On Friday, a bipartisan commission created by Republican Gov. Larry Hogan to redraw Maryland's 6th Congressional District unanimously chose a replacement map created by Daily Kos' Stephen Wolf.
The 6th District was struck down in federal court last year as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, prompting Hogan to form an emergency commission to recommend a replacement map to the state legislature. While the commission's decision doesn't automatically mean the map Wolf proposed will become law, there's a good chance that it or a similar proposal could.
That's because the court must still approve any remedial map. Maryland’s Democratic-controlled legislature therefore has an incentive to draw lines that will pass legal muster. If it does not, the judges hearing the case would craft their own map.
Prior to the selection of his map on Friday, Wolf published an article explaining the background of this case and why he redrew the lines the way he did. As you can see from the map, which is shown at the top of this post (click here for a larger version), several districts remain heavily gerrymandered. However, because only a single district—the 6th—was struck down, Wolf correctly anticipated that the commission would prefer to follow longstanding practices in similar redistricting litigation, which have seen courts favor remedial plans that alter as few districts as possible.
In keeping with this precedent, Wolf redrew only the 6th and neighboring 8th Districts, relying on strictly nonpartisan criteria. Chief among Wolf’s aims were keeping cities and counties whole, while making the boundary between the two districts more compact. As a result, the 6th would flip from voting for Hillary Clinton by 55-40 in the 2016 presidential election to supporting Donald Trump by 52-43. However, Wolf did not rely on election data when drawing the map and only calculated these results after the fact to help ensure the map satisfied the court's ruling.
The commission plans to hold two public hearings regarding its selection, on March 12 and March 20, and it plans to make a final decision on the replacement map by April 2. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on March 26 in an appeal brought by Democrats, and a ruling is expected by June. A victory for the plaintiffs would see the 6th District redrawn ahead of the 2020 elections.
Daily Kos is a partisan political organization that is equally dedicated to electing Democrats and to ensuring free and fair elections. Multiple media outlets have covered the commission's selection of Wolf's map, including the Washington Post, the Frederick News-Post, Maryland Matters, and Politico.
Stephen Wolf is an elections writer for the political news site Daily Kos and a nationally recognized expert on redistricting. Each week, he publishes the Voting Rights Roundup, a newsletter that covers important voting rights developments around the country, with a special emphasis on redistricting. Wolf's work on redistricting has been widely cited, including by the Washington Post, the New York Times, Vox, and the Brennan Center for Justice.
In 2018, as an amicus, Wolf submitted two nonpartisan redistricting plans to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, which had ruled that the state's congressional map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and sought input from the public in crafting a remedial map. That map, drafted by special master Nathaniel Persily, bore a number of resemblances in key aspects to Wolf's plans.
