As you can tell from the map, these districts have been gerrymandered at some point. The problem is that each district has an incumbent who wants to be protected and in this case, the incumbent Democrats can lean on the Democrats in the state legislature to do just that. Therefore the new map must protect those incumbent Democrats to get passed by the state legislature in the first place. When a congressman lives at one end of such a district, there is no way to cut the pie and not have the result look fairly gerrymandered. Of course, the same is not true for Republican incumbents. However, there is no need to sock it to the Republicans because the geography already dictates that they are going to lose a seat. In the following map, the white dots show where the congressmen currently live:
As you can see the purple and tan districts have three white dots which represent three incumbent congressmen. There is no way without horrible gerrymandering to prevent two of these three from running against each other. Naturally a Democrat controlled legislature has no reason to help these three Republicans out. The fact that each district has to cover more territory is bound to shore up the incumbents of both parties. The Republicans have one incumbent, Congressman Runyan, who is on the endangered list and is in the orange district. The Democrats have two such congressmen, Congressman Pallone in the dark red district and Congressman Holt in the bright green district.
Except for the bright blue district, all of the districts in the lower part of the state are in Republican territory. There is no way to weaken the three Republican incumbents with endangering either Congressman Andrews in the bright blue district or the two already endangered Democrats north of the Republican area. Thus the commission might as well shore up all the congressmen in the six southern districts and let the geography kill off one of the Republicans in the northern part as is suggested in our proposed map. We never split a county subdivision and still got close enough to the required equal population as the following table demonstrates:
| Incumbents | 2010 Population | Deviation | % Deviation |
|---|---|---|---|
| LoBiondo (R) | 732,109 | -549 | +0.0749% |
| Andrews (D) | 733,581 | +923 | +0.1260% |
| Runyan (R) | 732,907 | +249 | +0.0340% |
| Smith (R) | 733,625 | +1,057 | +0.1443% |
| Garrett - Felinghausen (R) | 731,889 | -769 | -0.0965% |
| Pallone (D) | 733,275 | +707 | +0.0061% |
| Lance (R) | 731,305 | -1,263 | -0.1500% |
| Pascrell (D) | 731,559 | -1,099 | +0.1384% |
| Rothman (D) | 732,431 | -227 | -0.0310% |
| Payne (D) | 732,119 | -539 | -0.0736% |
| Holt (D) | 731,832 | -826 | -0.1124% |
| Sires (D) | 734,722 | +2,064 | +0.2817% |
| Total/Average | 8,791,894 | +/-856 | +/-0.1168% |
