Colorado’s political class was set abuzz this week after the state’s congressional redistricting commission unveiled their “starting point” 8-district congressional map plan.
The map is going to change before a final version is selected, but that hasn’t prevented anyone from offering opinions on who the map indicates is winning or losing the redistricting process or whose political fortunes have been blessed or cursed by the lines.
Immediately after the release of the map, Democrats called it a gift to Republicans, saying the plan would result in a 4-4 split between the parties, even though Colorado has quickly become a more Democratic-leaning state over the past 10 years.
The current seven-district map that’s been used for the past decade is a solid 4-3, Democratic-favoring map. Some Democrats have said the past decade’s shift to the left means a more equitable 8-district map would be a 5-3 map favoring Democrats, or maybe a map that has 4 solid Democratic districts, 3 solid Republican districts and one district that could go either way.
But some Republicans don’t even accept that premise, and say the preliminary draft map isn’t actually a 4-4 map, rather that it is a 5-3 map, favoring Democrats.
The disagreement is about one district, and what it’s actual partisan leaning is. But the clash also highlights a dynamic that emerges during redistricting, where each party has an incentive to make the map appear as bad for them as possible, in an attempt to get the map drawers to adjust the plan in the direction of what each side says would be more fair.
The district in question is the 7th Congressional District in the plan, in the western Denver-metro area. Democrats have said it would have a GOP advantage, and Republicans have said the opposite.
So who’s right?
It depends on what data you look at.
Determining the partisan leaning of a district can be done different ways.
Using party registration will show what portion of the population of a district has decided to have each party designation, but it’s not a perfect method. If a hypothetical district is 37% Democratic, 34% Republican and 39% party-unaffiliated, the large plurality of unaffiliated voters adds some opacity to the picture painted by party registration. Dealing with that unaffiliated portion usually means simply counting only the partisan registrations, which assumes the unaffiliated voters are split about like the partisan voters. The same hypothetical district would then have a 52.1%-47.9% Democratic advantage over Republicans. But as the number of unaffiliated voters grows, the “two-way” partisan registration split can become less reliable, experts have warned.
Past election data can perform a similar function. The precinct-level election results from 2020, for example, can be added up using the new districts, which shows how the new combination of precincts would have performed in the 2020 Presidential and U.S. Senate race. But it’s also not a perfect method. Swing elections can give a false sense of the actual partisan leaning of a district. For instance, the 2014 election was a wave Republican year, but in 2018 and 2020, suburban voters swung dramatically toward Democratic candidates. Using the 2014 election results would, then, lead to overestimating the Republican lean of any given district, and using the 2018 or 2020 results would overestimate the Democratic lean of any given district.
Sometimes a single election is used for determining partisanship, and sometimes a blend of methods is used, combining election results from several years, sometimes weighting years differently, and sometimes even adding party registration data as well.
As for what this all means to the preliminary draft map plan released Wednesday, the response from various political actors shows how the different partisanship analyses can be wielded to better position one side or the other.
“Five of these eight districts voted for Biden,” said Alan Philp, a Republican strategist and registered redistricting lobbyist working on behalf of a 501(c)4 organization called the Colorado Neighborhoods Coalition, holding up the 2020 election results, when suburban voters in the preliminary map plan’s 7th District swung significantly toward Biden. The combined results of the precincts in the preliminary draft district show a 9.3 percentage-point margin of victory for Biden in the district.
Dave Wasserman, a political analyst who runs the Cook Political Report, wrote this week arguing that the preliminary draft plan’s 7th District should be considered a Democratic-leaning district, because of the 2020 presidential election results.
But two years earlier, the combined precinct results in the preliminary draft map’s 7th District gave a 2.9 percentage-point margin of victory to the Democratic candidate for Attorney General, Phil Weiser.
And the party registration figures show that Republicans outnumber Democrats in the preliminary draft district. Using the two-way party registration split, Republicans have a 6 percentage point advantage.
“If you look at the 2020 presidential race, that’s a wave year election, unlike we’ll see anytime in the near future,” said Curtis Hubbard, a Democratic strategist and registered redistricting lobbyist working on behalf of a 501(c)4 organization called Fair Lines Colorado. “Trump was extremely unpopular in Colorado. So if anyone is pointing at the 2020 results to show how these districts would perform in a congressional race, they don’t really understand much about Colorado.”
The 2018 election was also a wave year, Hubbard pointed out, so using the 2018 Attorney General’s race doesn’t give a complete picture, he said.
The view that the district is not Democratic leaning was reflected in reporting by other political media outlets that warned of the demise of Ed Perlmutter, who lives in the district in question, because of the district’s Republican partisan registration advantage. It’s true that no matter whether the district leans 6 percentage points Republican or 9 percentage points Democratic, the preliminary draft version of the district is significantly less Democratic than the district over the past decade, having shifted to west and south from the current seven-district plan’s version of the map.
The state’s redistricting commissions have heard from topic experts about evaluating partisanship, and the legislative commission has even contracted work from Dwayne Liller, a researcher who specializes in partisanship analysis in redistricting. In the coming weeks, the commissions will discuss and eventually decide on a way to evaluate the partisan leaning of their map plans, the commissions’ lead staff member said.
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ANALYSIS | Preliminary 8-district congressional plan's partisan tilt in the eye of the beholder - coloradopolitics.com
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