September 14, 2010 10:19 PM UTC

Redistricting + Demographics = Good News for Democrats

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

There’s an interesting story at Huffington Post from Dylan Loewe about the potential for redistricting to mean big advantages for Democrats nationwide:

Using Nate Silver’s gubernatorial projections and Louis Jacobson’s state legislative predictions, we find that Democrats will be in a better position during this redistricting in at least 8 states, and, depending on the outcome in November, could very well be in better shape in as many as 11 states. Republicans, on the other hand, will find themselves in an improved partisan environment in just 6 states. They can get to 8, but only if they win the gubernatorial races in California and Maryland. The rest of the states are expected to have partisan advantages that are more or less the same as they were in 2001.

The states where Republicans are expected to be better positioned (Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and South Carolina) are midsized states, with an average of only about 8 congressional districts each.

The states where Democrats are expected to improve, on the other hand, (Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Virginia, and Michigan) include a significant number of very large states, with an average of about 17 congressional districts.

This breakdown alone would suggest that Democrats will have the ability to draw a map that is more favorable to them.

Over the last ten years, 80 percent of the population growth in this country has come from minorities, overwhelmingly in metropolitan areas. When states like Texas are awarded new congressional districts (they are expected to get four this cycle), those districts will have to be drawn in the same metropolitan areas where such high minority population growth is occurring. Barack Obama won 80 percent of the minority vote. He won every major city in Texas except Fort Worth. This means that these new districts are going to be drawn in areas that are going to be highly populated with Democrats, ones that are almost certainly going to send Democrats to Congress. This, of course, will play out beyond Texas. In fact, of the 10 new districts expected to be allocated, there is reason to believe that at least 8 of them will end up in Democratic hands.

Colorado is not expected to gain an additional Congressional seat in redistricting, but when the district lines are adjusted to account for changing demographics, what will that mean for seats like CD-5 and CD-6 that currently have 2-to-1 Republican registration advantages?