PA - Clean Redistrict

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday December 11, 2012 · 11:06 PM PST

2012/12/11 · 23:06

no image description available — He just loves America so much.

Most folks on here probably know that House Democrats actually won the popular vote in this past election, polling 49% to the Repubs 48%. Yet, due to America's awesome election laws, this guy still gets to be Speaker.

He just loves America so much.

This was felt most profoundly in Pennsylvania, where Democrats were recovering from a 2010 cycle where we lost everything that wasn't nailed down.

The Democrats lost our state house majority and the Governor's mansion just in time for deciennial redistricting, coughing up the redistricting trifecta just in time for the Republicans to screw up. We also lost Democratic seats in PA-03, PA-07, PA-08, PA-10, PA-11. After a decade of clawing our way back to relevance in PA, we were facing the prospect of playing another decade on Republican turf.

Fast forward to 2012, PA Democrats received 50.2% of all votes cast for House races -- and Republicans received 48.7%. Naturally, Democrats won 5 of PA's 18 seats -- or 27.8% of the seats.

PA relies completely on political gerrymandering for our elections, and I'll admit I dreamt in 2008 of the safe D districts we could draw from under some Republican incumbents. However, I decided to take a stab at drawing a realisticly clean map of PA. My guiding principle was respecting county lines, and where that failed ward/township lines. I actually managed to only break 16 or so of our 67 counties, and achieved pretty good parity of districts (standard deviation is +/- 225 people).

Take a look, and let me know what you think.

RSS