2020 Redistricting in Pennsylvania

[Oryxslayer]

All things considered Cartwright's district is pretty compact for how D-leaning it is. Interesting to go after Smucker instead of Perry, though it may be prudent as York's pastorals/ex-sundown towns are more conservative than Lancaster's.

Lancaster is quite fertile ground in general for Democrats. The city itself is growing, the suburban areas of the county are trending Blue, and the blood red rurals are losing population quite quickly. Lancaster County could flip in a decade or two.

Aren't the rurals gaining population due to Amish growth ?

Yes Amish have a high birthrate. They (presently) though are one of the insolated self-reliant religious communities that prefers to abstain from non-local politics. Despite the stereotype, the Amish aren't exactly huge percentages of York or Lancaster's population - plenty of different communities of rural citizens - they just have an oversized cultural presence. And the in-migration into the SCPA cities and the immediately adjacent townships is much more relevant electorally. And as noted, the community is migrating out to make way for this growth.

[Oryxslayer]

In this instance I am reminded how in 2018 the Supreme Court's special master basically did his own thing and appeared to ignore the submissions from all formal political actors.

[Oryxslayer]

When is the court picking a map?

Yesterday

Great job, I love it when deadlines are missed.

https://twitter.com/adambonin/status/1488218438854184960?s=20&t=t7Buoe5iPcYR...

It was intentional. As was expected for months, Persily is probably gonna be coming back.

[Oryxslayer]

When is the court picking a map?

Yesterday

Great job, I love it when deadlines are missed.

https://twitter.com/adambonin/status/1488218438854184960?s=20&t=t7Buoe5iPcYR...

It was intentional. As was expected for months, Persily is probably gonna be coming back.

All hail the Mapmaker in Chief!

The guy who drew ny 10 as it is right now and cracked southern Brooklyn into 3 CD s?

Persily had a hand in that? I had no idea.

Yeah pretty sure he was the special master. Forgive me if he wasn't.   The solution would have been to cut a Manhattan cd but not southern Brooklyn just got screwed to give up to their Manhattan overlords.

Persily was not the special master. He was the data guy hired to assist U.S. Magistrate Judge Roanne Mann, who was said special master. He was hired then because of his recent success in Connecticut. In this instance, evidence suggests he was just the computer guy, taking orders from Mann whereas in PA he had loose orders and broad discretion to fulfill specific goals. Interestingly, he then was at Columbia whereas now he is at Stanford.

[Oryxslayer]

When is the court picking a map?

Yesterday

Great job, I love it when deadlines are missed.

https://twitter.com/adambonin/status/1488218438854184960?s=20&t=t7Buoe5iPcYR...

It was intentional. As was expected for months, Persily is probably gonna be coming back.

All hail the Mapmaker in Chief!

The guy who drew ny 10 as it is right now and cracked southern Brooklyn into 3 CD s?

Persily had a hand in that? I had no idea.

Yeah pretty sure he was the special master. Forgive me if he wasn't.   The solution would have been to cut a Manhattan cd but not southern Brooklyn just got screwed to give up to their Manhattan overlords.

Persily was not the special master. He was the data guy hired to assist U.S. Magistrate Judge Roanne Man, who was said special master. he was hired in that instance because of his success in Connecticut. In this instance, evidence suggests he was just the computer guy, taking orders from Mann whereas in PA he had loose orders but specific goals.

Ah my bad. I do remember reading he was involved so  I assumed he was the special master.

Yeah, I remember digging through the old 2010 thread and saw people referred to said special master as a 'she,' so I had the reverse thought process and went "hold on, that ain't right, was Persily actually involved?"

[Oryxslayer]

It ends where it began.

[Oryxslayer]

I actually wonder if they'll split Pittsburgh to make a second Biden seat in Western PA.

You don't need to. You can get reasonable seats in the region and the successor to Lamb's seat can still be to the left of the nation in 2020. Splitting Pittsburgh though makes 2 reliably D seats, rather than 1 safe and one battleground. And they might go for it if the expansion of the SEPA seats is too disadvantageous for Ds.

[Oryxslayer]

How many seats do we think could come out of PA now?

The answer is a least change map partisan-wise: each side with similar number of safe seats and some competitive ones in the middle. If preserving this requires breaking some eggs and reshuffling the lines - well we saw how amenable they were to such things in 2018. If they truly add more to the dems deck - either by moving competitive seats to a more Biden-friendly margin, or moving them into the safer blue column - then that would just be a proverbial Bonus for team blue.

[Oryxslayer]

The PA legislative redistricting commission is unveiling the final(?) legislative lines, small edits are present from the first version. You can check out this thread by Forstate for live updates:

https://twitter.com/4st8/status/1489661820415746049?s=20&t=_sZpBb4t2cTUwu_qo...

[Oryxslayer]

Senate Map

[Oryxslayer]

Approved maps in the tweet previously posted. Slightly better for Dems than v.1. 25-25 tied senate based on 2020 Presidential election results, 103-100 Biden State House. Also interesting Pottstown-outer Montgomery-near Berks swing seat.

[Oryxslayer]

Will these new legislative maps make it possible for Dems to take control of a chamber? Weren’t the previous ones hard republicans gerrymanders?

Yes and yes, though likely not immediately.

[Oryxslayer]

Here is my attempt at an court-ordered equitable map of PA. Once again equitable does not mean fair, since national fair maps wouldn't need to correct for any efficiency gaps. Also, as we saw in 2018, the Court still put their thumb on the scale where it mattered at the margins.

So as we all know, PA has to lose a seat, it has to be a central Safe Republican seat, and this means the swing and Dem seats must take in new areas of population that were previously within red territory. And there isn't much territory left to add that isn't safe for the GOP, so this is making many of the swing seats on drawn plans favor the GOP.

But this is a Dem court who will be looking to preserve the work done in 2018. And there is one remaining big basket of Democratic votes outside of a Blue seat. And adding this basket to the blue seats negates the need to make any other hard decisions whatsoever. The rest of the map just draws itself in a generally least-change manner. Even PA-08 can remain competitive, even though on a fair map Cartwright would be DOA rather than just in hot water.

Of course, in this instance, I am referring to Lancaster and her environs, which can be added to PA-06 in a 'triangle' orientation. One leg is in Lancaster, one in Reading, one on the Main Line/US Route 30. Adding Lancaster into the Eastern regions seats makes perfect sense if you look at things from the perspective of preserving an equitable breakdown - with D favoring swing seats since this is the 5-2 court - and not from preserving geography.



Every other region of the map can be variated, and that is what I seek to show with this second map. Since you don't need to make any more hard decisions after the initial one, everything else is flexible.



- The first map maintains the current Pittsburgh alignment with one Safe D seat and one Biden+3.3 seat. The second map does what some Dem plans do and cuts Pittsburgh, making the northern seat Biden+10.6 and the southern Biden+17.6. Splitting Pittsburgh while maintaining the western seats would be a very Dem biased move.

- The original plan makes things in Lancaster County slightly uncompact with the non-city portion of the county configured in a C-Shape. The alternate fixes this by rotating population through my PA-12 and PA-09. The downside to this rotation is the cutting of the Susquehanna Valley multi-county COI grouping.

- The original plan has PA-04 taking in the White Liberal 21st, 11th, and White parts of the 38th wards in the NW corner of the city that are similar to near Montgomery county. These additions allow  PA-01 and PA-05 to get their remaining population from just Montgomery. But the real result of these moves is in Philadelphia, where without those White areas, PA-03 is free to take in more White downtown regions and make PA-02 more diverse. Someone with better knowledge of neighborhood communities could likely have made a better selection of Wards to add to PA-02, but the important thing is the result. The original plans PA-02 is African American + Hispanic majority minority coalition by both VAP and CVAP.

The Alternate plan focuses instead on county nesting rather than diversifying PA-02, and so PA-04 remains in Montgomery. PA-01 and PA-04 take the surplus from Philadelphia - PA-04 in a manner similar to the previous district. PA-02 is Whiter.





DRA links for the first map are here, and for the alternate map are here.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/Elaijuh/status/1490742868008390660?s=20&t=XmuZ1nlsNIlpvl...

Unsurprisingly, the now-sidelined Conservative gives her powerless opinion in favor of the GOP maps. The PA supreme Court will now collect opinions on this map, at which point they will overrule her decision.

[Oryxslayer]

Wait, I thought Persily was the special master??

This is the result of the now-sidelined lower state courts. Parties will file objections and recommend plans like last time. The court will then toss aside the GOP map. Now the court could pick a map that was submitted or, like last time after they collected maps from the parties, ignore them all and call in a special master.

It has just been a very likely assumption that Persily or a disciple would end up with the pen, cause the court has experience with him, and the maps the parties submitted to the lower courts all undid the courts past efforts in one way or another. For example, I think there was only 1 plan that kept the Harrisburg seat in a recognizable fashion, despite it effectively needing no changes because of population growth.

[Oryxslayer]

New filing schedule.

[Oryxslayer]

What was the split anyway ?

9-8 Biden, though the Scranton and Harrisburg seats only went narrowly to Trump.

I meant the split for the court vote.

4-3 decision. Justices Todd, Mundy, and Brobson dissent. I believe one of the dems wanted a different plan.

[Oryxslayer]

Good choice. The only choice that's unfavorable to Dems is the Wild seat, which I get is frustrating, but given the pretty D-friendly choices elsewhere it's hard to complain. Overall, a pretty good COI map in the vein of the Persily one.

The Wild seat has basically nowhere else to go but there of course on a CoI-driven map. Carbon County is part of the Lehigh Valley.
This map is very, very reminiscient of the Persily one. And as you said, there's a lot of Dem-friendly choices on this map too.
Ds are well positioned for 2022 and beyond with this one.

The other option is to put Monroe in PA-07, probably then either removing red areas from outer Lehigh or just keeping PA-07 as it was and cut Monroe. Of course this basically trades Cartwright for a better PA-07 long-term, and that deal may not be acceptable given ones perspective.

[Oryxslayer]

Solid map but I feel like there should be a district wholly within Allegheny county.

That would probably mean making PA-17 a Trump seat.

No it wouldn't, not with places like New Kensington right there. There's quite a lot of versions that Biden won back in this thread, many that didn't cut Pittsburgh. But such a seat would more likely than not be to the right of the nation, whereas this orientation or cutting Pitt would make it to the left of the 2020 Pres vote.