MAKING ILLINOIS SAFE FOR ERIC ZORN.

He came to the defense of Illinois Democrats creating safe Congressional districts because Republicans in other states were also creating safe districts.  "Then I look around our deeply polarized country, see how high the stakes are in the fight for the future and how important it is for the Democrats to hold the line where they can."  The new map is out, and the Bantustans have some really weird shapes.  I'm not familiar enough any more with the census tracts to rule on whether Chicago has been subdivided into one predominantly black district and another predominantly Hispanic district, so as to create the majority-minority districts, the better to have a diverse collection of faces (the minds are interchangeable) in Congress.

Perhaps those tricks will backfire.

The flip side of gerrymandering as many winnable districts as possible for Democratic candidates, however, is that you have to pack as many Republican voters as possible into those three other districts. By cutting places like Bloomington, Champagne [c.q.], Decatur, and Peoria out of their surrounding, redder areas, Democrats have created some serious vote sinks where Republicans make up more than 65 percent of the population.

Instead of a reddish-purple downstate, you've got that ragged blue scar and a bunch of districts where the Republican primary election will effectively decide who goes to Congress. And when primary elections have more significance than general elections, it gives more power to a party's base.

There's also one district several hundred miles long, stitching together all sorts of sparsely settled flatlands that are more than four leagues from the heavily Democratic clusters outside Chicago and along the Alton Route.  So much for creating compact sets.

The legislature had to craft fewer Congressional districts because the state is losing population, perhaps because of the fine job petty dictator governor J. B. Pritzker is doing chasing productive people out.  Whether Republicans, or some other politicians, will be able to compete more effectively in all these pocket boroughs by running against that record remains to be seen.