A Gerrymandering "work of art"

It's no wonder the NC GOP waited until the Friday before the fourth of July weekend to drop their redistricting map on the public. Nate Silver said it best when he tweeted:

GOP gerrymander in NC is a work of art. State voted for Obama, but McCain won between 56-58% of the vote in 10 of 13 new districts.

That just about sums it up, and not a whole lot more needs to be said.

Except that I will say some things, because redistricting is just too interesting to me leave it alone. It's one of my strongest political interests. Maps, numbers, history -- what more could you want?

First of all, here's the proposed GOP map:

And here's the map as it currently stands, which the GOP map will be replacing:

My comments:

1. Obviously, gerrymandering is in the eye of the beholder. For two decades the GOP and their conservative allies have whined about the 12 district, calling it the ugliest gerrymander in the country. So now that the GOP has a chance to do something about it, what do they do? They make it even more weirdly shaped, stretched out, and squiggly than it was before. Not only that, but they take the 4th district, which was one of the most compact ones in the state, and transform it to make it look much like the 12th. So now we two snake-shaped districts instead of one, courtesy of the same GOP that complained about the shape of the 12th for 20 years.
2. Brad Miller (13th district Democrat) is toast. This is not an insightful observation, it's been obvious from the beginning that the GOP was going to target him and they did. That said, it's hard to feel sorry for Brad Miller, even though he's a fellow Democrat. First of all, I can't think of any way in which he's distinguished himself in Congress. But most of all, we have to remember how he got that seat in the first place. As chair of the Democratic legislature's redistricting committee in 2001, he custom-drew it for himself. He also drew the Republican who is now chairing the redistricting committee out of his seat in the legislature. Revenge is a dish best served cold, but also: what the redistricting pen giveth, the redistricting pen taketh away. Bye-bye Brad, hope you enjoyed your 10 year run.
3. Heath Shuler is more screwed than I expected. For at least 30 years, the 11th district has been one of the most compact and regularly shaped districts in the state. It was also reliably Republican, until Shuler took it in 2006, and surprisingly easily won re-election in 2008 and 2010. Well the Republicans have exacted their revenge by removing Asheville from the district (notice how district 10 reaches up and grabs it). Asheville is the most Democratic place in western NC and was likely Shuler's base. Now he's lost it.
4. Asheville is just as screwed as Shuler. It's now stuck in Patrick Henry's district, one of the most Republican in the state represented by one of the most extreme wingnuts in Congress. Talk about a bad fit, but the intention wasn't to make a fit -- it was to deprive Heath Shuler of Asheville's Democrats, and bury them in a district where they will no influence. It's pure gerrymandering genius.
5. Rene Ellmers, whom the Daily Kos aptly called "one of the dimmest bulbs in the freshman class" has hit the lottery. Remember she barely squeaked by a tired and damaged Bob Etheridge to win district 2. Now it's been redrawn to keep her safe. The good news, for me personally, is that she will no longer represent me, with Chatham County drawn out of her district. I'm happy to not be represented by her.
6. If he hasn't already, David Price (4th district Democrat) can go ahead and buy a house in DC. The new map ensures his continued tenure, as the mapmakers crammed every Democrat they could from the Triangle and its surrounding area into his district, to make the ones around him more Republican. He got Chapel Hill, Durham, the northeastern Chatham County, the area of Wake county where NC State and Meredith are as well as the areas around the SAS institute where the educated high tech voters live. Yes his district now looks like District 12 Junior, but it's safe for him.

So what do I really think?

After all that you may think I hope the map gets thrown out, or think it's beyond the pale. Well I don't. Yes it royally screws Democrats, and it's an ugly looking gerrymander, and it exposes the hypocrisy of decades of GOP whining about Democratic maps. But Democrats have been doing it for 140 years.

Now after all this time the Republicans control redistricting, and you bet they are going to maximize their advantage and do all they can to make up for all those decades of Democratic gerrymandering. Redistricting is the ultimate example of "to the victor goes the spoils" and by winning the legislature for the first time in over 100 years last year, the NC GOP has earned the right to draw their maps. We shouldn't expect them to show restraint that our party never showed.

Democrats inadvertently complicit in their own redistricting slaughter

Besides, the NC Democrats are complicit in their current situation. Recall that the governor of NC has no veto power over district maps.

Why is that?

Because when the Democratic-controlled legislature amended the NC constitution in 1996 to give the governor the veto, they figured they would always control the legislature but that the Governor could be a Republican. So they made sure the Governor had no say in this process.

Now it's 15 years later and oops -- we have a GOP legislature with a Democratic Governor who is forced to sit helplessly on the sidelines while the GOP carves up the spoils of NC redistricting.

Talk about an example of trying to fix the system in your favor, backfiring.