2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: Michigan

[Torie]

[Torie]

map

What is partisan breakdown of that map? Looks like 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 are Republican, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13 are Democratic, and 4 and 11 are swingy?

3 is lean Dem I suspect, and 5 could go swingy if the Dutch belt keeps moving to the Dems. The only really pretty safe CD's for the Pubs are 1 and 7. At the moment 4 is probably tilt Pub, but may not be that way for long. The one really swing CD is 11, and it will go tilt Dem if trends continue. Trump 2020 probably got beaten pretty badly there, but he was a horrible fit for that CD this year.

The way the trends have played out, there are a lot more competitive CD's in MI, which is a beautiful thing.

[Torie]

map

What is partisan breakdown of that map? Looks like 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 are Republican, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13 are Democratic, and 4 and 11 are swingy?

3 is lean Dem I suspect, and 5 could go swingy if the Dutch belt keeps moving to the Dems. The only really pretty safe CD's for the Pubs are 1 and 7. At the moment 4 is probably tilt Pub, but may not be that way for long. The one really swing CD is 11, and it will go tilt Dem if trends continue. Trump 2020 probably got beaten pretty badly there, but he was a horrible fit for that CD this year.

The way the trends have played out, there are a lot more competitive CD's in MI, which is a beautiful thing.

I think 3 would lean Republican and 4 and 11 would be the swing districts.

Well you can peruse the numbers yourself and make up your own mind. It is harder than it used to be to predict these things with the complexion of the partisan coalitions in such a state of flux.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/d5fbe65c-1976-45b4-a98f-ab09f694fad4

Well that does not seem to work. Sorry.

[Torie]

[Torie]

Honestly I would give Bay and the county to the north to the 1st and give Leelanau and Grand Traverse to the 2nd.

Your wish is my command.

[Torie]

If you can draw two performing black CD's within Wayne, I do not understand the rationale to cross over into Southfield in Oakland myself.

[Torie]

In the map that I drew I am quite confident that the two  CD's that are performing for black candidates. But yes, that is the crux of the issue - are they performing? The questions revolves around the expected composition of the voters in a Dem primary. In the 2018 GOP primary, about 90,000 chose to vote in that primary in Wayne County.

[Torie]

I guess you will post your map in due course.

[Torie]

Ok, here's my counterproposal. Fairly similar to my earlier map, but with a more compact Detroit area. Not in love with the boundary between the 1st and 2nd but not sure of the best way to improve it.


Sorry for the absence of images, not able to screenshot presently.

Thank you.

[Torie]

Nice piece of art work!

[Torie]

Does this look better?

You did a fine map, and clearly put a lot of effort in it. I don't prefer your deep jut into Oakland County, which has the effect of unnecessarily packing the black vote as well, depriving them of a third black influence CD, and the extension way out into the Thumb of a metro Detroit CD is not ideal, but on the other hand, the Flint, Saginaw, Bay City and Midland CD is nice, along with creating a CD of working and lower middle class whites by and large in Wayne and Monroe. So I acknowledge the map's compensating virtues.

[Torie]

I decided to put Midland in with Bay City, and made more precise the equalization of populations, and played around with how to round out the Grand Rapids CD. FWIW, I am absolutely convinced that the two black CD's are performing. They are around 44.0% and 45.4% BCVAP. That is enough in a Dem primary.

[Torie]

In any case, sorry for being so persnickety. I know I keep on nitpicking others' maps--just trying to move closer to the Ideal Map. Apologies however if I'm causing offense.

No, not at all. You have been polite and reasonable in all of my interactions with you, and are certainly entitled to your own opinions, particularly when you explain you reasoning, which is well, reasonable. Unfortunately, as you well know, there is no way to get all that one wants, and I certainly don't disagree that having Bay City and Saginaw in the same CD is a plus factor in a map.

One thing I look at with county chops is their size, along with the size of the chop of any municipality. In the case of Kalamazoo County, the size of the chop is about 22,600 people, or about 8% of  the population of the county. In other words, the chop is of a quite rural area, and does impinge on the City of Kalamazoo or its nearby suburbs, so it does not bother me that much personally.

[Torie]

The Southfield jut is discordant to me. I preferred your prior chop of Oakland. But here is another version that you might consider, bearing in mind that Waterford Township is more than anything else a working and lower middle class suburb of Pontiac. I also prefer to keep Southfield and Pontiac together to make the CD one with more of a black influence. I think that your map overall however has a lot of merit to it. Well done. I have seen a lot of worthy maps actually. You guys are the best I have seen as a map drawing group overall. I am quite impressed.

[Torie]

At the margins, I fiddled around with Mr. Turner's map with which I find great favor in so many ways, to equalize populations a bit more precisely, and make it a more pleasing to my eye.

[Torie]

I watched the MI redistricting commission in action on youtube today (a meeting last Thursday). First, the initiative that it operates under is poorly drafted, and the commission had 3 lawyers arguing, none of whom got it right. I think later on after I fled, somebody decided to hire a high powered law firm to tell them what I could have told them for free but whatever (because the meeting the next day mentioned that a nationally famous law firm had been hired). No, the commission does not have the power to interpret the law, and yes, the constitution may force changes in their deadlines and schedules, and maybe the date of the primary election, and yes anyone can sue with standing to sue, like an aggrieved commissioner, and yes there may be a necessity to file a declaratory relief action, and yes, as a practical matter, who is going to vote for an un-vetted map, and yes it is a mess.

Second, they have partisan fairness software that can look at election by election. What that means is that the geographic Dem disadvantage in Michigan, and the VRA, means that the map needs to be gerrymandered so that the Dems can catch up. Thus uber Dem Ann Arbor is quad chopped on the state house map, to spread the Dem wealth. The hapless Pubs have no idea what hit them. And finally, lawyers always take over. The chairperson happens to be a lawyer, claims she is unaffiliated but she is really a Dem (Michigan has no partisan registration), and she dominates everything.

I wonder if I will live long enough to see a commission go into the fairness metrics in states where geography favors the Dems, and the gerrymandering needs to be ruthless to get the Pubs to catch up. Such a state house map in Mass would be an erose mess.

The MI constitution does have a clause about using standard measures of fairness. Just what are standard measures is in the eye of the beholder I guess (and the mathematics is way above what 99.9% of the population can understand, so that just leaves Muon2 on this site), and such standards can rapidly lead to the theater of the absurd depending on what is going on on the ground. I won't be watching this circus again. It's just too painful.

Oh, on the CD level, the fairness measures are not too bad in MI vis a vis ugly gerrymandered maps, given that so much of MI has become much more marginal than heretofore, as Dutch Michigan and high income educated burbs race to the Dems, and rust belt whites race to the Pubs, rendering vast swaths of MI marginal. Most states are not like Michigan.

Oh, one other thing. If they go to ranked choice voting if they don't get a bipartisan agreement, the law is unclear if that vote is by secret ballot or how that will work, and if by a public roll call, giving those who vote last and have a high powered computer that they know how to use, a huge advantage, and whether one can change one's vote after knowing what the totals are, and if one can legally bargain behind closed doors. The commission has not though about that at all, although the smart lawyer chairman probably has. But she shows her hand only when it maximizes her power.

tldr: It's cf city out there in the land between the lakes.

Addendum 1: I see the post above that I just read is on the same wave length as I on much of this. So we are both sage and perspicacious, or clueless and obtuse.

Addendum 2: We should adopt the German system which mixes districts and proportionality, so it does not matter much how the lines are drawn. If the lines zero out a party that got 40% of the vote, they then get enough seats through proportionality to get to 40% of the seats. Yes, to make it work reasonably, we need to get rid of the Senate and the States. Both have to go. It's time for a Constitutional Convention to make it happen. I nominate myself as chairman of that event. It will need a lot of competent security guards I understand. Thus the Capitol police will not be used.

Addendum 3: Since the fairness doctrine in NYS requires that the Pubs get 40% of the CD's, and everything else. I wonder what that map would look like? Probably need to take the Pub map that was submitted, and do some more gerrymandering on Long Island, and do a snake from Rochester to Ithaca.

[Torie]

FWIW, I like Birch the best as well. As I say, given the fairly flat partisan variations outside Detroit and Ann Arbor, for a map with districts as large as CD's, it does not upset the apple cart that much. It does at the state house seat level however with much smaller districts that are easier to gerrymander.

[Torie]

Here is the C map I would have pushed I think if I was on the commission. Not much different from Chestnut, except the Grand Rapids CD is swing, rather than a ugly Dem snatch gerrymander, but Grand Rapids is going Dem anyway, so this iteration would have given the Pubs a short term lease, unless the Pub incumbent there was MAGA'ed out. The other changes from a partisan perspective are minor. I just don't do chops to help the Dems at the margin a point or less.

[Torie]

This cycle of line drawing has let it all hang out, and this thread does it in a raw and  brutal but candid manner, so KUDOS for that. The only way out is the German system. Absent that, the self righteous from both sides will flagellate  themselves and each other with no surcease, long after no one still living has any idea that i was ever on this planet,  with less impact than a fart in a windstorm.

[Torie]

Lfromnj is totally right--correcting for geographic concentration is still disgusting gerrymandering.

I would argue that drawing maps to correct for undemocratic results because of residential patterns is not the same, not "disgusting", like drawing maps to exacerbate undemocratic results.

Yeah, I don't see what is controversial about this. If you ask the vast majority of voters whether the party that wins the most votes for a legislature should get to govern, they'd very likely say yes. That is really all that should matter here. I get on a forum regarding drawing maps in the current system might take issue with what it takes to create those results, but at the most fundamental level, the legislature has to be responsive to the will of the people, even if those people are asymmetrically clustered for one party. If the people keep voting for one party to control the legislature but the party that gets fewer votes keeps winning majorities, like in Michigan, that is a dysfunctional democracy at best and corrupt at worst. Trying to talk to people about communities of interest isn't likely to placate their concerns that the majority's votes effectively don't matter. Perhaps urban voters will walk away with the belief that the communities of interest of rural and exurban Michigan matter much more than them. Perhaps the ideal compromise in our current system is one where COI matters but up to a point.

I guess at the heart of this conversation is what kind of system we hold elections under, which is fine. I vote we start with a system that actually responds to the will of the people like they expect.

Is your preference state by state? If so, you would support a Pub gerrymander in CA, because the Pubs are getting like 8 out of 52 seats, when they "should" be getting about a third of the pie. And it would be pretty gross to boot. Your whole system of trying to make it fair breaks down in states that are not quite closely balanced politically. And gerrymandering for fairness should really focus on the overall national result since these days with the polarized parties that is almost the only thing that matters. If you gerrymander for one party in one state, you probably will need to effectively gerrymander for the other party in another state, to make it "fair" overall. You are probably well on your way to opening a Pandora's Box.

[Torie]

Is your preference state by state?...

I do think her argument is about state legislatures for state government, not Congress. There are a number of threads here but the context is the Michigan State Senate map. Not that Congress is "fixed" but it's a different problem with different solutions.  

Fair enough. The problem still obtains, but you do not have the offsetting state issue. In states that are reasonably closely balanced, you probably want to have a bunch of closely balanced seats of different types, so if they trend, the trends might cancel each other out. What you don't want is for one party to be totally shut out of power if the vote totals are close overall. And then there is the issue of a two thirds majority issue in states less closely balanced, which often can matter quite a bit with veto overrides and other instances of supra majority requirements.

[Torie]

Is your preference state by state? If so, you would support a Pub gerrymander in CA, because the Pubs are getting like 8 out of 52 seats, when they "should" be getting about a third of the pie. And it would be pretty gross to boot. Your whole system of trying to make it fair breaks down in states that are not quite closely balanced politically. And gerrymandering for fairness should really focus on the overall national result since these days with the polarized parties that is almost the only thing that matters. If you gerrymander for one party in one state, you probably will need to effectively gerrymander for the other party in another state, to make it "fair" overall. You are probably well on your way to opening a Pandora's Box.

I don't really support the current system, so yeah. Democrats have a slightly better record on gerrymandering reform, but it's still atrocious what they have and haven't done. FPTP in single member districts drawn by the lawmakers themselves has done nothing but ruin both government and faith in government. You have entire decades in some states where the only thing keeping the majority party in power is the fact that at some point years prior they got to draw the lines, and drew them just well enough to cling to power even when they got less votes, and in some cases this level of control perpetuated itself through multiple redistricting cycles.. I can't blame voters for losing faith in the government's ability to do anything when the allocation of power frequently does not match up with the votes.

The bizarre system in this country is nearly impossible to change, too. It requires the buy-in of many lawmakers who are only office because of this system and the control it affords them, so I'm all for other, more sympathetic lawmakers and judges re-balancing the system in a more equitable way, when possible. I don't see any other way forward for change at the moment.

I decided way back in college that a parliamentary system in the modern age would be far better for the US than what the Founders and history devised. Ditch the whole thing, except perhaps making a Constitution written as opposed to unwritten, and having a Court to be the final arbiter of that, but in general with courts having less power to make policy. It was at that point that I decided my odds of becoming POTUS were basically at absolute zero. I had nothing going for me at all. So I got more interested in land use law and urban planning. Cities have always fascinated me.

[Torie]

The new Congressional map is facing a lawsuit and I'd wager it will be struck down on VRA grounds. There is not a single minority-majority district in the new map because they played Tetris in Detroit. Minority vote dilution is also a significant concern in the state legislative maps, where inner city neighborhoods were deliberately balanced by the white suburbs. While the House will likely stay Republican under the new map, the Senate could very plausibly yield a 20-18 majority for Democrats if the maps were to actually go into effect.

In both the Detroit based CD's, blacks are still a majority of the voters in Dem primaries, so a VRA claim seems DOA right out of the box.

[Torie]

I do think it's a bit odd that they've unnecessarily split Detroit between multiple congressional districts.

I think there’s a psychological barrier to reducing Detroit to 1 representative, plus it would probably result in an 75% AA district (depending on what else is added) which would be an illegal pack.

It would be an illegal pack only if Gingles triggers two black CD's. The trigger is right on the cusp, assuming block voting. I can barely draw 50% BCVAP CD's based on the 2019 ACS estimates, which  is really more like 2016 figures, without reaching for Pontiac.

[Torie]

I decided that Michigan badly needed a map beautification program, and came up with this stunning specimen, thereby deserving a tree moniker of equal magnificence. Can you guess the name of the species?

It also has diversity. Every county in the state but one, has a real potential of having at least a portion thereof represented by a Pub.



https://davesredistricting.org/join/e533be5d-680c-42be-924f-f2c4d0f37b90