Tuesday, December 27, 2011

BREAKING!!! New Congressional Districts a-comin'...

OK, OK ... so maybe the story doesn’t quite merit the BREAKING!!! headline.  Still, it’s news that will turn out to be big for all Washingtonians, for a decade.

At this afternoon’s meeting of the Washington State Redistricting Commission, it was announced that (at long last) a proposed map of 10 Congressional Districts will be unveiled tomorrow.  It’s possible that they’ll even be able to put the new map on the Commission website ahead of time.

We’ve been waiting for another CD iteration for well over three months, since each of the four Commissioners presented his own version way back on September 13.  This new proposal was hammered out between the two political heavyweights on the Commission—Tim Ceis (D) and Slade Gorton (R).  If those two uber-partisans can agree on a single map, it’s very, very likely that that’ll be the final plan from the WSRC.

I eagerly await the results, so that we can learn the outcomes of two important issues. 

The easier one is a simple yes-no:  Will there be a majority-minority District? As my readers may recall from my post on October 10, three of the four Commissioners proposed a CD in which non-Hispanic whites constituted just under 50% of the Census population.  Only Democrat Dean Foster omitted such a District.

However, readers may also recall from that earlier post that I have serious reservations about a majority-minority Congressional District in Washington, that in my opinion such a District would not accomplish the goal of fostering diversity among Representatives.  I hold that belief for two reasons:

• Any such District would contain no defined ethnic/racial community with sufficient numbers of voters to dominate the political structure of the District.  Majority-minority Districts work when there is a large, homogeneous group within its boundaries—African-Americans in many large cities and in parts of the rural South, Latinos in quite a few cities, etc.  The broad range of ethnicities in the South King County area that would form the center of a majority-minority CD makes for marvelous cultural diversity, but it doesn’t engender political power within all (any) of those communities.
• By far the largest “minority” in such as CD would be precisely the one that creating the District was supposed to work against ... non-Hispanic whites.  The September plans contained 49.6% (Ceis), 48.9% (Gorton), or 48.5% (Huff) non-Hispanic whites, very, very close to half.  In terms of voters, however, non-Hispanic whites would surely constitute a comfortable majority in this “majority-minority” District.  The Census counts residents, irrespective of their citizenship, and of course minorities are much more likely to be noncitizens (whether documented or not) than non-Hispanic whites.  Also, the proportion of youngsters under the age of 18 is likely to be higher among minorities.  For these reasons, I bet non-Hispanic whites would make up 55-60% of the registered voters in a “majority-minority” CD.

The second issue of interest is, to be blunt, Who has bigger balls, Ceis or Gorton?

The boundaries of the new Congressional Districts will play an extremely large role in determining whether Republicans or Democrats are most likely to hold each of those seats in the next five election cycles.  Sure, no matter how you draw a Seattle-based District, it’s going to go Democratic.  But you could take, say, the core of the current WA-08 and make it strongly Democratic by adding areas to its north and west, and removing Pierce County.  Alternatively, the same core could be made into a GOP sure-thing by lopping off its northern parts and taking the new CD across the Cascades.  The same sort of phenomenon could take place in many other Districts.

I’d suggest that in a normal election the current Districts break out as 5-2-2 (Dem-GOP-tossup) or 5-3-1, with WA-08 and maybe WA-03 the tossups.  How will the 10 new Districts work out ... 6-4?  6-3-1?  5-4-1?  4-4-2?  The state can be divided “fairly” in many ways, and the outlines of the proposed Congressional District map will go a long way toward assessing the relative enormity of Tim Ceis’s and Slade Gorton’s cojones.

For those interesting in watching the presentation of the new Congressional District map, it’s scheduled for 11:00am tomorrow.  You can watch the Commission meeting live by navigating to the Washington State Redistricting Commission site and clicking on the TVW link underneath Attend a meeting by interactive webcast.  It may not be compelling television, but it’s a must-see for some of us.

[Cross-posted, and slightly revised, from HorsesAss.org]

Friday, December 16, 2011

Before redistricting comes reapportionment

At a special meeting this morning, the Washington State Redistricting Commission unveiled the next iterations of their proposed redrawing of Legislative District boundaries.  As displayed here (PDF), the Commissioners have split into two bipartisan pairs, each responsible for drawing a particular portion of the state.  Commissioners Tom Huff (R) and Dean Foster (D) have been working on the Olympic Peninsula, the Pacific coast, and the southern section of the wet side of the state.  Their colleagues Tim Ceis (D) and Slade Gorton (R) have been tasked with working on the Eastside, the islands, and the northern west-of-the-Cascades area.  They are not currently dealing with either the Seattle environs or the large area east of the mountains.

I don’t know whether they’ve been skipping over both the most and least urban parts of the state because they’ve already agreed on the LD lines in those areas, or because they’re at an impasse there, or (most likely IMHO) because drawing the lines in and around Seattle and on the dry side depends on the outcome of their deliberations in the segments they’re working on now.  Whatever the reason, the Commissioners had better get their asses in gear—they’re supposed to present an agreed-upon plan to the Legislature by January 1, 2012, just half a month from now.

While this new presentation is the third iteration of LD borders, we still have seen no Congressional District maps since each of the four Commissioners presented their own proposals on September 13, fully three months ago!  Their silence on the topic frustrates many observers no end.

While we wait (and wait, and wait, ...) for the Commissioners to break their long silence on Congressional redistricting, I’d like to take a step back in the process, to discuss the reapportionment that presented the Commission with the opportunity to construct a brand-new Congressional District instead of merely rejiggering the existing ones in their redistricting task, as they’re doing with the state’s 49 (no more, no less) Legislative Districts.

As you’re no doubt aware, the number of Congressional Districts in each state is determined based on the results of the decennial Census, mandated by the Founders in Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution and revised under the 14th Amendment (you know, the one that got rid of that pesky three-fifths of a man thing).  How the reapportionment is actually carried out is based on laws written by Congress, and those laws have changed numerous times over the decades.  Nice presentations of background info on apportionment methodology, 1790 to the present and how different apportionment methods can produce differing allocations can be found on the Census website.  The latter link shows concrete examples of calculations and results under four apportionment models.

Since 1940, the method of equal proportions has been used for reapportionment.  After each state receives the required minimum of one seat, the other 385 seats are assigned to states in descending order of priority value (PV).  The PV for potential seats 2, 3, 4, ... is calculated as shown in this paragraph, where n is the state’s potential seat number.  In other words, the PV for a state’s second seat is its apportionment population divided by the square root of two.  For its third seat, divide by the square root of (3*2=)six, then continue with the square roots of (4*3=)12, (5*4=)20, 30, 42, and so forth.  By the time we get to the 60th seat (hey, California might someday have that many CDs), the divisor is the square root of 3540 (that’s 60*59).  After all these values are calculated, rank-order them in descending order and assign the seats until 385 of them have been filled.  For the record, the denominator in the equation is the geometric mean of n and (n-1).

I should mention a small wrinkle in the procedure.  As you probably know, the Census counts persons, not citizens; undocumented individuals, if they’re willing to participate, count as residents of their state.  For apportionment, however, the state’s resident population is augmented by the number of overseas Federal employees (including military personnel) who list that state as “home” on their employment records.  Because these home state patterns don’t necessarily match the state’s rank in resident population, this small addition can affect the allocation of CDs to the states.  In 2000, Utah might have gotten an additional seat if the Census counted Mormon missionaries for apportionment; that seat went instead to North Carolina, and Utah took its case (Utah v. Evans) all the way to the Supreme Court, where UT lost.  As an example, adding the 28,829 Washingtonian Feds overseas to the state’s resident population of 6,724,540, the apportionment population comes to 6,753,369.  Washington has the 12th highest count of overseas residents, one place better than its overall population rank.  Texas, #2 overall, has the highest number of overseas persons, while California ranks third (behind Florida).  Alaska, way down at #47 in population, ranks 26th in overseas employees.

After the calculations described above, it’s no surprise that the 51st seat goes to the largest state, California.  Texas gets #52, followed by another CA seat, then NY, FL, CA again, TX again, and so on.  Washington’s first added seat (its second overall) is #78 and its next is #122.  The state’s ninth seat, equalling its 2000 number of Representatives, comes in at #391.

It gets really interesting as we come to the final few seats.  In the spreadsheet snippet, I present the state assignments for the last ten seats (#426-#435), along with the next ten near-misses.  The new WA-10 seat comes in at #432, comfortably above the cut-off.  Minnesota’s eighth seat wins the final position in the House (too bad, as it’s likely that Michelle Bachmann’s district would have been axed had MN’s Congressional delegation decreased by one).  Minnesota just barely avoided subtracting a seat from its 2000 allocation.  At #434, California narrowly averted losing a seat in the House; if the Golden State had done so, it would have been its first-ever lost seat.  In fact, except for 1920, when Congress somehow decided not to do any reapportionment at all, this is the first time California has failed to add a district.  For the record, Washington is one of only 18 states that has never lost a seat since 1910 (and five of those have never changed their seat count in that century-plus).  It may be poetic justice that North Carolina is the first runner-up this time around, after winning the final spot in 2000.  The Tarheel State missed adding another seat by that thin margin. 

As it turns out, in 2010 using resident population instead of apportionment population wouldn’t have altered the composition of the next Congress.  There were a few flipflops in the PV list ... for instance, TX-10 would have been seat #126 and OK-2 #125, rather than the reverse.  The rank-order (but not the identities) of the last five seats would be different, with the actual #431-#435 showing up in the order #432, #433 (Washington), #435, #431, #434.  So the final spot would have gone to TX-36 instead of MN-8.

Of course, none of the above is of much interest to the Redistricting Commission.  They probably don’t particularly care how it came to pass that they’re tasked to draw ten CDs instead of nine.  It falls to reapportionment geeks like me to look at this sort of information.  There’s a pile of additional information in the tables and charts on the Census 2010 website that I find fascinating—trends in the distribution of House seats over time, states that actually lost population between Censuses (hint: several states in the plains in the 1930s ... can you say “Dust Bowl”?), states that have never lost seats, states on long seat-losing streaks (Pennsylvania has lost at least one seat in every Census since 1930), and much more.

So that’s how Washington earned its tenth Congressional seat in 2010.  By the way, we weren’t even close to reaching ten seats in the 2000 Census.  Ten years ago, its ninth seat came in as #407 on the priority list, and the next potential WA seat (#455) missed the cut by 20 positions.

Although they don’t affect my fate here in Seattle (stay in the 43rd or get shifted into the 36th?), I’m eager to review the new LD maps.  If the Redistricting Commission meets its deadline, we’ll be seeing a lot more of their products in the next couple of weeks.  Including a redrawn 10-seat Congressional District map.

[Adapted and revised from an earlier post at HorsesAss.org]

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Memory plays tricks on you

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, thirty-fifth President of the United States, was assassinated 48 years ago on this date.  My memory of that day, and of the following weekend, is clearer than my recall of yesterday’s lunch.

Some small part of this phenomenon might be benign senile forgetfulness [jokes and insults at my expense expected, and welcomed].  But CRAFT syndrome, as it’s commonly known, explains, if anything, only the second half of the comparison.  The vivid immediacy of November 22, 1963 in my mind’s eye is something else entirely.

For Americans of my age group (I was 13 at the time), the shocking murder of JFK is the seminal moment of our lives.  That day irrevocably altered the way the world worked for us.  In my opinion, every single one of the 17,532 days since then exists on the continuum that began that afternoon.  What Pearl Harbor was for my parents’ generation, what 9/11 probably represents for more recent generations, 11/22/1963 was the “where were you when ... ?” moment for me and my fellow Baby Boomers.

For the record, where I was was Heritage Junior High School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.  Along with the other members of the school band, I had just returned from outdoor practice—we were going to play at the next day’s high school football game, a contest that never happened—and was stowing my instrument when the principal informed us of the shooting over the PA system.  The news was too much to process immediately, so we mostly sat in stunned silence.  The school was on the far side of the township from my home, but I have no real memory of the long ride home with a passel of fellow adolescents in that yellow school bus.  I do remember the weekend, as the whole family stared endlessly at the TV news reports.  We watched the lying-in-state at the Capitol.  We watched Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday.  We watched the state funeral on Monday.  We were in shock throughout. 

We had made plans to spend Thanksgiving with relatives in the DC suburbs that year.  It was a very somber holiday indeed.  While there, we went to Arlington Cemetery to pay our respects to the President.  On a bright, cold, and windy afternoon, we joined a long line of our fellow Americans, shuffling slowly and silently (except for the sobs) past the freshly-dug gravesite.  It was so soon after the event that we had to carefully step over the eternal flame’s gas line, which had not yet been buried.

Over the years, I’ve written a number of November 22 essays.  In addition to the previously mentioned one from 2008, they are:  Forty years (2003), The end of the innocence (2004), and 43 ... and 46 (2006).

For me, the death of JFK marks the day on which “The Sixties” began.  The idea of a counterculture was inconceivable on November 21, all but inevitable on November 23.  We can argue about when The Sixties ended (probably somewhere between the 1972 election and the first Rolling Stone article about disco, in September 1973), but I think it would be a real reach to put their birth anywhere other than the Kennedy assassination.

[adapted from HorsesAss.org]

Friday, November 11, 2011

At 11 on 11/11/11

In Canada, Australia, India, Kenya, the UK, and the remainder of the 54 Commonwealth nations, today is Remembrance Day, a holiday honoring those who gave their lives for King (or Queen) and country while serving in the armed forces.  As such, Remembrance Day is much more like our Memorial Day.

In my youth, this holiday was alternatively called Armistice Day.  Officially, it became Veterans Day in 1954, but of course many adults kept calling it by its original name for years and years thereafter.  The armistice referred to in the earlier title was the one that ended hostilities on the Western Front of the Great War.  That occurred, famously, in Marshal Foch’s railway car, deep in France’s Forest of Compiègne.  Though signed by representatives of Germany, France, and the Allies in the wee hours of that morning, the agreed-upon time for the laying-down of arms was “the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month”.

Today, on the 93rd anniversary of that armistice, on this Veterans Day, we can go that timestamp one better, adding “of the 11th year”.  Hence, my decision to publish this epistle at 11am on 11/11/11.

I’ve written posts marking Veterans Day on almost every November 11 since opening Peace Tree Farm in 2003.  Somehow, I missed the day last year, breaking a seven-year streak.  In case you’re interested, here are links to those essays:

• On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month (2003)
• Eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month ... again (2004)
• 11th, 11th, 11th ... Veterans Day (2005)
• How will this war be memorialized? (2006)
• On Veterans Day (2007)
• A different sort of Veterans Day (2008)
• Lest we forget (2009)

I’m not a veteran myself.  To be honest, only a few of my friends and family served in the military.  I come from a long line of non-soldiers ... had a student deferment during Vietnam and then a high enough number in the first draft lottery to avoid being called, my father was 4-F in World War II (he was deaf in one ear), and my maternal grandfather was a temporary New York City cop while many of the real policemen were marching “over there” in World War I.  My father’s father did serve, if you consider playing the French horn in Czar Nicholas II’s army band to be military service.

But you don’t have to be a veteran to honor those who did serve.  So here’s to Shaun Dale, whose blog Upper Left has been running almost as long as my own, and to Michael Hood of the well-respected BlatherWatch.  Here’s to HorsesAss commenter-extraordinaire Roger Rabbit and to Robby, occasional HA commenter and erstwhile blogger on the late, lamented Effin’Unsound, as well as my DailyKos buddy rickeagle.  And also a salute to my Congressman Jim McDermott, one of only 90 House members with military service of any sort.  Jim was a Navy psychiatrist treating sailors and soldiers with PTSD during the Vietnam War (to be fair, both of Washington’s Republican Congressmen, Dave Reichert and Doc Hastings, were reservists).

And, in fact, greetings and salutations in honor of all of the veterans hereabouts.

[Adapted and cross-posted from HorsesAss.org]

Thursday, October 20, 2011

And you call yourself a politician??

[Crossposted from HorsesAss.org]

******

When the Washington State Democrats hold their annual “Maggies” (Warren G. Magnuson Awards dinner/fundraiser) on Saturday, the keynote speaker will be former two-term Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak.  In and of itself, that’s not particularly notable ... the WA Dems bring in an out-of-stater every year.  Last year it was Iowa’s Senator Tom Harkin, and previous speakers include Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean.

Joe Sestak is a different kind of politician.  I refer not only to his biography—the highest-ranked military officer ever elected to Congress (he was a three-star Vice Admiral), commander of a carrier strike group in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, deputy to the Chief of Naval Operations, National Security Council liaison, director of a top-secret Navy counterterrorism unit —but to some unusual-for-a-politician attributes.

I’ve been a Sestak fan for quite some time.  Not long after he first decided to run for Congress in 2006, he participated in the YearlyKos (now Netroots Nation) gathering in Las Vegas.  In his post-YK diary post, I wrote the following comment:

thank you, Admiral

I knew very little about you before attending YK, but since returning home I’ve made a (very small, alas) contribution to your campaign through ActBlue.

I don’t want to sound like I’m dissing Eric Massa, your colleague on the panel at YK, because I appreciate his fire.  But I found your quiet, measured, from-the-soul passion far more compelling than his fervor.  I can imagine that in a debate against Curt Weldon’s delusional bombast, your approach will be all the more effective.

Your words carry immense authority.  As a non-military person, I find myself reassessing my views on the military if a man with a style such as yours can so successfully command a carrier battle group.

I grew up across the Delaware, in Cherry Hill.  So most of the towns and locations you mentioned are familiar to me.  I wish you the best of luck in your campaign, and hope that I’ll be able to put together the funds to send along some additional tangible $upport.

At that YearlyKos panel, Massa strutted and shouted, even tearing off his dress shirt at one point to reveal some clever (he thought) t-shirt.  Though I had no idea he’d turn out to be so wacky, it was readily apparent to me that he was hiding behind all the noise he made.  On the other hand, Sestak spoke slowly and carefully, but it was evidently from the heart and deeply personal.  The authority and passion of his presentation made it clear how such a soft-spoken man could have inspired sailors in a combat zone.

I made small contributions as well to Sestak’s 2008 re-election campaign and to his Senate campaign in 2010.  In that one, he edged Republican Democratic incumbent Arlen Specter in the primary but lost narrowly to Club For Growth teahadist Pat Toomey in November.

As a longtime backer, I wasn’t particularly surprised when I received an email from Sestak a couple of weeks ago.  After all, I get messages daily, from dozens and dozens of candidates, legislators, and interest groups.  The content, however, was completely unexpected.  Noting that he’d soon be here in Seattle (though he didn’t mention the reason for the visit), he invited me and his other Washington supporters to join him for coffee on Saturday so that he could thank us for our help.  That was all ... just to thank us, just to meet us.  No request for a check or Paypal or credit card, not even to “retire his campaign debt”.  There was no “ask” of any sort.

To say this action was unusual is a vast understatement.  I don’t recall anything remotely like it in my years of political activities.  Politicians don’t go out of their way to thank (or even notice) small donors like me.  Hell, they don’t take a step from morning to night without pleading for cash.  Yet here’s Joe Sestak, 3000 miles from home, who wants to spend an hour or so doing precisely the opposite.

Not to suggest a deeper meaning, I’m macabrely amused by the keynoter choices of the WA Dems and WA GOP at their big fundraisers.  On Tuesday, the WSRP’s Fall Dinner featured political trickster/Plame unmasker/US Attorney firer/Dubya inventor/secret superPAC creator Karl Rove.  The guy whose friend Dubya calls him Turd Blossom.  The guy who, through his shadowy American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS organizations, funneled nearly $5,000,000 into last year’s Murray-Rossi race.

Make of the Sestak vs. Rove comparison what you will.  In the meantime, I’m looking forward to shooting the shit with Joe on Saturday.