Stateline Midwest ~ November 2012

When the 2012 session of the Kansas Legislature adjourned last May, lawmakers left one important piece of business unfinished. Their inability to come to closure on the politically charged issue of redistricting left Kansas alone among the 50 states without a new set of maps going into this year’s congressional and legislative elections, and eventually forced a panel of federal district court judges to finish the job.

This year’s stalemate may have been unprecedented in the Sunflower State, but Kansas’ redistricting process is unique among Midwestern states in other ways as well. Like all other states, Kansas relies on U.S. Census Bureau data as a starting point in the decennial process of drawing new district lines. 

But the Kansas Constitution requires that the population data provided by the federal government be adjusted before maps are drawn.

Chapter 8 of the 2011 Book of the States contains the following articles and tables:

In recent years, the movement of women into state-level offices has slowed following several decades of gains. Following the 2010 elections, the number of women in both state legislative  and statewide elective office declined. Efforts to actively recruit women for elective and appointive positions will be critical in determining what the future holds for women in state government.

While women continue to make gains in terms of their participation in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of state government, more progress is needed before they will reach parity with their male counterparts.

The story of the population and economic decline of some of the Midwest’s largest, historically most important cities did not begin in 2000 and will likely not end in 2010.  Nonetheless, data from U.S. Census 2010 are striking in showing the extent of the out-migration from many of this region’s central towns.

As legislators go about the work of redrawing political maps, one fundamental rule guiding their decisions will be to keep the populations of political districts as equal as possible.

In a decade when the U.S. population grew at the smallest rate since the 1930s and the Great Depression, every Midwestern state failed to keep pace with the nation’s 10-year growth rate of 9.7 percent.

States around the Midwest are preparing to redistrict congressional and legislative seats, and Iowa's process remains a unique model in the region -- and the nation.