Charlie Cook has his newest round of Partisan Voting Index (PVI) figures for Congressional districts around the country out based on the 2008 election results, and they're a tribute to the good job North Carolina Democrats have done with the state's redistricting.
4 of the 50 most Republican districts in the country are in North Carolina with Howard Coble's 25th, Patrick McHenry's 34th, Walter Jones' 39th, and Virginia Foxx's 48th.
To put in perspective how remarkable that is you can add up all of the other Congressional districts from states that went for Barack Obama and there are only five of them among the 50 most Republican in the country, barely more than North Carolina alone.
Why is that a good thing for Democrats? Bunching the Republicans so heavily into a few districts has created five districts that lie in the median of competitiveness- 146th to 290th- and there are Democrats representing all five of them in Congress. For the most part Democrats just run better campaigns in North Carolina than Republicans do and that means holding a disproportionate share of the seats in the state's delegation- so long as the districts are competitive enough to be winnable in the first place.
It also means though that it will be hard to carve out a 9th Democratic Congressional district with the 2010 redistricting if the state gets a 14th seat.
Anyway, interesting stuff.
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