September 20, 2011 01:53 AM UTC

We have new State House and State Senate maps

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• by: Dan Willis

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Today, the Reapportionment passed new State House and State Senate District maps. They will be sent to the CO Supreme Court for approval.

There may be a little wiggle room for a court challenge, but I really don’t think one will be successful unless there is some issue that everyone, including me, has overlooked.

View the SD map here.

View the HD map here.

One technical note, the numbering of the districts will still be changing a little as the Commission passed a motion to allow incumbents who do not have other incumbents in their new district to keep the same district number. A special motion was passed to give Pat Steadman SD31 even though he technically has another incumbent (Joyce Foster) in the district because Joyc e has already announced she will not run.

There was and is a lot of debate over what is a “competitive” district. I will use my own yardstick in this regard and I differentiate between leaning D, leaning R, and very competitive. My process is use an average of the D & R votes for Treasurer and for CU Regent in 2010. If the result is +/- 5% of 50-50 that is leaning and if it is +/- 2% of 50-50, that is very competitive.

Using this standard the SD map has:

14 Safe R seats

3 Leaning R seats

9 Safe D seats

4 Leaning D Seats

5 Very Competitive Very Competitive

And the HD map has:

23 Safe R seats

4 Leaning R seats

15 Safe D seats

9 Leaning D seats

14 Very Competitive seats