Number two in the series is another Seattle-area LD with an open seat. Two of them, actually, thought one of these will assuredly be filled by the incumbent whose seat will be open in this election. Confused yet? We’re talking, of course, about the 11th District.

NOTE: click on the “Click to continue” link below to view a key that defines what the various colors and other symbols on the maps actually mean.

Location — Tukwila, South Seattle, Renton, Kent
   Senate: Margarita Prentice (D), 2012, retiring
   House 1: Zack Hudgins (D)
   House 2: Bob Hasegawa (D), running for Senate

The 11th District is one of the most oddly-shaped LDs in the state, seeming to wrap around the southern shores of Lake Washington without ever actually reaching the lake itself. It’s an industrial and commercial district, thrusting into the port-oriented southwest portion of Seattle in addition to Tukwila, parts of Kent, and some of Renton. Under the 2001 Legislative District map, the bulk of its land area was in that Duwamish River portion of the 11th District. The LD reached almost to the center of Burien. Perhaps your imagination is better than mine, because I can’t think of a metaphor that describes the shape of 11th Legislative District. Its 2001 borders, at the scale of 1:80,000, are shown below:

Viewed by itself, the new version of the 11th LD doesn’t seem all that different from the 2001 map. It remains misshapen, so much so that it (like the 2001 version) might remind you of this infamous image from a Massachusetts newspaper cartoon:

Looking at the new 11th LD more carefully, though, we observe that it no longer approaches Burien. Also, its border has been “notched” to exclude central Renton, and the 11th extends farther to the east than had the 2001 iteration of the district.

The bulk of the 11th District falls within the 9th Congressional District, and it contributes appreciably to the fiction that the new WA-09 is a majority–minority district. A small portion of the 11th, mostly warehouses between I-5 and SR-99, is in the 7th Congressional District. The suburban-to-rural easternmost part of the new 11th LD falls within WA-08.

When the 2001 and 2011 versions of the 11th Legislative District are superimposed on one another, the locational shift is readily apparent. Some of the changes are fairly small (a precinct here, a precinct there). The loss of Highline and Burien is easy to see, as is the large swath of suburbia, perhaps even exurbia, that is now part of the LD. Industrial grit meets tract houses and strip malls.

While it is correct to say that Senator Prentice is retiring, I wonder whether she would have stayed on if she hadn’t been redistricted out of the 11th LD. One might almost suspect that the Renton “notch” I mentioned earlier was created so as to remove her from the district. Unlike Representative Kagi of the 32nd LD (who moved back into her district), Senator Prentice chose to retire rather than try to win office in her new LD, the 37th. Then again, the Senate seat in the 37th isn’t up in this election cycle, so unless she wanted to run for the House she would have had to sit out for a couple of years anyway. Might she unretire and take on Adam Kline in 2014? I have my doubts, as she would be 73 by then.

There’s no doubt that Bob Hasegawa will win the 11th LD Senate seat in November. Even with the addition of a lot of less-than-urban territory, this remains a solidly Democratic district. Hasegawa is well known as a leader in labor and social justice issues, fitting very well with the nature of the 11th. I would have called him a perfect fit if the 11th had retained its previous borders, but this isn’t quite the same district as before. His opponent is a token Republican who didn’t even name the correct office on her C1 form (it says “State Representative”).

Zack Hudgins briefly flirted with a run for Secretary of State this cycle, but decided against it a couple of months ago. So he’s running for reelecion to the House 1 seat. He’s opposed by a Democrat who got into the race when it looked like an open seat. Jim Flynn appears to be a serious candidate — his campaign treasurer is Phil Lloyd, whose other clients include Jim McDermott — but I don’t think Hudgins has all that much to worry about.

The big action in the 11th is in the House 2 seat, currently occupied by Hasegawa. Four Democrats are vying for the position, as well as a lone (irrelevant) Republican. All of the Dems have raised decent money so far; the one with the most name recognition, Port Commissioner Rob Holland, has taken in the least. Far ahead of the others, at nearly $250,000(!), is Bobby Virk. As I write this, only one Legislature candidate in the entire state (a self-funding Democrat running for the open Senate seat in the 27th LD) has taken in more money than Virk, who is definitely not trying to buy himself a place in Olympia. His personal contribution to his campaign is negligible.

Clearly, although there are nominally two open seats in the 11th Legislative District, one of those is already spoken for. In the House 2 position, I can’t imagine that Bobby Virk will finish third or lower in the primary. He has, after all, taken in more than three times what his opponents have … combined. Who will join him on the general election ballot? I have no idea. Perhaps someone more familiar with the 11th Legislative District can edify HA readers.

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Date of birth: May 24, 1941
Place of birth: Duluth, Minnesota
Name at birth: Robert Allen Zimmerman

In case you somehow don’t know anything about the man born 71 years ago today, here’s an eight-minute profile:

Whether he likes it or not, he is truly The Voice of a Generation. Dylan has created so many brilliant albums, so many wondrous songs … and he’s still out there playing music. He’s been running the Never Ending Tour since June, 1988 (that’s 24 years, folks!), and shows no sign of stopping.

I know, I know … no Seattle or Washington content whatsoever. Tough shit. Bob’s a special case.

If you desire more listening pleasure, click below to get to a few more videos (please excuse the brief ads on some of them).

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Filing week, when candidates who may have been running for office for a year or more make their intentions official, is always of great interest to the political class. Back when they actually had to go to Olympia to file in person, candidates often played the waiting-game, trying to cut as close as possible to the deadline before submitting their paperwork. Inevitably, that strategy backfired every once in a while … a flat tire, a speeding ticket, an accident.

These days, filing happens on the internet, removing that sort of fun from the process. But now that Washington uses the (utterly ridiculous, IMHO … but that’s for another day) Top Two primary system, there’s a new source of amusement available to observers:

(Prefers ___________________ Party)

Sure, most of the time that blank space is filled by something conventional — Republican or Democratic. Not always, however, and I always like to review the atypical ones. For instance, three Congressional candidates, two candidates for Governor, an Insurance Commissioner aspirant, and one apiece for State Senate and State House of Representatives prefer the Independent Party. Which doesn’t really exist. Why those candidates didn’t use the (States No Party Preference) option, as 13 others did, escapes me. Surely that’s what they actually mean to say.

As always, a few supposedly-Democratic candidates omit the ic, telling us they prefer the Democrat Party. That irksome misconstruction is particularly favored by Republicans; Bob Dole was a frequent ic-dropper. Note to WA-01 special election candidate Ruth Morrison, 26th District House candidate Stephen Greer, 42nd LD House candidate Matthew Krogh, and 49th District House candidate Sharon Wylie — if you want us to believe you’re really Democrats, get Sam Reed to add the ic to your preferred label. Linda Wright (39th LD House) goes them one better. In addition to the dropped syllable, she eschews the capital D; she Prefers democrat Party.

And then there’s Brad Owen. Is it any surprise that this guy, who’s running for his fifth term of sullying the office of Lieutenant Governor, Prefers Democrat Party? Look up “DINO” in the dictionary, and you’ll find a picture of Brad Owen (or maybe his pal Tim Sheldon). That no actual Democrat ever tries to wrest the office (and, more importantly, the Senate gavel) from him astonishes me.

Quite a few candidates described themselves with riffs on the names, or nicknames, of the major parties. Thus, we find preference (with minor variations) for:

• F.D.R. Democrat Party — Dave Christie (WA-09)
• Independent Dem. Party — incumbent Christopher Hurst (31st District House)
• The Republican Party — John C. W. Shoop (WA-02)
• Indep Republican Party — Glenn Anderson (Lt. Governor)
• Independent GOP Party — incumbent Cheryl Pflug (5th District Senate), John Swapp (40th LD Senate), Eileen Qutub (49th LD Senate)
• GOP Party — Scott Sutherland (WA-07), Nancy McLaughlin (3rd District Senate), Tim Benn (3rd LD House), Mark G. Schoesler (9th District Senate), incumbent Linda Evans Parlette (12th District Senate), Adrian E. Cortes (18th LD House), Ed Orcutt (20th District House), incumbent Mike Carrell (28th LD Senate), Eric R. Alvey (32nd District House), Michael Casey (38th LD House)
• The most creative of these is 36th District House aspirant Leslie Klein, who cleverly(?) Prefers (R) Hope&change Party.

Members of several real political parties filed to run for office in 2012. Or maybe they aren’t party members … after all, a candidate can write anything on that blank line, as long as it’s short enough and not profane. The Green candidate, Howard A. Pellett for the House in the 40th District, is probably the real thing. Karen Murray, Constitution Party candidate for Secretary of State, is definitely for real; she’s their Vice Chairman/Communications Director. So too is Progressive Party chair Linde Knighton, running for the open 36th District House seat. I’m not so sure the Reform Party wants to take the blame credit for crazed ex-felon and US Senate candidate Will Baker, but then again he’s called himself Reform Party before.

Spiraling ever farther away from serious politics, we come to a bunch of so-called candidates with one-off, semi-random “party” preferences. Get a load of these:

• The 99% Party — Mike Lapointe (WA-02)
• Prog Independent Party — Sue Gunn (WA-10)
• Democracy Indep. Party — Mark Greene (Lt. Governor), who often trolls blog comment threads calling himself Party of Commons
• Neopopulist Party — Dave T. Sumner IV (Lt. Governor)
• The Human Rights Party — Sam Wright (Secretary of State)
• Non-Partisan Party — Tamra Smilanich (37th District House)
• Socialist Altern Party — Kshama Sawant (43rd LD House)

I’ve saved the best for last. Yes, our favorite perennial candidates are back for still another round!

Still utilizing Washington state elections as advertising for his business (the $1740 filing fee buys him millions of views in the primary’s voters’ guide every two years, as well as free TV time on TVW), Mike The Mover is running for the US Senate this time. Interestingly, he’s calling himself a Republican in this election. In previous years, he’s generally said he was a Democrat.

Goodspaceguy has set his sights a bit lower than usual in 2012, running for the WA-07 Congressional seat rather than a statewide office. Is the grind of all that campaigning wearing him down? His choice of a party affiliation demonstrates imagination, at the very least. What else would you expect from a man who has legally changed his name to Goodspaceguy? He Prefers Employmentwealth Party.

And last but not least, what would we do without Stan Lippman? Who knew that the Redistricting Commission extended the borders of the 46th Legislative District to the north and northeast in order to bring Stan back into a Seattle-based LD?! He’s one of the cast of thousands running for that open House seat in the 46th. The other candidates are four Democrats and one Republican, whereas Stan wants to have it all. He Prefers Democratic-Repub Party.

One more item … as I write this, the Secretary of State’s list of candidates who have filed has some rather glaring errors. According to the SoS, Zack Hudgins isn’t running for re-election to the House in the 11th District and Sylvester Cann didn’t file to run against Gerry Pollet for the House in the 46th. King County Elections doesn’t make either of those mistakes. The SoS also seems to say that Senator Joe Zarelli’s surprise retirement leaves a Democrat running unopposed for that blood-red Republican seat. Goldy tells me that the SoS list isn’t official yet, which is made abundantly clear by those mistakes. Check back with them on Tuesday.

Location — North Seattle
   Senate: David Frockt (D), 2012 (special election)
   House 1: Gerry Pollet (D)
   House 2: Phyllis Gutierrez-Kenney (D), retiring

Under the 2001 Legislative District map, the northern border of the 46th was the entire northern city line (Sound to Lake) of Seattle. It was one of three LDs completely contained within the city, joining the 36th and the 43rd. Unlike those other Seattle-only LDs, which were also entirely within the 7th Congressional District, a small portion of the 46th was in the 2001 version of the 1st CD. The 2001 borders of the 46th LD, at a 1:60,000 scale, are shown below:

For reference, the 2001 boundaries of LDs are the pink/purple region. Major bodies of water are blue, major roads (state or federal highways, for the most part) are red lines, counties are named in ALL-CAPS ITALICS and delineated with heavy black lines, precincts are lighter black lines, and cities are displayed as blue “dot in square” symbols and name labels. These color conventions will be used throughout this series, and additional conventions will be described as we display them on maps.

The 2001 version of the 46th LD, then, consisted of northern and northeastern Seattle. In the new 2011 map, the 46th breaks out of Seattle, generally moving to the northeast of its previous location. It loses its former western portion to the 36th and 32nd Districts; the latter LD regains some of the Seattle precincts it had had in 1991. The 46th’s border with the 43rd is slightly changed, and it takes its new non-Seattle section largely from the old 32nd. In the following map of the new 46th, the LD is shaded in green. This map also shows the boundaries of the 2011 Congressional Districts, marked in thick dashed blue lines and labeled as “WA-x“.

Note also that all maps in this post cover exactly the same area, at the same scale (1:60,000 for the 46th LD). The only differences are in the “layers” placed on the map.

As in the 2001 map, the 46th is mostly in the 7th CD, with a portion in the 1st (though of course it’s a very different CD than the old 1st Congressional District). The 46th now extends up and around the northern end of Lake Washington. The King-Snohomish county boundary now defines the northern border of the LD and the southern border of the 2nd CD. None of the new 46th Legislative District is in the new 2nd Congressional District.

Now that we’ve seen the old and new borders of the 46th, let’s superimpose them on one another. That will more clearly display where and how the boundaries of the LD have changed. In the map below, the colors of the earlier maps are retained where there is no overlap. Territory that is no longer in the 46th Legislative District remains pink/purple, and areas newly encompassed by the 46th remain green. Areas within both the 2001 and 2011 versions of the LD are displayed as a brown region.

So how will these changes affect this year’s elections in the 46th? Let’s make it clear from the start — there’s no chance whatsoever that a Republican will win any of the LD’s seats in the Legislature. Lake Forest Park and Kenmore are just as Democratic as Broadview and the northwest corner of Seattle. Although two of the three seats have incumbents, neither Frockt nor Pollet was elected to his current position. Frockt did stand for election to the House 1 seat before being elevated to the Senate after Scott White’s untimely death, but Pollet is in the House based only on the votes of PCOs (in the old 46th). The principal factor to be considered by the candidates, then, is making themselves known to their new non-Seattle constituents. I would suggest that those candidates whose political bases are rooted primarily in the 46th District Democrats organization might be at something of a disadvantage against those who are better know “publicly”.

In the race for the open House 2 seat, the action will likely unfold in both the primary and the general election. It’s possible, however, that the crowd of Democratic candidates might divide the primary vote so evenly that the Republican (yes, there is one) could sneak into one of the two November slots. That would make it less bloody in the general, as the surviving Dem would be a sure thing if facing a Republican, but I doubt that any of the Democrats are working under that assumption.

What might have been a wildcard thrown into the mix — a candidate living in the new non-Seattle portion of the 46th — appears to have been circumvented. The Lake Forest Park home of Representative Ruth Kagi (D-32) was redistricted into the 46th, but she has already stated that she will move into the reconfigured 32nd LD and run for re-election there.

While the filing deadline is still almost three weeks in the future, Senator Frockt is currently running unopposed. Representative Pollet has drawn one Democratic opponent thus far, though the choice of which seat a candidate might run for is still fluid. Also, there’s nominally still time for a non-Seattle candidate to throw his/her hat in the ring, though it doesn’t seem likely.

Open seats in Legislative Districts almost always draw large packs of aspiring candidates. Significant alterations in district boundaries, as in the 46th (and the 11th, but not 36th), add even more spice to the competition.

Over the last few months, I’ve written at length — some might say ad nauseum — about Washington’s redistricting process based on the 2010 Census:

• A report on minority-majority Congressional Districts and why it’s absurd to try to construct one here. (The Redistricting Commission didn’t listen to me.)
• On the mechanics and mathematics of Congressional reapportionment and how Washington earned its 10th Congressional District.
• A “breaking” story just before the release of the nearly-final CD maps.

A few days after the last of those, upon further review of the newly-drawn map, I wrote a more reflective piece on the outcome of Congressional redistricting in Washington. My conclusion: Skeletor won the battle with Tim Ceis, and it wasn’t even close. For reasons that escape me, I posted that piece only on Peace Tree Farm, resulting in even fewer readers than my wonkery draws here on HA. That was dumb of me, wasn’t it?

Nearly everything in the above-referenced posts concerned Congressional redistricting. Which makes sense, I suppose. Changing the number of districts is always exciting, though of course it’s even more exciting (and much, much bloodier) in states that lose Congressional Districts. You can check with Dennis Kucinich on that. For the record, Washington has never experienced CD subtraction.

But redistricting affects far more than Congress. Many other jurisdictional boundaries have to be changed to account for changing demographics, from school board districts to County Council and beyond. If Seattle elected City Council by district (as it should, IMHO), those borders would have to be redrawn too. With one exception, those lower-level maps are drawn by lower-level governments.

The exception, of course, is the map of Legislative Districts, also drawn by the Redistricting Commission. While the number of LDs in Washington is constitutionally set at 49, their boundaries must be redrawn to take into account population trends over the 10 years since the last Census. LDs that had nearly identical populations in 2000 are no longer equal, and the Commission is mandated to reconstruct the legislative map to reflect those demographic trends.

The Commission had to account for more than just the statewide 14.1% increase. Had every LD added 16,948 residents (average LD population was 120,288 after the 2000 Census and would be 137,236 under this redistricting), we could have kept the old boundaries. But of course, that isn’t what happened. The population of the old 2nd LD increased by 43,337 (36.0%), while the 28th actually lost 754 residents (-0.6%).

I won’t go into the extended process by which the Commission eventually settled on the new map, except to note that it took them until 10:35pm (85 minutes before their deadline) on January 1, 2012 to convey their agreed-upon map to the Legislature. Instead, I thought it might be interesting to examine the changes in LD boundaries. Data geek, and map geek, that I am, I’ve done exactly that — creating maps showing each LD’s old boundaries, its new boundaries, and the two superimposed on each other.

The results of (some of?) my handiwork will appear here on HA soon. The questions I pose to myself — and to my colleagues here, and to the readers of HA — are:

1. Do I report on the LDs one-by-one or in groups?
2. Can I report on every single one of the 49 LDs without boring y’all to death?
3. How ever we decide to do the reports, in what order should they be revealed?

I’ll answer a couple of those questions, at least to start, by writing individually on the Seattle-area LDs with open seats. I plan to begin with the 46th, followed by the 36th and the 11th. Why the 46th? Simple — it has cooler maps than the others. It’s the wow!! factor…

So, if you haven’t nodded off in boredom are drooling in breathless anticipation, stay tuned.

Darcy Burner gets her wish … and doesn’t.

Yes, her home is located in the 1st District. And yes, she’ll be in a no-incumbent CD. But no, it doesn’t much overlap with what had been Jay Inslee’s District. Most of it is what had been represented by Rick Larsen, who now has much of the former Inslee CD (and a safe Democratic seat).

I don’t know how most of the other 1st CD prospects made out.

Off the top of my head, I’d say that Marko Liias struck out … he’s almost surely in the new 2nd, and would have to face Larsen. I don’t know where in Snohomish Steve Hobbs lives. Suzan DelBene is now in the 9th District, with incumbent Adam Smith. The others — Goodman, Ruderman, and others — are still a mystery for me. [CORRECTIONS (12:51pm): If DelBene lives in Medina, she’s actually in WA-01, not WA-09. Roger Goodman is definitely in WA-01. It’s possible that Liias is now in WA-07, not WA-02 (either way, he’s SOL).]

Yes, majority-minority, but …

The redrawn 9th Congressional District is “only” 49.67% non-Hispanic white. However, it already has a well-entrenched incumbent in Adam Smith. And, as I noted yesterday, the voters of the CD will be majority non-Hispanic white.

In terms of cojones, Ceis and Gorton fought to a draw.

It really depends on the new 1st District. They built five Democratic Districts: 2nd (Larsen), 6th (Dicks), 7th (McDermott), 9th (Smith), 10th (Thurston County-based, no incumbent). There are three, maybe four, Republican CDs: the 4th (Hastings), 5th (McMorris Rodgers), and 8th (Reichert) are solid red, and the 3rd (Herrera Beutler) might, but probably doesn’t, have a whisper of a chance for a Democrat to squeeze her out. The new 1st will be the battleground. In a Presidential year, Democratic chances up there probably improve a bit.

More thoughts as I get a better chance to review the maps.

OK, OK … so maybe the story doesn’t quite merit the BREAKING!!! headline. Still, it’s news that will turn out to be big for all Washingtonians, for a decade.

At this afternoon’s meeting of the Washington State Redistricting Commission, it was announced that (at long last) a proposed map of 10 Congressional Districts will be unveiled tomorrow. It’s possible that they’ll even be able to put the new map on the Commission website ahead of time.

We’ve been waiting for another CD iteration for well over three months, since each of the four Commissioners presented his own version way back on September 13. This new proposal was hammered out between the two political heavyweights on the Commission — Tim Ceis (D) and Slade Gorton (R). If those two uber-partisans can agree on a single map, it’s very, very likely that that’ll be the final plan from the WSRC.

I eagerly await the results, so that we can learn the outcomes of two important issues, discussed below.

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…you can probably skip this post. On the other hand, I think there might be one or two HA readers who will find this intriguing.

At a special meeting later this morning, the Washington State Redistricting Commission will unveil the next iterations of their proposed redrawing of Legislative District boundaries. As displayed here (PDF), the Commissioners have split into two bipartisan pairs, each responsible for drawing a particular portion of the state. Commissioners Tom Huff (R) and Dean Foster (D) have been working on the Olympic Peninsula, the Pacific coast, and the southern section of the wet side of the state. Their colleagues Tim Ceis (D) and Slade Gorton (R) have been tasked with working on the Eastside, the islands, and the northern west-of-the-Cascades area. They are not currently dealing with either the Seattle environs or the large area east of the mountains.

I don’t know whether they’ve been skipping over both the most and least urban parts of the state because they’ve already agreed on the LD lines in those areas, or because they’re at an impasse there, or (most likely IMHO) because drawing the lines in and around Seattle and the dry side depends on the outcome of their deliberations in the segments they’re working on. Whatever the reason, the Commissioners had better get their asses in gear — they’re supposed to present an agreed-upon plan to the Legislature by January 1, 2012, just half a month from now.

While this next presentation will be the third iteration of LD borders, we still have seen no Congressional District maps since each of the four Commissioners presented their own proposals on September 13, fully three months ago! Their silence on the topic frustrates many observers no end.

While we wait (and wait, and wait, …) for the Commissioners to break their long silence, I’d like to take a step back in the process, to discuss the reapportionment that presented the Commission with the opportunity to construct a brand-new Congressional District instead of merely rejiggering the existing ones in their redistricting task, as they’re doing with the state’s 49 (no more, no less) Legislative Districts.

As you’re no doubt aware, the number of Congressional Districts in each state is determined based on the results of the decennial Census, mandated by the Founders in Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution and revised under the 14th Amendment (you know, the one that got rid of that pesky three-fifths of a man thing). How the reapportionment is actually carried out is based on laws written by Congress, and those laws have changed numerous times over the decades. I’ll mention three issues to be considered:

• The Census counts persons, not citizens. Undocumented individuals, if they’re willing to participate, count as residents of their state.
• The apportionment population is not the same as the resident population. The latter does not count federal employees (including the military) living overseas on April 1. For apportionment (but not redistricting) purposes, such individuals are counted with their state of residence as listed on their employment records. This approach can make a difference in apportionment of Congressional Districts … in 2000, Utah might have gotten an additional seat if the Census counted Mormon missionaries for apportionment; that seat went instead to North Carolina, and Utah took its case (Utah v. Evans) all the way to the Supreme Court, where UT lost.
• Sensibly, apportionment is carried out through the use of a ranking algorithm. What isn’t set in stone is the methodology. It’s been done in a variety of ways over the years. Different procedures often give different results, but it must be said that there is no “correct” way to do it. Whatever method has Congress’s blessing at the time is the method to be used.

Washington’s resident population in the 2010 Census is 6,724,540. Adding in the 28,829 Washingtonians overseas, the state’s apportionment population is 6,753,369. Washington has the 12th highest count of overseas residents, one place better than its overall population rank. Texas, #2 overall, has the highest number of overseas persons, while California ranks third (behind Florida). Alaska, way down at #47 in population, ranks 26th in overseas employees.

Since 1940, the method of equal proportions has been used for reapportionment. After each state receives the required minimum of one seat, the other 385 seats are assigned to states in descending order of priority value (PV), where PV for potential seats 2, 3, 4, … is calculated as:
where n is the state’s potential seat number. In other words, the PV for a state’s second seat is its apportionment population divided by the square root of two. For its third seat, divide by the square root of (3*2=)six, then continue with the square roots of (4*3=)12, (5*4=)20, 30, 42, and so forth. By the time we get to the 55th seat, the divisor is the square root of 2970 (that’s 55*54). After all these values are calculated, rank-order them in descending order and assign the seats until 385 of them have been filled.

Not surprisingly, the 51st seat goes to the largest state, California. Texas gets #52, followed by another CA seat, then NY, FL, CA again, TX again, and so on. Washington’s first added seat (its second overall) is #78 and its next is #122. The state’s ninth seat, equalling its 2000 number of Representatives, comes in at #391.

It gets really interesting as we come to the final few seats. The assignments for the last ten seats (#426-#435), along with the next ten near-misses, are displayed below:

The new WA-10 seat comes in at #432, comfortably above the cut-off. Minnesota’s eighth seat wins the final position in the House (too bad, as it’s likely that Michelle Bachmann’s district would have been axed). MN just barely avoided subtracting a seat from its 2000 allocation. At #434, California narrowly averted losing a seat in the House; if the Golden State had done so, it would have been its first-ever lost seat. Washington, by the way, has never lost a seat either. It may be poetic justice that North Carolina is the first runner-up this time around, after winning the final spot in 2000. The Tarheel State missed adding another seat by that thin margin.

It turns out that using resident population instead of apportionment population wouldn’t have altered the composition of the next Congress. The rank-order of the last five seats would be different, with Washington at #433 and TX-36 taking the final spot.

It’s likely that none of the above is of much interest to the Redistricting Commission. They probably don’t particularly care how it came to pass that they’re tasked to draw ten CDs instead of nine. It falls to reapportionment geeks like me to look at this sort of information. There’s a pile of additional information here that I find fascinating — trends in the distribution of House seats over time, states that actually lost population between Censuses (hint: several states in the plains in the 1930s … can you say “Dust Bowl”?), states that have never lost seats, states on long seat-losing streaks (Pennsylvania has lost at least one seat in every Census since 1930), and much more.

If you’re interested enough in redistricting, tune in to the Redistricting Commission’s web feed at 10:30am. It won’t be great theater, but the final result of all that line-drawing and all that negotiation will affect your political life for a decade. And whether you know it or not, that’s important.

[UPDATE, 1:30pm]

An item I meant to include in the original post — Washington wasn’t even close to reaching 10 seats in the 2000 Census. Its ninth seat came in as #407, and the next potential WA seat (#455) missed the cut by 20 positions.

The third iteration of draft LD maps, in PDF format, is now available at the WSRC site.

A couple more (way-cool, IMHO) links from the Census website:

• Apportionment methods and factors considered, from 1790 to the present
• How various apportionment methods can produce differing allocations, with examples

Video “explanation” of the apportionment process, from the Census Bureau:

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, thirty-fifth President of the United States, was assassinated 48 years ago on this date. My memory of that day, of the following weekend, is clearer than my recall of yesterday’s lunch.

Some small part of this phenomenon might be benign senile forgetfulness [jokes and insults at my expense expected, and welcomed]. But CRAFT syndrome, as it’s commonly known, explains, if anything, only the second half of the comparison. The vivid immediacy of November 22, 1963 in my mind’s eye is something else entirely.

For Americans of my age group (I was 13 at the time), the shocking murder of JFK is the seminal moment of our lives. That day irrevocably altered the way the world worked for us. In my opinion, every single one of the 17,532 days since then exists on the continuum that began that afternoon. What Pearl Harbor was for my parents’ generation, what 9/11 probably represents for more recent generations, 11/22/1963 was the “where were you when … ?” moment for me and my fellow Baby Boomers.

For the record, where I was was Heritage Junior High School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Along with the other members of the school band, I had just returned from outdoor practice — we were going to play at the next day’s high school football game, a contest that never happened — and was stowing my instrument when the principal informed us of the shooting over the PA system. The news was too much to process immediately, so we mostly sat in stunned silence. The school was on the far side of the township from my home, but I have no real memory of the long ride home with a passel of fellow adolescents in that yellow school bus. I do remember the weekend, as the whole family stared endlessly at the TV news reports. We watched the lying-in-state at the Capitol. We watched Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday. We watched the state funeral on Monday. We were in shock throughout.

We had made plans to spend Thanksgiving with relatives in the DC suburbs that year. It was a very somber holiday indeed. While there, we went to Arlington Cemetery to pay our respects to the President. On a bright, cold, and windy afternoon, we joined a long line of our fellow Americans, shuffling slowly and silently (except for the sobs) past the freshly-dug gravesite. It was so soon after the event that we had to carefully step over the eternal flame’s gas line, which had not yet been buried.

Over the years, I’ve written a number of November 22 essays on my blog, Peace Tree Farm. In addition to a version of the 2008 DailyKos diary linked above, they are: Forty years (2003), The end of the innocence (2004), and 43 … and 46 (2006).

For me, the death of JFK marks the day on which “The Sixties” began. The idea of a counterculture was inconceivable on November 21, all but inevitable on November 23. We can argue about when The Sixties ended (probably somewhere between the 1972 election and the first Rolling Stone article about disco, in September 1973), but I think it would be a real reach to put their birth anywhere other than the Kennedy assassination.

In Canada, Australia, India, Kenya, the UK, and the remainder of the 54 Commonwealth nations, today is Remembrance Day, a holiday honoring those who gave their lives for King (or Queen) and country while serving in the armed forces. As such, Remembrance Day is much more like our Memorial Day.

In my youth, this holiday was alternatively called Armistice Day. Officially, it became Veterans Day in 1954, but of course many adults kept calling it by its original name for years and years thereafter. The armistice referred to in the earlier title was the one that ended hostilities on the Western Front of the Great War. That occurred, famously, in Marshal Foch’s railway car, deep in France’s Forest of Compiègne. Though signed by representatives of Germany, France, and the Allies in the wee hours of that morning, the agreed-upon time for the laying-down of arms was “the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month”.

Today, on the 93rd anniversary of that armistice, on Veterans Day, we can go that timestamp one better, adding “of the 11th year”. Hence, my decision to publish this epistle at 11am on 11/11/11.

Over at Peace Tree Farm, I’ve written posts marking Veterans Day on almost every November 11 since 2003. Somehow, I missed it last year, breaking a seven-year streak. In case you’re interested, here are links to those essays:

• On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month (2003)
• Eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month … again (2004)
• 11th, 11th, 11th … Veterans Day (2005)
• How will this war be memorialized? (2006)
• On Veterans Day (2007)
• A different sort of Veterans Day (2008)
• Lest we forget (2009)

I’m not a veteran myself. To be honest, only a few of my friends and family served in the military. I come from a long line of non-soldiers … had a student deferment during Vietnam and then a high enough number in the first draft lottery to avoid being called, my father was 4-F in World War II (he was deaf in one ear), and my maternal grandfather was a temporary New York City cop while many of the real policemen were marching “over there” in World War I. My father’s father did serve, if you consider playing the French horn in Czar Nicholas II’s army band to be military service.

But you don’t have to be a veteran to honor those who did serve. So here’s to Shaun Dale, whose blog Upper Left has been running almost as long as my own, and to Michael Hood of the well-respected BlatherWatch. Here’s to HA commenter-extraordinaire Roger Rabbit and to Robby, occasional HA commenter and erstwhile blogger on the late, lamented Effin’Unsound. And a salute to my Congressman Jim McDermott, one of only 90 House members with military service of any sort. Jim was a Navy psychiatrist treating sailors and soldiers with PTSD during the Vietnam War (to be fair, both of Washington’s Republican Congressmen, Dave Reichert and Doc Hastings, were reservists).

And, in fact, greetings and salutations in honor of all of the veterans hereabouts.

When the Washington State Democrats hold their annual “Maggies” (Warren G. Magnuson Awards dinner/fundraiser) on Saturday, the keynote speaker will be former two-term Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak. In and of itself, that’s not particularly notable … the WA Dems bring in an out-of-stater every year. Last year it was Iowa’s Senator Tom Harkin, and previous speakers include Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean.

Joe Sestak is a different kind of politician. I refer not only to his biography — the highest-ranked military officer ever elected to Congress (he was a three-star Vice Admiral), commander of a carrier strike group in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, deputy to the Chief of Naval Operations, National Security Council liaison, director of a top-secret Navy counterterrorism unit — but to some unusual-for-a-politician attributes.

I’ve been a Sestak fan for quite some time. Not long after he first decided to run for Congress in 2006, he participated in the YearlyKos (now Netroots Nation) gathering in Las Vegas. In his post-YK diary post, I wrote the following comment:

thank you, Admiral

I knew very little about you before attending YK, but since returning home I’ve made a (very small, alas) contribution to your campaign through ActBlue.

I don’t want to sound like I’m dissing Eric Massa, your colleague on the panel at YK, because I appreciate his fire. But I found your quiet, measured, from-the-soul passion far more compelling than his fervor. I can imagine that in a debate against Curt Weldon’s delusional bombast, your approach will be all the more effective.

Your words carry immense authority. As a non-military person, I find myself reassessing my views on the military if a man with a style such as yours can so successfully command a carrier battle group.

I grew up across the Delaware, in Cherry Hill. So most of the towns and locations you mentioned are familiar to me. I wish you the best of luck in your campaign, and hope that I’ll be able to put together the funds to send along some additional tangible $upport.

At that YearlyKos panel, Massa strutted and shouted, even tearing off his dress shirt at one point to reveal some clever (he thought) t-shirt. Though I had no idea he’d turn out to be so wacky, it was readily apparent to me that he was hiding behind all the noise he made. On the other hand, Sestak spoke slowly and carefully, but it was evidently from the heart and deeply personal. The authority and passion of his presentation made it clear how such a soft-spoken man could have inspired sailors in a combat zone.

I made small contributions as well to Sestak’s 2008 re-election campaign and to his Senate campaign in 2010. In that one, he edged Republican Democratic incumbent Arlen Specter in the primary but lost narrowly to Club For Growth teahadist Pat Toomey in November.

As a longtime backer, I wasn’t particularly surprised when I received an email from Sestak a couple of weeks ago. After all, I get messages daily, from dozens and dozens of candidates, legislators, and interest groups. The content, however, was completely unexpected. Noting that he’d soon be here in Seattle (though he didn’t mention the reason for the visit), he invited me and his other Washington supporters to join him for coffee on Saturday so that he could thank us for our help. That was all … just to thank us, just to meet us. No request for a check or Paypal or credit card, not even to “retire his campaign debt”. There was no “ask” of any sort.

To say this action was unusual is a vast understatement. I don’t recall anything remotely like it in my years of political activities. Politicians don’t go out of their way to thank (or even notice) small donors like me. Hell, they don’t take a step from morning to night without pleading for cash. Yet here’s Joe Sestak, 3000 miles from home, who wants to spend an hour or so doing precisely the opposite.

Not to suggest a deeper meaning, I’m macabrely amused by the keynoter choices of the WA Dems and WA GOP at their big fundraisers. On Tuesday, the WSRP’s Fall Dinner featured political trickster/Plame unmasker/US Attorney firer/Dubya inventor/secret superPAC creator Karl Rove. The guy whose friend Dubya calls him Turd Blossom. The guy who, through his shadowy American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS organizations, funneled nearly $5,000,000 into last year’s Murray-Rossi race.

Make of the Sestak vs. Rove comparison what you will. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to shooting the shit with Joe on Saturday.

Last Thursday, Pramila Jayapal and George Cheung of United for Fair Representation wrote an op-ed column in the Seattle Times. Though it ended up on the doorsteps of a couple hundred thousand readers, their opinion piece was actually addressed to an audience of four — the members of the Washington State Redistricting Commission.

Jayapal and Cheung are challenging the Commissioners to create a “majority-minority” Congressional District at their next public meeting, tomorrow morning in Olympia. They’ll probably get their wish … which, sad to say, might eventually work against their interests.

Before explaining what I mean, we need some background information. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 contains several provisions that bar racial discrimination in redistricting plans. Sixteen states are required to go through “preclearance” of their plans, automatic submission to their plans to the feds; Washington is not one of those states. In practice, application of the VRA has resulted in district lines that collect members of a racial group into one district, thereby greatly increasing the probability that that CD will be represented by a member of that group. One might call it “reverse gerrymandering”, concentrating a group instead of diluting their influence by drawing districts that put small pockets of the group into several districts dominated by other ethnicities. In creating such Congressional Districts, you can end up with some really ludicrous maps. For instance, look at Illinois’s 4^th District, in which the two convoluted sections of Chicago’s Latino communities are connected by the median strip of I-294.

Another majority-minority district is the 12^th District of North Carolina, which crawls along I-85 picking up African-American communities while skipping past other towns. It even looks a little bit like the original 1812 gerrymander.

Those two CDs, and others around the country, achieved the goal of fostering diversity in the House of Representatives. Luis Gutiérrez represents IL-04 in Washington and the Congressman from NC-12 is African-American Mel Watt. But I doubt that the same could easily happen if our Redistricting Commission takes the advice of Jayapal and Cheung, because any such district would be majority-minorities. Unlike the largely Mexican-American IL-04 or the mostly black NC-12, a Washington district would be Eritrean and Pakistani, Thai and Guatemalan, Indian and American Indian, Vietnamese and African-American, Iraqi and Filipino … on and on and on. No race, no language group, no national origin would predominate. Some of those groups are antagonistic to others — would a Bengali vote for a Pakistani? a Honduran for a Salvadoran? an Iraqi for an Iranian? With such splintering, in a multi-candidate electoral race, it just might turn out that someone from the largest single demographic group in the CD (non-Hispanic whites) would win.

This is not to suggest that racial identity would be the reason for any citizen to vote for a particular candidate. I’m merely saying that the situation wouldn’t be nearly as cut-and-dried as it would be in a locale with a large concentration of a single racial/ethnic group.

There’s another issue as well. Republicans love majority-minority Congressional Districts. Racial minorities are generally Democrats, and concentrating a racial group into, say, a 75-25 Democratic district may make it possible to generate a bunch of 53-47 Republican CDs around it. That’s probably not the case in Illinois, where the excluded middle of IL-04 is largely a black community, but it certainly applies to North Carolina. And it could happen in Washington as well.

In their op-ed, Jayapal and Cheung summarize the first round of Redistricting Commission maps (emphasis added):

Republican commissioners Slade Gorton and Tom Huff and Democratic commissioner Tim Ceis made strong and positive statements that reflected their appreciation for people’s participation in the process and their belief that there was a real need for this change. Huff’s map exactly matched our unity map. No maps had all of our asks reflected but many had some and we will continue to push for as much representation as possible for people of color.

While Tom Huff may have given United for Fair Representation what they want, he found a lot of ways to screw Democrats. His map, IMHO, is even more Republican-friendly than Skeletor’s Gorton’s. For instance, he separates uber-Democratic San Juan County from the Whatcom County-based CD, replacing those voters with large chunks of rural Republicans in eastern King, Snohomish, and Skagit. I see that district as lean-R. Huff drew four strong-R districts on his map, and another that could swing that way when Norm Dicks decides to hang ’em up. Also, he has the Seattle-based CD wrapping around the northern border of Lake Washington, far enough to include most of Kirkland. His map certainly doesn’t come close to representing the state’s overall makeup.

Tomorrow, we’ll get to see each Commissioner’s second iteration. It will be interesting to see who has moved his boundaries the most, as well as who has hardened his position. I still have confidence that the Commission will agree on a final map by the end of the year. And I think it’ll have a majority-minorities Congressional District. But I don’t have much confidence that the m-m district will be represented by a minority group Congress(wo)man. If Tom Huff or Slade Gorton gets his way, it will be slightly more difficult to elect enough Democrats to retake control of the House from the crazies who run it these days. And a Democratic Congress would do far, far more for Jayapal and Cheung (and the rest of us) than building the Congressional District they seek.