2020 Redistricting in Pennsylvania

[Brittain33]

WTF is Wolf’s map doing with that boomerang shaped district in north Allegheny country?

[Brittain33]

I’m not going to lean too much on the choice of one word as I say something the poster is already aware of, but it’s always good to remember that the “natural” skew of large cities and “self-packing” are the result of decades of federal, state, local, and business policies that heavily restricted where people of color could live to a small number of communities, so a neutral political process that perpetuates the impact of that ghettoization by wasting tens of thousands of votes in compact but lopsidedly uncompetitive districts, reducing political power for the minority group per individual, is not neutral at all.

[Brittain33]

Given that redistricting is divided this time in PA between the parties... and that Dem areas increased in population and GOP areas lost population.  Shouldn't we expect Dems to at least maintain their districts in 2022 or possibly even gain 1?  Am I missing something here?

The current map is very favorable to Dems plus you have Matt Cartwright in a district that has zoomed to the right since he was elected. The state has to lose a district which means either a Dem district is eliminated or some of the remaining Dem districts have to take up more Republican territory which could endanger incumbents.

[Brittain33]

Given that redistricting is divided this time in PA between the parties... and that Dem areas increased in population and GOP areas lost population.  Shouldn't we expect Dems to at least maintain their districts in 2022 or possibly even gain 1?  Am I missing something here?

The current map is very favorable to Dems plus you have Matt Cartwright in a district that has zoomed to the right since he was elected. The state has to lose a district which means either a Dem district is eliminated or some of the remaining Dem districts have to take up more Republican territory which could endanger incumbents.

It's really not. It's literally a 9-9 map. If it was favorable to Dems it'd be 10-8.

Not sure how you get that a Dem district would be eliminated when all of the areas that lost population were GOP areas.

I didn’t say a Dem district would be eliminated. I said there are two scenarios, a Dem or a Republican is eliminated, which is a tautology. In fact the district most often mentioned for deletion is the Republican PA-9.

The map is favorable to Dems because geography in Pa. is unfavorable to Dems and the court made deliberate choices to improve Dem representation to compensate for that, in particular with PA-17 and with the configuration of PA-6.

[Brittain33]

The starting point also has a lot of strong R Republican seats and lean D Democratic seats, so change is going to put the latter at risk.

[Brittain33]

https://twitter.com/4st8/status/1485831919497621507

Well these are fun.

Yeah, I don’t think the Court wants to do the Democratic Party’s work for them with regard to packing or cracking PA-1.

[Brittain33]

Torie, are there 17 districts in that map or 18?

[Brittain33]

Still, 9 Biden seats to 8 Trump seats in a Biden +1 state isn't exactly objectionable to me?  This isn't much like the NC shenanigans. 

My theory is based on the fact that for the last 20 years, the House map overall has had a small but significant Republican bias, with some states having large Republican biases (Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Ohio) standing out as really problematic. People came to consider a small Republican bias the natural order of things, a compromise everyone should accept, while acknowledging that Texas, the pre-reform PA map, etc. could be called gerrymandering.

What this means is that maps that mirror the state’s political tint or even have a small Democratic edge are seen as outrageous and offensive, the equivalent of the Texas gerrymander which is much more extreme. It’s because both are equidistant from what Republicans consider the natural, fair outcome - a moderate Republican advantage.

[Brittain33]

This is not what a fair map looks like because it gerrymanders to get Democrats to proportionality. Democrats are self-packed into Philly and Pittsburgh.

State-sponsored racial discrimination in housing, leading to 90+% African-American neighborhoods adjacent to places in Bucks County where they were forbidden to live, is not “self-packing.” Using racial discrimination as a justification for unequal distribution of political power is rewarding racists for their success.

[Brittain33]

This is not what a fair map looks like because it gerrymanders to get Democrats to proportionality. Democrats are self-packed into Philly and Pittsburgh.

State-sponsored racial discrimination in housing, leading to 90+% African-American neighborhoods adjacent to places in Bucks County where they were forbidden to live, is not “self-packing.” Using racial discrimination as a justification for unequal distribution of political power is rewarding racists for their success.

If you're using Bucks as an example, the reason Democrats haven't been able to win that seat isn't because of muh "discrimination". In case you forget, Biden carried the current seat by 6 points. Tom Wolf won it by 18 and Bob Casey won it by 15. Fitzpatrick just so happens to be an extremely strong incumbent who maintains a lot of crossover appeal. That's all it is.

All Democrats ever do is bitch and moan about how everything is rigged against them. You're starting to sound like Trump.

Congratulations on defeating an argument I didn’t make, also on handwaving away well-documented historical racist injustices as “bitching and moaning” and “everything is rigged against us.”

Bucks County has historically had a lot of segregation and exclusion of African-Americans. Whether or not it determined the outcome of PA-1, which has unique factors, is not the point.