GOP plan would have given Mich. to Romney, despite solid loss

A plan put forward by Republican state Rep. Pete Lund of Shelby Township in the 2011-12 legislative session would have given Michigan to Mitt Romney in the November presidential election, though President Obama received far more votes.

That’s the logical conclusion after looking at a report released earlier this month by a group called the Republican State Leadership Council.

The RSLC report  boasts about the triumph of a GOP effort to gerrymander as many congressional districts as possible across the nation. The group singled out Michigan as one of the most successful efforts to draw district lines in a highly partisan manner.

Kudos to Gongwer News Service in Lansing for breaking this story (in Michigan), which reveals the ugly underbelly of the redistricting process.

In Michigan, this project, code-named REDMAP, successfully kept the state’s congressional delegation in GOP hands. The party's edge in seats is 9-5 despite the fact that Democratic congressional candidates in November received 240,000 more votes in Michigan overall than the Republican candidates.

That’s the ultimate proof of gerrymandering. (A similar disparity emerged in state House races, where Democrats garnered far more votes than the GOP candidates, yet the Republicans maintained a 59-51 edge in seats.)

This is shameful, politically motivated cartography at its worst.

According to Gongwer, the RSLC is an umbrella organization for Republican state officials, including lieutenant governors, secretaries of state, attorney generals and legislators.

The report by the organization, issued on January 4, said the successful candidate recruitment efforts, fundraising and campaign messaging still had to "rest on the congressional district lines, and this was an area where Republicans had an unquestioned advantage."

A $30 million effort was launched prior to the 2010 elections – and prior to the release of the 2010 U.S. Census results, which initiate the redistricting process.

In Michigan, the GOP won big in 2010 and that put the Republicans in the state House and Senate in full control of the redrawing process.

A key player in that much-criticized process was Lund, chairman of the House Elections and Redistricting Committee. The Shelby Township Republican has repeatedly defended the methods used to draw new districts  -- including the snake-like shape of the new 14^th District, which some political activists have labeled  one of the nation’s worst 2012 examples of gerrymandering.

But Lund is front and center on this issue for another reason. He has been pushing a bill for some time that would have Michigan’s Electoral College votes distributed based on the election outcome in each congressional district, not on a winner-take-all basis.

If Lund’s plan had been in place last fall, Mitt Romney would have received nine electoral votes in Michigan, based on the number of districts he carried. Obama would have been allotted just five of the district-based electoral votes, though he carried the state by nearly 450,000 votes.

Of course, the reason for these huge disparities is the partisan lines drawn to favor the GOP. The president won the state with a solid 52.4 percent to 44.7 edge. But the Lund plan would have given Romney a 9-5 win, despite the vote totals.

 

So, is Lund rapidly retreating from his proposal? The last I heard, he was preparing to introduce it as legislation again in the 2013-14 session.

(sorry, I had some font/letting problems halfway through this post)