up candidates in those areas that are NOT representative of the moderate to conservative Democrats who live there.

The Florida Dems do seem more than a little disorganized...quite often they don't put up anybody at all.
Areas where Dems have the edge in registration but where the Reps are clear favorites to win exist all over the South.
And Florida isn't the only state where a Democratic redistricting in 1992 ended up working like a Rep. gerrymander. Georgia is the prime example. There are two reasons to how this happened:
1) They idealistically created a number of gerrymandered Black majority districts and made these Black majorities larger than seems necessary because until 1992 the number of Black Reps had been abysmal, and they wanted to make sure some were elected this time. These districts, logically, had very large Democratic majorities (and were preserved when the Republicans got their hands on redistricting in 2000), making the neighboring districts more Republican.
2) When you redistrict for partisan advantage, you creat a number of districts where you have only a narrow majority. When there is a permanent shift in voting patterns towards the opposition (as there was in the South in 94 and 96), the result is that all these pro-Dem marginals become pro-Rep marginals. It might happen again, you know;)

[minionofmidas]

Maryland really isn't that gerrymandered. Parts of Anne Arundel and Baltimore County are split into 2 or 3 different districts, but District 1 (more conservative)  consists of the entire eastern shore (less population) and is balanced out with Baltimore and some of the more liberal parts of Anne Arundel. Still results in Bush winning about 58% of the vote there in 2000.

The problem is not in districts one and six. It's the "normal" part of Maryland that's gerrymandered to ensure Reps stay out.