http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=164x2273
Oh my.
It's not saying much, but even the Nebraska forum on Skins's island is more active than the cooking and baking forum lately.
LiberalAndProud (1000+ posts) Mon Jun-27-11 01:04 PM
Original message
Don Walton: Big 3rd leverages Republican power
Seventy-five counties, 263 towns, 244,872 homes, about 41,000 farms.
Nebraska's new 3rd Congressional District spreads across 68,201 square miles.
That's the same size as Florida and bigger than 29 states.
-snip-
Democrats may be competitive in Omaha and Lincoln, but the 3rd overwhelms them in statewide elections with huge Republican margins.
Read more: http://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and...
No primitives came to the Nebraska forum to discuss this.
Adrian Smith lives in Gering, a short drive from the Wyoming border, but his district now reaches to South Sioux City and Falls City.
Redistricting spreads the 3rd across the state from border to border on the north and the south all the way to Iowa and Missouri.
In line with his new responsibilities, Smith will be in South Sioux City today to inspect flooding in Dakota County.
On a map, the new 3rd looks like open jaws with Omaha and Lincoln and a big chunk of eastern Nebraska in its mouth.
But that's way too much to swallow in a state where the population base steadily moves eastward and has concentrated in Lincoln and metropolitan Omaha.
Along with population goes power.
The Big 3rd has learned how to compensate for that.
Rural Nebraska could have lost two legislative seats in this year's redistricting. Instead, when all the manipulation and maneuvering at the Legislature was done, it lost only one.
In statewide elections, the 3rd continues to make its voice heard.
That GOP domination -- western Nebraska last elected a Democratic congressman 53 years ago -- also gives the 3rd disproportionate power within a statewide Republican primary election.
That could be a hidden advantage for Deb Fischer in a 2012 GOP Senate primary race because she's a Sandhills rancher and western state legislator while the other two leading contenders, Jon Bruning and Don Stenberg, hail from the Lincoln-Omaha urban complex.
A counter argument presented to me over a sandwich and a cup of soup last week is that Stenberg can exercise a long-standing philosophical claim to that conservative 3rd District vote. And, of course, Bruning has piled up his share of votes out there, too.
Here's the most recent dramatic evidence of how the one-sided Republican numbers in the 3rd District can overwhelm the more competitive politics of Omaha's 2nd District and Lincoln's 1st District.
In the 2008 presidential vote, Barack Obama defeated John McCain by about 3,000 votes in the 2nd District (Omaha). McCain bested Obama by about 27,000 votes in the 1st (Lincoln).
In the 3rd, it was McCain by 96,000 votes.
The total Republican vote by congressional district was 148,000 in the 1st, 135,000 in the 2nd and 169,000 in the 3rd.
The bad news for the Dems is that the state legislature managed to make the Omaha district change from very faint pink to pink, and the Lincoln district from pink to light red. It's remarkable, what smart people can do.
This is the current map, not the new one effective with the elections of 2012.
(http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/Eferrari/CongressDistricts.jpg)
The areas circled in black were added to the 3rd district.
A part of western Omaha was added to the 1st (Lincoln) district, changing it from pink to light red.
A part of the area directly south of Omaha (Bellevue, Offutt Air Force Base) was added to the 2nd (Omaha) district, changing it from faint pink to pink.