Yesterday, I took issue with the conventional wisdom that the GOP would gain seats from redistricting:

The tricky question, which we can only speculate on until November, is exactly who moved into those districts. If the red districts grew, but filled with DFL voters, it’s a whole other story.

The Census, of course, doesn’t tell us anything about political affiliations. But there are certain proxies we can use. For example, minority groups tend to lean heavily toward the DFL (maybe because the GOP is trying to stop them from voting). One political observer explained to me why that’s important:

…yes, exurbs are growing but overall the majority of our population growth is minorities, immigrants, etc.

That means a few things. First of all, inner-ring suburbs that were once reliable Republican votes are now swing districts or even reliable DFL votes. Second, we can’t just assume that the exurbs are just filling up with GOP voters — some of them may be competitive.

Until November, we can’t exactly know the partisan makeup of the new districts. We know for a fact, however, that every single Congressional district has a larger minority population than it did in 2002. Here’s a chart from the redistricting panel [PDF] illustrating that:

There’s a similar chart for the legislative seats [PDF], showing an increase in minority population throughout all Minnesota’s House districts:

The point is, growth in the exurbs is balanced by shifting demographics. We saw that the Congressional map, far from favoring the Republicans, was an improvement for the DFL. I expect the legislative map won’t end up being a boon for Republicans, either.