In this diary I am speaking as a partisan liberal progressive Democrat, who wants to see the maximum possible gains in 2012 out of my home state of Illinois for the Democratic party so that Boehner's assault on working and middle-class Americans can come to an end. (Mind you, with the unpopularity of the Ryan budget that might be happening anyhow, redistricting or no redistricting). As Illinois is one of the few states where Democrats control the redistricting trifecta where it matters, it has long been clear to me that Democrats would want to go for as an aggressive an approach as possible here.
For the most part I believe they succeeded: by and large, this map is an aggressive Democratic gerrymander. It will likely result in a delegation which is only at the moment 8 Democrats - 11 Republicans flipping to at least 12 and possibly 13 Democrats to only 5 to 6 Republicans. So, this diary is not meant to trash the map as a whole, but rather to suggest changes here and there that might make it even stronger.
1) The downstate 12th and 13th aren't strong enough. Jerry Costello got about an identical district, one of the few sitting congressmen in the delegation who can say that. He added just Jefferson County (Mt. Vernon) to make up for the population he needed to meet the new population standard. However, this county voted for McCain, so the district as a whole became slightly weakened in its Democratic performance score. Costello will be fine, but I worry long-term about holding this district. Over the past few decades there has been a steady erosion of once-strong Democratic support in Southern Illinois caused by, among other factors, deindustrialization (closure of many Illinois coal mines) and the partisan realignment of parties around cultural rather than economic issues. The unpopularity of Chicago Democrats running Illinois for the past decade probably also has to be considered as a pull on Democratic fortunes anywhere south of I-80.
Along these same lines, the new 13th is very cleverly done to screw over John Shimkus, and so, if he tries to run anyway in 2012, we probably will defeat him. I worry about a district that is only 55% Obama in this part of the state, though. Obama's margin was heavily reliant on student turnout (Urbana-Champaign and Bloomington-Normal) and heavy support among minorities from the eastern side of Springfield and Decatur. Back in 2004, Kerry did not turn out these voters nearly as well as Obama did, resulting in Bush carrying this district then.
Could they have drawn this stronger? Absolutely. As several former Swing State Project mappers such as roguemapper and myself have shown, a district adding Peoria, Pekin/East Peoria, Bloomington-Normal, the right part of Springfield, Decatur, and possibly Danville voted for Obama in the 59% range. Such a district would have been uglier though than the downstate map provided here. It is highly possible that Springfield Democrats did not want to be charged with drawing an ugly map with all the other heat they are getting at the moment over their (probably illegal) attempts to diminish state worker pensions, change workers comp, and, indeed, their own state legislative remap.
This leads me to my 2nd quibble with the map as drawn...
2) They made the 17th perhaps too strong. Bobby Schilling was in all likelihood a fluke, the result of a perfect storm of a strong year for the national Republican party, a struggling Democratic ticket downstate (Quinn lost Rock Island!), and a weak incumbent who was never all that popular in his district. Adding parts of Rockford alone probably would have been enough to ensure that Schilling was likely a one-term wonder; instead they also threw in Peoria. But as a result, the map wastes good Democratic votes in two nearby GOP vote sinks. Macomb is thrown into Aaron Schock's 18th as are some good areas of East Peoria/Peoria. Just as wasteful is throwing all of 50/50 Bureau and Lasalle Counties into the 16th. Lasalle contains several very good Democratic cities like Peru, Lasalle, and Ottawa; likewise the Spring Valley area of Bureau is very strongly Democratic. By allowing for Peoria to be fed into the 13th to make that district stronger, they could have easily replaced it with these other suggestions of mine and kept the Democratic performance roughly the same. Here again, I think the fact that they lost a seat that had been in their hands since 1982 made them very nervous and they perhaps are too cautious in this part of the map.
3) Dekalb is left stranded in a GOP vote sink. As we move closer to the Chicago area, some of the choices made in this map are not as optimal as could be (from a partisan Democratic angle). Dekalb, for example, easily could have been hooked up to the 8th to give it a bit of a bumpup. Instead, there are 50-60k very Democratic voters there that aren't being utilized at all. Instead, there seems to be a hope that the 16th (which also contains Lasalle and Bureau by the way) will become such a bloodfest between Manzullo and (probably Kinzinger) next March, that the open civil war between the tea party and the establishment GOP will provide an opening for a Democratic candidate to make a run here. I think that's dreaming. If they intended to do that, why did they put arguably the most Republican part of the state (south of Kankakee in Ford/Iroquois Counties) into the district as well? Instead of wrapping around, might it have made better sense to merge Manzullo and Walsh together in a northern Illinois McHenry to Rockford seat)?
4) My final quibble concerns the 11th. It seems that they screwed ex-Congressman Bill Foster over in place of John Atkinson, who announced earlier this year that he was launching a primary challenge to IL-3's Dan Lipinski for, among other things, Lipinski's vote last year against health care reform. So, it seems, they decided to try to remove the primary threat entirely by drawing Atkinson into a new IL-11 instead. Fine. It is to be expected that Michael Madigan would seek to do whatever he could to protect Lipinski, especially as Lipinski's dad and Madigan go way back in the Cook County Democratic Machine. But, still, by making only a few slight adjustments to the district involving shifting of territory between Peter Roskam's vote sink to the north (the 6th) and/or the 14th/16th, they could have improved this district by about a point or two more. The district takes too much of GOP-leaning Downers Grove for example. And, inexplicably to me, it avoids West Chicago and Warrensville entirely, even though this is a great pocket of Democratic strength in western Dupage County. Worst, it dumps Bill Foster's home of Batavia (a town that Obama carried by 55% in 2004 so arguably better than the ~50% precincts in Downers Grove that the district contains) into the 14th. Foster would have an even harder time in the new 14th than the old one he represented for almost three years: the old one at least contained Elgin, Dundee, and Aurora; all the above Democratic strongholds have now been parceled out into either the 8th or the 11th, resulting in the 14th moving about 3-4 points in the Republican direction from the old map in my quick eyeballing of the electoral data. Kerry only received 44% under the present lines; I would imagine that he received closer to 40% in the new 14th.
Don't get me wrong. I generally like the map as a whole. In my mind the likely outcome after 2012 is at least a 12-6, and possibly a 13-5. Judging also from how it discomfits nearly every Republican in the delegation except perhaps Roskam and Schock, it brings a great smile to my face as a partisan liberal progressive Democrat. And it is a far better map than I would have expected, frankly, coming out of Springfield. I had long dreaded that Madigan would produce a map far more modest, like an 11-7 where they only tried to go after Bobby Schilling (the obvious district to fix), Bob Dold (again very easy to do) and one or two maneuvers around the suburban area. I did not think they would try to put Urbana-Champaign, Decatur, and Springfield together and the fact that they are rolling the dice on that, suggests my view of Madigan as being ultra-adverse to risk-taking is perhaps a bit wrong.
That being said, it could have been better. They are wasting several good Democratic voters in the suburban area and the middle part of the state. From the central part of the state south, they are presuming that once-Democratic regions (like those contained in the IL-12 and the new IL-13) will stay true to form and vote Democratic on the congressional ballot even while voting more Republican for president. I don't know whether I would risk that, given that this map will last the next ten years. And, finally, personal machine politics seem to have trumped good partisan sense in drawing a less optimal IL-11 and apparently screwing over ex-Congressman Bill Foster, who would seem to me to be a stronger candidate. Not only was he a congressman for close to three years; but even in 2010, he ran ahead of the statewide ticket (he received almost 20% more votes than Governor Quinn did in the IL-14) suggesting like Melissa Bean that he has a good amount of cross-over support.