Everyone laughed when someone asked, during the Washington Redistricting Commission's press conference period after the formal meeting today, where Dennis Kucinich's congressional district was. (In Ohio, someone suggested.)
And Democrat Tim Ceis spoke up to agree with Republican (former Senator) Slade Gorton to say that their maps of congressional districts are really a lot more similar than many people probably assume.
All that said, the Washington remap group, which released its individual-member (four of them) individual maps today, clearly has a lot of work ahead of it.
There is, for example, the matter of majority-minority congressional districts - districts in which minorities actually make up most of the voting population. The Republicans on the panel, as one reporter noted, seem to be a lot more interested in creating maj-min congressional districts than the Democrats were. Which on its surface sounds a little counterintuitive.
Or not. Put aside Gorton's contention that this simply represents communities of interest compact sizes; it also means that more Democrats are bunched together into fewer districts, giving Republicans more of a chance in the districts that remain. Republicans currently have four of nine U.S. House districts; one issue is whether the new map gives them an edge in winning five or more.
Key in this will be how Olympia is deployed within the new district structure, how King County is split and where - not if - one or two districts jump the Cascade Mountains. (Population considerations are going to make at least one trans-Cascades district highly likely.
The current District 8, closely balanced between the parties but long held by Republicans (now Dave Reichert) and also the mot overpopulated of the state's nine districts, might become "slightly less marginal" - that is, more Republican, Gorton said. Ceis, a Democratic commission member, said thst he's seen plans in which that area's district has a largest city of Issaquah, and second-largest of Wenatchee. Most plans do, however, have something like a new District 3 that's "more Cowlitz-Clark centered."
Then there's the proposed district that takes in the San Juan Islands in the far northwest, and Chelan on the east side of the Cascades. Asked to justify that linkup, Gorton said "they're both rural, not metro Puget Sound," and unique San Juan County is almost inevitably going to be lumped in with areas unlike it. Didn't sound like a sale among the Democrats, though.
There were issues among the legislative districts as well. Spokane Spokesman-Review reporter Jim Cmden said that a look at the three Spokane-area districts in one Republican plan suggested all three would be Republican districts, compared to the one-D, one-R, one-competitive mix at present. (He was told the Republicans saw them as "three competitive districts." Probably no sale among the Democrats there, either.)
The next meeting, and some of the hardest negotiations, will come October 11.
