Tuesday, January 10, 2012
New CDs announced ... it could have been better
I just realized that I left my (very few) readers hanging on December 27, when I posted about the about-to-be-released Congressional District map. It’s now been released and approved by the Washington State Redistricting Commission, and awaits minor tweaking by the Legislature. Same with the new Legislative District map, but I haven’t yet had a chance to examine it in its 49-district totality.
Immediately after the CD map was revealed, I wrote up a rapid-response post over on HorsesAss.org. I’m reposting the basics of that post here, but with more thoughts developed in the couple of weeks since it first saw the light of day.
Darcy Burner gets her wish ... and doesn’t.Yes, her home is located in the new 1st District. And yes, she’ll be in a no-incumbent CD. But no, it doesn’t much overlap with the WA-01 that was represented by Jay Inslee. Most of the new WA-01 consists of what had been WA-02, represented by Rick Larsen. Larsen will now have much of the former Inslee CD (and a safe Democratic seat), while the upcoming WA-01 looks like a probable toss-up.
Most of the other 1st CD hopefuls are also in WA-01.The biggest loser was State Representative Marko Liias, whose home will be in Jim McDermott’s WA-07. His power base is split between WA-07 and WA-02, so Marko withdrew his candidacy immediately after the map hit the streets.
Interestingly, the southernmost extent of WA-01 reaches Medina, home of Suzan DelBene (Dave Reichert’s opponent in 2010). She hasn’t made any announcements, but is said to be seriously considering throwing her hat into the crowded WA-01 ring. Also in WA-01 is teahadist John Koster, who narrowly lost to Rick Larsen in the 2010 election. So Larsen wins twice—his CD is now much more Democratic than what he used to represent, and arguably the strongest Republican contender north of Seattle is no longer a resident of his district.
Yes, majority-minority, but ...The redrawn 9th Congressional District is “only” 49.67% non-Hispanic white. However, it already has a well-entrenched incumbent in Adam Smith. And, as I explained previously, the voters of the new WA-09 will be majority non-Hispanic white. In the last couple of days, Seattle City Councilmember Bruce Harrell (cultural/ethnic diversity personified) has made noises like a potential challenger to Smith, but I suspect that’s really positioning for a post-Smith future.
In terms of cojones, Gorton swings the bigger ones.Originally I called it a draw, but the more I look at the map the worse it looks. Dividing WA-01 and WA-02 “vertically” makes no sense in terms of communities of interest, supposedly one of the major considerations in redistricting. What do Kirkland, Redmond, and Kenmore have in common with rural Whatcom County hamlets on the Canadian border? Why are Kenmore and Bothell in a different CD than neighboring Mountlake Terrace, Brier, and Lynnwood? A much more sensible map, easily drawn using Dave’s Redistricting App, would keep all of Whatcom and Skagit in WA-02 and move the southern portion of the line between the two districts slightly westward; basically, they would split along I-5 in Snohomish County. That would create two similar districts, both about 53-47 Democratic, in a portion of the state that’s been represented by two Democrats for the last decade. Instead, Larsen’s in a solid-blue CD (about 57-43) and WA-01 is a toss-up with a strong Republican already on the prowl.
One may ask why it didn’t turn out more sensibly. I see two reasons, both associated with (misguided, IMHO) Democratic desires elsewhere:
- The (not really) majority-minority Congressional District
- Building a district for Denny Heck
In the end, there are four solidly Democratic CDs: 2nd (Larsen), 6th (Dicks), 7th (McDermott), and 9th (Smith). Conversely, four new districts look solidly Republican, at least in the short run: 3rd (Herrera Beutler), 4th (Hastings), 5th (McMorris Rodgers), and 8th (Reichert). It’s possible that a strong candidate, increasing Latino turnout, and a liberalizing Vancouver could eventually retake WA-03, but the over-the-mountains WA-08 is now dead-solid GOP.
That leaves the two incumbentless CDs as the battlegrounds. The new WA-10, supposedly Heck’s, is actually fairly evenly divided; it leans Democratic, but is by no means a sure thing. And, as we’ve seen above, a WA-01 in which most of the Dems reside at the southernmost urban tip doesn’t bode well for a large district replete with rural residents wary of the Seattle/Eastside tinge. Still, in a Presidential year and with a Democratic US Senator likely to cruise to an easy victory, high turnout probably improves Democratic chances a bit in both CDs. Given the high value of incumbency, if both of those districts are won by Democrats in 2012 they can stay that way into the future (barring another Tea Party year like 2010 or 1994).
OTOH, if either is won by the Republican this year, ...
Monday, January 02, 2012
And another blogiversary
Oh man, I let this one slip right past me. So I’m sneaking it into the blog in its “rightful” place. Full disclosure—although it’s displayed as a January 2 publication, marking the day-of-the-year of my opener in 2003, it’s actually being written on January 10.
Is that cheating? Sure, but it’s my blog and I can do what I please with it.
Happy blogiversary to meCan you believe it? Nine years of these very occasional musings.
Happy blogiversary to me
Happy blogiversary, dear Peace Tree Farm
Happy blogiversary to me
According to reliable sources (well, as reliable as I’m going to look for), the traditional gift for the ninth anniversary is “pottery / willow”. I don’t think they’re talking about pottery made of willows, but really ... how do those two go together? The modern selection is much easier to comprehend; it’s leather. A belt? Shoes?
Not a saddle, thanks.
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 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]
