Jon McHenry’s comments in Slate about the redistricting process and the effect on control of the House of Representatives:
The Republican advantage was tremendous. Most states give the power of the map to whomever happens to run the legislature. As 2011 began, Democrats only controlled the redistricting process for 47 seats—safe blue turf like Maryland and Illinois, which they squeezed for every possible gain. They had to. Republicans controlled the process for 202 seats. The Democrats had built the Pelosi house in states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Then they lost everything, and the other guys got to draw the maps.
“Republicans weren’t thinking ‘Hey, just how do we draw these lines to screw over Democrats?’ ” says Jon McHenry, a pollster at Resurgent Republic. “It was, ‘How do we make this suburban Philadelphia seat safer for the Republican who just won it?’ The goal wasn’t so much to add seats as it was to hold on to the 2010 gains.”
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Maybe a swing state’s gotten impossibly tough for a Republican to carry. Carve it up right, and you can put the demographically troublesome voters in the districts where they can do the least damage to your party. “We’d have to see an amazing landslide in order for these districts to flip,” McHenry says. “If there was a big coattail effect, that would mean that the people who drew the districts didn’t do very good jobs.”
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