Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of November 15

Last week I made this list of maps that have been semi-recently published. But first, the 3 states that have most recently passed new maps are:

Montana, whose new map basically adds another fairly Republican districts to the state, which is pretty unfair given the state is around 40% or so Democratic, enough for it's own district.

Idaho basically just kept the current map with minimal changes around Boise.

Utah made and passed this map that splits Salt Lake county (the largest County and capital of Utah) into all 4 congressional districts of Utah like this into law for the 2020s. This is particularly telling given the Utahan populace voted for an independent commision to make their districts and the Republican state government responded by making it advisory and passing it's own gerrymander when most of the maps the commission made included a district for Salt Lake City.

Now, onto the maps proposed but not passed:

The next 2 gerrymanders are in Ohio, where the GOP made maps with 2 out of 15 house districts in the 45% Democratic state. The maps are these 2. This is probably the most extreme gerrymander in this redistricting cycle, given the aforementioned 45% Democratic population merits representation from nearly 7 districts.

Meanwhile, Dems in Maryland aren't that sure about gerrymandering their state's House into an all-democratic configuration. Two of the maps keep the current 7-1 Democratic delegation, one makes the 1st district (Delmarva district) competitive but still winnable for the Republican and the last map makes it possible that an extra Republican could win in 2022 by messing with the 6th district to include more of Republican Northern maryland, which added to West Virginia the Maryland panhandle voters makes the 6th a D+3 district,  down from D+16.

On the other side of this, FL Republicans didn't try to significantly strengthen their comparatively mild gerrymanders of Florida. The main changes I see in all 4 maps are:

A new swing district was created east of Tampa, which makes district 14 become a swing district too.

District 9 is in all 4 proposals safely Democratic as opposed to Democratic leaning.

In Nevada the Democrats traded their D+20 Las Vegas district and 2 R-leaning or swing districts for 3 D+2-5 districts with this map. This feels like an inefficient gerrymander. Couldn't you have done something like D+5 for this?

Lastly, California's New map drawn by the redistricting commision there came up with this map, and it mostly made 4  D+7 districts in some LA suburbs competitive, a new competitive district east of San Diego and swapping a competitive district east of the Bay area to one around Fresno. This map is still more Democratic than the state as a whole, given it's 75% D and 13,5% R in a 65D-35R state, but given the stakes of the 2022 election, now is not the time for principled behavior. (Well, not principled behavior from our side while the GOP does nothing.)

Steve Bannon has turned himself in on criminal contempt charges

A federal grand jury indicted Bannon last week on two counts, one for failing to appear for a deposition with the House committee and one for failing to produce documents in response to its subpoena.

Each count carries a minimum of 30 days in jail and a maximum of one year, as well as a fine ranging from $100 to $1,000. Prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia will oversee the criminal case.

I'm not really sure why he thought this was a good play, maybe trying to martyr himself?

What, courtesy of Ann Coulter following the Rittenhouse verdict.

Apparently the Ohio majority leader is dismissive of people using Dave's redistricting application data to describe Ohio's map as 13-2 Republican. Here's a video of him not knowing who Dave is, or pretending to, given the people working for him do lots of redistricting and thus probably know of the app and might even use it themselves.

Related article: More Americans than ever are participating in redistricting

The number of Americans who have engaged with state legislatures and independent commissions working to redraw political boundary lines in the decennial redistricting process has hit vertiginous new heights as voters inundate mapmakers with proposals, suggestions and objections.

In Washington state, the independent redistricting commission has received input from about 7,000 people, either through emailed comments or participation in virtual town hall meetings, a threefold increase compared to the last redistricting process a decade ago.

Of those, state residents have submitted 1,300 proposed maps of their own. Seventy of those maps have qualified as third-party recommendations that commissioners will consider.

In California, where the independent redistricting commission still has six weeks to go before a deadline to finalize new district maps, more than 13,000 comments have been submitted. In the entirety of the last three-month redistricting process, California’s commission received about 20,000 comments and suggestions.

In Michigan, 9,000 people applied to sit on a new redistricting commission, and those who were chosen have received more than 10,000 comments already, a decade after the legislature did not accept comments at all. The website Utah residents can use to submit comments on proposed district maps was so overwhelmed earlier this week that the server crashed.

And speaking of Dave:

The transparency of the redistricting process has been aided, too, by the widespread availability of open-source redistricting software. Within minutes of a legislature releasing a proposed map, Democratic and Republican partisans will surge to Dave’s Redistricting App, the most popular entrant in the field, to measure the proposal’s partisan and demographic characteristics.

Dave Bradlee, the website’s founder, said in an email the site had registered 10,000 unique users in the month of October, significantly higher than a few months ago. Users started 153,000 maps on the site in October, beating the previous record by more than 20,000, Bradlee said.