Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives proposed a new congressional map for the 2022 election. Their map shows 17 congressional districts, down from the current 18 districts. According to the 2020 Census, the state saw a slight uptick in its population, but Pennsylvania’s increase was small in comparison to states like Florida, Texas, Idaho, and Arizona. So those states will have additional members representing them in Congress, while Pennsylvania will lose a seat.
The Republican legislators used a map drawn by Amanda Holt, a Lehigh County piano teacher. According to Spotlight.com, “Holt became a well-known redistricting activist a decade ago and was a plaintiff in a successful case against previous state House and Senate maps.”
The Inquirer wrote Holt’s map favors Republicans more than the current one, according to an analysis conducted for The Inquirer by the nonpartisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project. The current map was imposed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2018, after it threw out a Republican-drawn map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The Holt proposal is less skewed toward Republicans than that 2011 map.
First 2022 Pennsylvania Congressional Map, proposed by Republicans in the PA House.
In Pennsylvania, new congressional maps are created every 10 years as a result of a bill that comes out of the state legislature. Both the Senate and the House have to pass the bill, and the governor has to sign. If the governor and the legislature reach an impasse (not at all unlikely) the Pennsylvania Supreme Court oversees the drawing of the map, as they did in 2018.
In 2001 and 2011, both houses of the legislature, the governor and the Supreme Court were all controlled by Republicans. The State Senate and the House are still under Republican control, but Governor Tom Wolf is a Democrat, and Democrats outnumber Republicans on the Supreme Court by 5-2.
The current proposed map has most of Montgomery County and all of Lower Merion and Narberth in the Fourth Congressional District.