California Redistricting: Another Look

I’m still trying to figure out who California redistricting is going to benefit.

Reasons to help the Democrats
1. If you put 100,000 Democrats from Democratic districts into Republican districts and vice-versa you’d end up with more Democratic districts. Current Democratic districts are really Democratic. Current Republican districts are mostly somewhat Republican.
2. I’ve seen a number of maps using Dave’s Redistricting App and made a couple myself. Each time you end up with a number of currently Republican districts with less McCain votes than the current districts.
3. California is trending Democratic.

Reasons to help the Republicans
1. Democrats currently control 64% of the congressional districts. That’s a higher percentage than any results from any California statewide office in 2006, 2008, or 2010.
2. Democrats are more likely to live in heavily Democratic areas than Republicans do. No matter how you draw the districts there are going to be a number of them that are very very Democratic, leaving less Democrats for the remaining districts.
3. If you only use Obama-McCain numbers, as Dave’s does, you may be overestimating Democratic strength. As the chart below shows, Obama exceeded Kerry’s totals by at least 6 points in every Republican district, but only 21 of the 34 districts Democrats hold. So the districts appear to lean more Democratic than they currently do.


Confused? Yeah? Let me confuse you more. In 2006 congressional Democrats beat Republicans nationally by 8 points nationally and by 16 points in California. That makes sense. California is going to overindex because of how Democratic it is. In 2010 Republicans won the congressional vote by 8 points, but in California Democrats won by 12 points. They didn’t drop by nearly as much as they did nationally. On the other hand, Republicans gained the 7% in the California senate race, a margin that fits in with the national results.

If you look at the 7 2006 statewide races Democrats only beat Republicans by 3.5 points. In 2010, Democrats beat Republicans by 13.5 points in the same races. They increased their share in 6 of the 7 statewide races. So it was across the board, not just a better gubernatorial contest.


To sum up:
1. Republicans improved from 2006 to 2010 in congressional races, but not as much as they did nationally.
2. Republicans improved from 2006 to 2010 in the senate race as much as they did nationally.
3. The statewide races produced the opposite results of the congressional and senate races.

What does this mean for 2012? I have no clue.