With 18 states done or almost done with the once-a-decade process of redrawing congressional district lines, the likelihood is strong that more sitting House members will be forced into face-offs than in the past 30 years.
“Redistricting is term limits by another name,” Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said in a telephone interview.
In the maps drawn so far, at least 13 districts in California, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan and North Carolina are being reshaped in a way that put the homes of two incumbents into the same territory. Some of those House members have decided to run for another seat and others have yet to say whether they’ll run at all.
Two more such pairings are expected but not yet set in Massachusetts and New Jersey, and more are probable in the 25 states that aren’t far along in the remapping process, including Pennsylvania and Ohio.
The problem is with Republicans controlling redistricting processes in a majority of the states, it's Democrats who are going to be forced into matches where two Representatives enter and only one leaves, and Republicans are hoping by doing so, they can blunt or even deflect the Dems' planned takeover of the House.
This is why allowing Republicans to run rampant at local and state level elections was such a bad way to teach Democrats a "lesson" in 2010. You literally couldn't have picked a worse time to do it, and this is why.
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