BREAKING: PA Supreme Court issues new map
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/pennsylvania-gerrymandering-supreme-court-map-congressional-districts-2018-elections-20180219.htmlEdit to add - the court completely re-numbered the districts! Also edit to add the proposed new map (thanks to DeminPennswoods
) -
= new reply since forum marked as read
Was about to update and you saved me the trouble! 
You beat me to that! 
I got moved from one Red-Neck district to another! 
I am their "token" Democrat!
One tweet -
Link to tweet
TEXT
Brian Amos @BrianAmos
2016 presidential results for the new remedial PA map. 10R-8D, but with a decent number of competitive districts.
Brian Amos @BrianAmos
Here's the rest of the 2016 statewides. Third parties excluded from these calculations for comparison.
3:28 PM - Feb 19, 2018
Unfortunately Jill Stein's 3rd party votes became a major factor in 2016, as we watched Hillary Clinton lose the election even though she won the popluar vote. I believe that ignoring 3rd parties/independents is an error that the Democratic Party regularly makes.
However that being said, this new map is a big step towards ending Satan's gerrymandering in Pennsylvania!
We must remain vigilant for any crap the Trussian Repukes try to pull - they'll do anything to cheat and game the system.
3rd parties never got the kind of vote that we saw happen in 2016. E.g., here in Philly, combined 3rd party votes were ~4,000 - 5,000 out of something like 650,000+ total. Yet in 2016, Both Stein and Johnson tripled their 2012 votes, with a total > 15,000.
So the question might be, was 2016 a one-off or is this about to become "the norm" (with Russian interference, etc)?
February 19th, 2018, 3:20pm by Sam Wang
Here’s the new Congressional map for Pennsylvania, drawn by the special master. It splits 13 counties, less than any plan offered to the court. The only plan that splits fewer counties is the “compact D gerrymander” that the Princeton Gerrymandering Project posted over the weekend. Our plan scores comparably to or better than the special master’s plan on the metrics the court set out (fewer county and municipality splits, performs just as well on compactness metrics).
As we showed over the weekend, it is just possible within the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s rules to allow a plan that reaches partisan balance, i.e. a 9 D, 9 R outcome for a 50-50 statewide vote. However, those rules bias the range of possibilities in favor of Republicans, so that a Republican gerrymander – one of the proposals on the table – was also a possibility.
It appears as if the special master was trying to achieve partisan balance (as opposed to, say, picking a plan that was in the middle of the range of possible maps). His map – and the one we gave over the weekend – show that even under the constraint of compactness and not splitting political jurisdictions, it is still possible to undo the effects of population clustering. Notably, he did so while keeping most population centers together.
It now seems clear that the Pennsylvania GOP made a serious tactical error. The governor and Democratic legislators had offered a plan that would have retained some GOP advantage. The new plan erases that advantage entirely. In our analysis, based on the 2016 vote the new map produces 5 Democratic districts, 7 Republican districts, and 6 tossup districts. The maximum likely performance by Democrats in 2018 would be 11 seats, a gain of 6 seats over their current representation. That gain would be one-fourth of the 24 seats they need to win control of the House of Representatives. Of course, some of those gains could also go away in a later year that was good for Republicans. That’s the point of electoral competition.
http://election.princeton.edu/2018/02/19/introducing-the-new-pennsylvania-congressional-map/
as to Dem districts 6 vs 5 and 8 vs 6 toss ups. 
until you mentioned it. 
I assumed "lights from space" but it's population dots on a black background.
Hopefully this will underscore to people (including DUers) that although it looks severe when you color the state "red" in large swaths of land and "blue" around the state border urban areas, those large red swaths are literally EMPTY of people. From one of the stats that I found, I think it was 36 of the 67 PA counties that have less than 100,000 people each and 3 of those 36 have <10,000 total.
and that is Fairmount Park!
The car's navigation system sortof took us a back way through the hills and dale and covered bridges around Kutztown. 
