The Runback: Portal Madness
The Maryland Citizens Redistricting Commission website includes all of the citizen plans that have been submitted. Hilarity ensues
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2022 Candidate Information
We have launched a one-stop shop for candidate information for the 2022 Election. Bookmark this page, as it will be updated through the 2022 Election. This includes our first round of candidate surveys, which includes candidates like Jim Shalleck for Attorney General, Kayden Snyder for County Commissioner, and more.
Our New Show: Chalk Session
Welcome to Chalk Session, The Duckpin's newest show where we break down and analyze political commercials.
On our first show, we analyze Dan Cox's new spot entitled "Propaganda".
You know of an ad we should review? Email us and tell us about it.
News and Politics
The Ego Has Landed: Socialist Richard Elliott's latest gambit is egomania run wild. It's also quite deceiving.
Republican Gubernatorial Primary Gets Stupid: The Silly Season Starts Sooner than it needed to as Steele and Cox trade barbs.
September 2021 Maryland Gubernatorial Power Rankings: The Deck gets Shuffled.
Sports
The OCHO: Week 1 Take a look at our newest column about the NFL. Take a look for it every Monday.
Week 2 Wackiness: Week 2 of the College Football Season was supposed to bland. It was not.
NFL Preview, Week 2: How close did Padre come to being correct?
Griffleball League wins NWLA Championship: The Celebration Station finally has its championship.
Culture
My Favorite Comedian: A tribute to the late Norm Macdonald.
The Monday Thought
I know I have written extensively about the Maryland Citizens Redistricting Commission ,including in this space last week.
But I wanted to draw attention to a fun part of the website, and that’s the Citizen Plan Submissions site. To date, the Commission has posted 38 different Congressional or legislative redistricting plans. I encourage you to take a look at them. I’ll highlight a few.
Some of the plans make a lot of sense, and look like the Commission plans.
Some of the plans are so gerrymandered that even Martin O’Malley might be embarrassed to submit them.
While most of the plans focus on Congressional redistricting instead of legislative redistricting, some of the submitted legislative plans show how little regard the left has for the state constitution and their insistence on bringing even more extreme gerrymandering to the state level.
The most egregious of all plans is the one below. Just look at the hilarity it gives us.
The author of this map was clearly not familiar with the Court of Appeals decision that rendered Parris Glendenning’s 2002 legislative districts unconstitutional. Not only does this map repeat the sin of crossing the Patapsco River as that map did. But this map also manages to connect a quarter of Anne Arundel County across the bay with Kent and Talbot Counties, and half of Queen Anne’s County.
This is the opposite of compact and contiguous.
All joking aside, I’m very glad that the Commission decided to make these plans public. It tells us a few things:
People Care About Congress Most of All: It’s a sad reality but people are so laser focused on Washington instead of Annapolis that Congressional districts are where all the action is. Part of that may be due to the fact that creating eight districts is easier than creating 47 districts of even 141 districts.
Citizen Submissions are Primarily Focused on Compact Districts: Most (not all) of these submissions are clearly done in a way to draw the districts as compactly as possible. It shows us what the appetite is among the citizenry as far as what districts should look like.
The Tolerance for Tomfoolery is Low: We’ve heard for years ever since Governor Larry Hogan started talking about redistricting reform that people want sane districts and not Rorschach inkblots. And that, for the most part is what we have seen from these plans.
As I mentioned last week, the Congressional plans created by the Committee are quite fair. As is the State Senate proposal. I can’t wait to see their House proposal this week and see if we get the single-member districts the people demand.