Finally Drawing the Line

Much as I try to be focused and informed, that likely won't be the case here today.  But I can be reasonably close to what I'm talking about, so bear with me.  

What I mean by this is that, when out in the car yesterday, I was listening to a discussion on MSNBC over Sirius/SM radio about redistricting in Pennsylvania (which was holding its primaries that day).  I wasn't able to see the maps they were talking about with new district lines that have been drawn, nor the charts, and I couldn't write down the details that the analyst was talking about -- nor even tell you who it was.  About the most specifics I can pass along is that the host was Katy Tur.  So, that's a start!  But I did get the general gist.

And the gist was that the analyst explaining how the court-ordered redistricting of Pennsylvania (after a lawsuit over illegal gerrymandering) could drastically change the House of Representatives landscape.  He went through a long list of the new 18 districts and show how not only more balanced they were for the entire state, but that they significantly changed districts that had previously been Republican to now being Democratic -- and heavily Democratic in most cases.  In fact, he said that as many as six House seats in Pennsylvania alone could flip from Republican to Democratic based purely on the new districts.  And given that Democrats only need to flip 23 House seats to gain control, this one state could provide over a quarter of those.

As I said, I can't be more specific than that.  I did however track down a article from Vox today which went into detail about many of the most-important House races in Pennsylvania.  You can read the whole thing here, but this one excerpt gives a general idea of the whole thing.  It discusses the race in the Pennsylvania 6th District, where highly touted Democrat Chrissy Houlahan announced last year that she would run against Republican incumbent Ryan Costello.-- 

But things went better for Democrats than they could have dreamed. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s new congressional map, released in February, reshaped Costello’s district from a closely divided one to one Hillary Clinton would have won by nearly 10 points.

Costello was so irate that he quit the race, but, to Republicans’ chagrin, he did so after the filing deadline had passed, once it was too late to recruit another candidate of their choice. That means the GOP’s stuck with Greg McCauley, a little-known attorney who’d filed when Costello was still in. This is viewed as one of the Democrats’ most likely pickups in the country, which means Houlahan will probably be a member of Congress next year.
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So, that's the overall larger point of the article.  And of the redistricting situation in Pennsylvania.  Sorry for being less detailed and specific than usual, but...you should be pretty close.

Here, too, is a short, 2-1/2 minute report from a local TV station WPVI in Philadelphia where reporter Brian Taff explains the redistricting changes in the state.  (There's a 30-second ad that starts the video.) 

​It doesn't seem to want to embed, so if nothing shows up, you can find it here.