Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see occasional rain and drizzle with a high of fifty-one. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 7:12 PM, for 12h 22m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred sixty-fifth day.
On this day in 1989, the Exxon Valdez runs aground and spills 10.8 million gallons (260,000 bbl) of oil into Prince William Sound, Alaska.
Recommended for reading in full:
David A. Lieb reports GOP redistricting edge moderated Democrats’ 2018 gains, Associated Press analysis finds:
The AP examined all U.S. House races and about 4,900 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year using a statistical method of calculating partisan advantage that is designed to flag cases of potential political gerrymandering. A similar analysis also showed a GOP advantage in the 2016 elections.
The AP used the so-called “efficiency gap” test in part because it was one of the analytical tools cited in a Wisconsin gerrymandering case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 and is part of a North Carolina case scheduled to be argued on Tuesday before the court. In that case, justices will decide whether to uphold a lower court ruling that struck down North Carolina’s congressional districts as an unconstitutional political gerrymander favoring Republicans.
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In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has repeatedly found a heavy GOP bias in the way the state’s 99 Assembly districts were drawn after the 2010 Census, using a different way of measuring the gerrymander than the “efficiency gap.”
In each election from 2012 through 2018, the Wisconsin legislative map has all but ensured Republican control of the Assembly even in years when there are significantly more voters voting Democratic statewide.
Under the GOP-drawn map, more than 60 percent of the Assembly seats are more Republican in their makeup than the state as a whole, giving the party a large “baked-in” edge for legislative control.
Some of the map’s partisan tilt reflects the concentration of Democratic voters in urban areas, especially Milwaukee and Madison. But much of the GOP tilt is a direct byproduct of the way the districts were drawn in 2011 to maximize the number of seats with a Republican tilt.
The efficiency gap analysis showed more states with a Republican edge than a Democratic one in their U.S. and state House districts.
Yet “when you look at the nation as a whole, it’s not just a radically tilted map,” said Eric McGhee, a researcher at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California who developed the efficiency gap model. “It’s more that in these certain key states, they’re paving the way for things to be much worse in the future” through gerrymandering.