Will Next Congressional elections bring a Redder Michigan?

In Michigan — a closely divided swing state that has cast most of its votes for Democratic candidates in five of the last eight congressional elections — Republicans consistently win a majority of the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. That's right: The party that gets the fewest votes often wins the most seats. It's a curiosity, but hardly a mystery: As in two dozen other states, the GOP's congressional advantage here can be traced to the 2011 reapportionment in which a state government dominated by Republicans reconfigured congressional boundaries to make most of the resulting districts a lock for their own parties' candidates. In a reapportionment scheme he published last week "to get the discussion going," Sarpolus suggests that one of the simplest ways for Republicans to protect their congressional incumbents in the downsizing to come would be to divide the district currently represented by Rep. Sander Levin, an 18-term Democrat from Royal Oak, between those currently represented by Rep. Mike Bishop, R-Rochester Hills, and Rep. Brenda Lawrence, D-Southfield.