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U.S.-WASHINGTON, D.C.-HOUSE-SOCIAL SPENDING BILL
NEW YORK (AP) — Democrats braced for disaster when state legislatures began redrawing congressional maps, fearing that Republican dominance of statehouses would tilt power away from them for the next decade.
But as the redistricting process reaches its final stages, that anxiety is beginning to ease.
For Democrats, the worst case scenario of losing well over a dozen seats in the U.S. House appears unlikely to happen. After some aggressive map drawing of their own in states with Democratic legislatures, some Democrats predict the typical congressional district will shift from leaning to the right of the national vote to matching it, ending a distortion that gave the GOP a built-in advantage over the past five House elections.
“We have stymied their intent to gerrymander their way to a House majority,” Kelly Ward Burton, head of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said of the GOP.
The nation’s congressional maps won’t be settled for several more months. Republicans in some large states like Florida have yet to finalize proposed changes, giving the GOP a last-minute opportunity to seek an advantage.
But the picture could come into greater clarity this week when New York’s redistricting commission submits to the state legislature a second attempt to draw a map. If the Democratic-controlled Legislature rejects the map, it can take over drawing new lines in Democrats’ favor. That would almost certainly blunt the GOP advantage that has been in place since the last redistricting process in 2010.
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