Redistricting Plan

This plan attempts to achieve proportional partisan representation while maintaining traditional redistricting principles as much as possible. Due to Pennsylvania’s troubling past filled with some of the most extreme partisan gerrymandering in the United States, it was essential to create a plan that reflected the political preferences of Pennsylvanians. Since the past two Presential elections were tightly contested in Pennsylvania with Donald Trump winning the state by 0.72% in 2016 and Joe Biden winning the state by 1.17% in 2020, this plan based its partisan fairness on the assumption that the Republican and Democratic parties each receive 50% of votes from the entire state of Pennsylvania. This proposal also attempted to ensure that Pennsylvania retains at least 3 competitive districts. The increase in political extremism is a concern that is rarely mentioned when discussing the harms of partisan gerrymandering. As President Obama recently penned, “Fewer competitive districts increases partisanship, since candidates who only have to appeal to primary voters have no incentive to compromise or move to the center.” The partisan split that this map proposes is 7 reliable Democratic districts, 7 reliable Republican districts, and 3 highly competitive districts.