2020 New York Redistricting

[UncleSam]

Personally I'd be pretty okay if we're in the "all the gerrymanders are killed" timeline.

Funny though how the GOP gerrymanders are getting away with it and the Dem ones are getting killed.

That's not really true; North Carolina's was killed, Ohio's is probably still going to be killed, Oregon lived, New Mexico is probably going to live.

Texas has entered the chat

Illinois and California have entered the chat

Can we get over this notion that California is somehow a partisan gerrymander? Yes it's not the prettiest of maps, but on net it's a very fair map when you consider California is Biden + 30 state. Most of the "funny" lines were to maximize minority influence and represent COIs that may deal with things such as mountains. Yes the Central Valley config is favorable to Dems but largely because of the way Hispanics are distributed. I would argue the OC config is pretty favorable to Rs as it packs Anaheim and Santa Anna and makes the Asian seat pretty competative. CA-41 is also terribly ugly but still leans R.

Also, if they were truly hackish, why would they have given rural inland Cali like 5 R seats? I agree the commission isn;t perfect and there were some hacks on it, but overall Cali is not a Dem gerry.

I mean it is objectively a Dem gerrymander in the sense that it gives Dems more seats than a randomly generated map would. However, I agree that it is a soft gerrymander and is nowhere near as bad as Illinois, NC (initial map), NY, or OH. Cali is pretty similar to Texas overall imo

[UncleSam]

What I find somewhat ridiculous about this is that the Dems passed a really ugly gerrymander, but they could easily have passed a pretty map serving the same purpose, for example

In which a few seats could be vulnerable in a bad year (18th and 20th are Biden+8, 19th is Biden+13, 22nd is Biden+11) but on the other hand the 23rd would be a potential pickup (only Trump+2).

Something like that surely wouldn't have been prone to a court strike-down and would generally have functioned as a 22-4 map anyway- but instead the Dems decided to go for ridiculous stuff like the 24th's narrow snake shape, the 19th's protrusions into Utica and Vestal, etc, all for the relatively small gain of incumbents being shored up a bit more. May backfire if the courts do feel inclined to strike it down.

Right, a normal person looking at this map would say it is fair. In fact tbh I would say it is within the realm of fair - anything that is close to maximally compact that follows county lines I’m ok with, and the legislature gets to decide which party the map advantages within those bounds. NYS should pass the most D-favored map possible that looks fairly clean, just like OH should pass the most R favored map under those same restrictions.