2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: California

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

The only problem with that layout is it'll force an ugly split of Long Beach

Changed a few things around:


Purple at 34% black, orange at 44% black.

[SevenEleven]

The only problem with that layout is it'll force an ugly split of Long Beach

Changed a few things around:


Purple at 34% black, orange at 44% black.

I like this. Nice and clean looking, compact, respects COI. If we were given free reign to ignore municipal boundaries, this would be the way to go. Mine is probably a better fit for what Oryx is doing (minimizing splits of cities). You can get rid of the downtown section of CA 37 and still have it likely to elect an AA candidate, though its impossible to maintain a plurality without it (and Westlake belongs with East LA, imo).

Overall, though, no reason to have the AA district less than 40% CVAP in LA, whether you go for two or one. I do think the commission would cut an AA opportunity district before connecting Burbank to Beverly Hills, though. Absolutely no chance that would ever happen.

[SevenEleven]

Also re: Santa Clarita, there's no reason to put it with Ventura, ever. You'd be better off drawing the coastal monstrosity out to Ventura and putting Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks with Santa Clarita to make a suburban commuter district

[Greedo punched first]

Also re: Santa Clarita, there's no reason to put it with Ventura, ever. You'd be better off drawing the coastal monstrosity out to Ventura and putting Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks with Santa Clarita to make a suburban commuter district

I put Simi Valley with Thousand Oaks, but didn't put them with Santa Clarita. My version of CA-37 is plurality AACVAP.

[Oryxslayer]

That CA-27 might be the single most frustrating district I have ever seen.

(snip)

I mean yeah, maybe I throw Hancock Park in the seat, but it would be dropping Central and Downtown Hollywood to do that, and we can't have the movie seat be without those two.

Reminder that the San Fernando valley is only 27K over two districts, and has two perfect COIs, so no whites can come from there other than the 27K.

That's fair until you realize you're pairing the rich white bits of four fundamentally different LA regions: The Westside, Arroyo Verdugo, SFV, and Central LA. They just don't belong together even if demographic metrics make that seem superficially sensible. If would be like attaching the white bits of Berkley to Marin via the San Rafael Bridge. It just doesn't work. There is a very, very obvious regional COI in Los Angeles which supersedes ethnic concerns: The Westside. It's its own region with exactly 760k people, and it has obvious barriers cutting itself off from other parts of the area: LAX Airport, the ocean, the Santa Monica Mountains, and the Baldwin Hills. La Cienega Boulevard acts as a final barrier of sorts between the richer areas to its west and poorer areas to its east. Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Malibu, Westwood, Century City, Brentwood, Venice, Marina Del Rey, Culver City, Mar Vista, and West LA just make sense together, even if it means putting the (not particularly large) South Bay beach cities in with their more diverse neighbors. No reasonable person would argue Santa Monica belongs more strongly with Redondo Beach than with Beverly Hills.

This should be the core of a district:

The strangely comes off as the type of NIMBY post that would occur if you live in the Westside, but your location says downtown so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Residents of the present CA18 probably find it weird that the one half of the district is cut off from another half by mountains and the San Jose city line, but it works because they are all  wealthy whites.

Anyway, lets start from the beginning, and this goes for everyone that has replied since.

Cutting a Hispanic seat is verboten because California is gaining Hispanics, even while losing a seat, so CA44 is safe. You want your hispanic seats in LA to have similar levels of HVAP if possible, based of the structural rules of the VRA. Essentially, if you have more that enough pop for two seats, but one is packed full and the other just barely crosses the line, this is considered unequal representation. So you should try for balance.

Lets also remember that nothing works in a vacuum. District changes cascade across the map. For example, the best thing for the LA region could be the dropping of SLO from CA23 and sending it north. This allows you then to have both a Hispanic seat in SB and Ventura, and the suburban seat in Santa Clarita and the hill suburbs. This is an ideal pairing, but it didn't work for pop reasons and the ethnic makeup of what was leftover. However doing this in effect destroys whatever Hispanic opportunity seat can be created from Monterrey and San Benito. The other option is to pair Kern and SLO, but unless you tell me that is a COI of some kind.... Therefore, CA23 has to stay. Which in turn means Ventura is left with 66K over the limit. Sure, you can just do a bit of trading by giving Simi or TO LA and then grabbing the Malibu suburbs...but A: this separates Simi and TO, and B: destroys whatever potential Hispanic opportunity seat you had in the Oxnard Plain.

So I don't want you to show me "oh X seat can be like this," of course it can. I want you to show me your entire region. If you don't want to draw the whole map, that's fine, just create some groupings like I did in the Bay Area where you can get to X districts with Y counties. I wish to see what tradeoffs were made to favor one group over another. In effect, I'm trying to think like a commissioner here, and while the commission likes local lines such as cities or communtiies, the next most important COI is ethnicity with whites at the back of the line. Treat neighborhoods as your building blocks, and build your ethnic access seats, because that is whats most important legally in big cities.

[Former President tack50]

While most of the discussion has been centered on what the commission may or may not draw, here is a thought I had.

Let's say that, at some point; Democrats get tired of Republican gerrymandering and abolish the commission in order to create a Dem gerrymander of California. How would such a gerrymander look like?

I assume it would be a 52-0 or 53-0 map or would there be 1-2 GOP sinks?

[Greedo punched first]

I created two San Diego maps. Which one is better?

Map 1, Imperial with Riverside:


Map 2, Imperial with East County:

[Sestak]

While most of the discussion has been centered on what the commission may or may not draw, here is a thought I had.

Let's say that, at some point; Democrats get tired of Republican gerrymandering and abolish the commission in order to create a Dem gerrymander of California. How would such a gerrymander look like?

I assume it would be a 52-0 or 53-0 map or would there be 1-2 GOP sinks?

There are some seats (I’m thinking of Calvert and McCarthy’s seats in particular, perhaps the far north seat as well) that would probably take some really absurd bacon stripping to get rid of completely...

[S019]

I created two San Diego maps. Which one is better?

Map 1:


Map 2:

Map 1, the 48th crossing three counties in the second map is just unnecessary

[Greedo punched first]

I created two San Diego maps. Which one is better?

Map 1:


Map 2:

Map 1, the 48th crossing three counties in the second map is just unnecessary

I guess, but the county split into a sparsely populated area is minimal (the real 1990s map did that too). There’s a highway connection. You prefer my first map, which has Calvert’s district covering parts of OC?

[S019]

I created two San Diego maps. Which one is better?

Map 1:


Map 2:

Map 1, the 48th crossing three counties in the second map is just unnecessary

I guess, but the county split into a sparsely populated area is minimal (the real 1990s map did that too). There’s a highway connection. You prefer my first map, which has Calvert’s district covering parts of OC?

Yes, but that can be avoided by moving the 47th north into southern Orange County.

[Greedo punched first]

I created two San Diego maps. Which one is better?

Map 1:


Map 2:

Map 1, the 48th crossing three counties in the second map is just unnecessary

I guess, but the county split into a sparsely populated area is minimal (the real 1990s map did that too). There’s a highway connection. You prefer my first map, which has Calvert’s district covering parts of OC?

Yes, but that can be avoided by moving the 47th north into southern Orange County.

But that requires me to pair Mission Viejo with Carlsbad, like the current real map. I don’t like that. Is my map with Calvert’s district covering OC still better?

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

That CA-27 might be the single most frustrating district I have ever seen.

(snip)

I mean yeah, maybe I throw Hancock Park in the seat, but it would be dropping Central and Downtown Hollywood to do that, and we can't have the movie seat be without those two.

Reminder that the San Fernando valley is only 27K over two districts, and has two perfect COIs, so no whites can come from there other than the 27K.

That's fair until you realize you're pairing the rich white bits of four fundamentally different LA regions: The Westside, Arroyo Verdugo, SFV, and Central LA. They just don't belong together even if demographic metrics make that seem superficially sensible. If would be like attaching the white bits of Berkley to Marin via the San Rafael Bridge. It just doesn't work. There is a very, very obvious regional COI in Los Angeles which supersedes ethnic concerns: The Westside. It's its own region with exactly 760k people, and it has obvious barriers cutting itself off from other parts of the area: LAX Airport, the ocean, the Santa Monica Mountains, and the Baldwin Hills. La Cienega Boulevard acts as a final barrier of sorts between the richer areas to its west and poorer areas to its east. Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Malibu, Westwood, Century City, Brentwood, Venice, Marina Del Rey, Culver City, Mar Vista, and West LA just make sense together, even if it means putting the (not particularly large) South Bay beach cities in with their more diverse neighbors. No reasonable person would argue Santa Monica belongs more strongly with Redondo Beach than with Beverly Hills.

This should be the core of a district:

The strangely comes off as the type of NIMBY post that would occur if you live in the Westside, but your location says downtown so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Residents of the present CA18 probably find it weird that the one half of the district is cut off from another half by mountains and the San Jose city line, but it works because they are all  wealthy whites.

Anyway, lets start from the beginning, and this goes for everyone that has replied since.

Cutting a Hispanic seat is verboten because California is gaining Hispanics, even while losing a seat, so CA44 is safe. You want your hispanic seats in LA to have similar levels of HVAP if possible, based of the structural rules of the VRA. Essentially, if you have more that enough pop for two seats, but one is packed full and the other just barely crosses the line, this is considered unequal representation. So you should try for balance.

Lets also remember that nothing works in a vacuum. District changes cascade across the map. For example, the best thing for the LA region could be the dropping of SLO from CA23 and sending it north. This allows you then to have both a Hispanic seat in SB and Ventura, and the suburban seat in Santa Clarita and the hill suburbs. This is an ideal pairing, but it didn't work for pop reasons and the ethnic makeup of what was leftover. However doing this in effect destroys whatever Hispanic opportunity seat can be created from Monterrey and San Benito. The other option is to pair Kern and SLO, but unless you tell me that is a COI of some kind.... Therefore, CA23 has to stay. Which in turn means Ventura is left with 66K over the limit. Sure, you can just do a bit of trading by giving Simi or TO LA and then grabbing the Malibu suburbs...but A: this separates Simi and TO, and B: destroys whatever potential Hispanic opportunity seat you had in the Oxnard Plain.

So I don't want you to show me "oh X seat can be like this," of course it can. I want you to show me your entire region. If you don't want to draw the whole map, that's fine, just create some groupings like I did in the Bay Area where you can get to X districts with Y counties. I wish to see what tradeoffs were made to favor one group over another. In effect, I'm trying to think like a commissioner here, and while the commission likes local lines such as cities or communtiies, the next most important COI is ethnicity with whites at the back of the line. Treat neighborhoods as your building blocks, and build your ethnic access seats, because that is whats most important legally in big cities.

Yeah, I live Downtown and I'm certainly no NIMBY but I do thing the Westside is a real community that needs to be respected. Same goes for CA-18 and I would never draw the district like you did, but that's another matter. My current map only has one AA seat so I was trying a quick experiment to keep the Westside, South Bay, and two AA seats intact. You can see it below. With this new map, I'd cascade my 34th, 3th, 36th, 31st, and 29th districts towards the SFV and make the 28th into some version of Schiff's current district with Glendale and Hollywood.

[Oryxslayer]

That CA-27 might be the single most frustrating district I have ever seen.

(snip)

I mean yeah, maybe I throw Hancock Park in the seat, but it would be dropping Central and Downtown Hollywood to do that, and we can't have the movie seat be without those two.

Reminder that the San Fernando valley is only 27K over two districts, and has two perfect COIs, so no whites can come from there other than the 27K.

That's fair until you realize you're pairing the rich white bits of four fundamentally different LA regions: The Westside, Arroyo Verdugo, SFV, and Central LA. They just don't belong together even if demographic metrics make that seem superficially sensible. If would be like attaching the white bits of Berkley to Marin via the San Rafael Bridge. It just doesn't work. There is a very, very obvious regional COI in Los Angeles which supersedes ethnic concerns: The Westside. It's its own region with exactly 760k people, and it has obvious barriers cutting itself off from other parts of the area: LAX Airport, the ocean, the Santa Monica Mountains, and the Baldwin Hills. La Cienega Boulevard acts as a final barrier of sorts between the richer areas to its west and poorer areas to its east. Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Malibu, Westwood, Century City, Brentwood, Venice, Marina Del Rey, Culver City, Mar Vista, and West LA just make sense together, even if it means putting the (not particularly large) South Bay beach cities in with their more diverse neighbors. No reasonable person would argue Santa Monica belongs more strongly with Redondo Beach than with Beverly Hills.

This should be the core of a district:

The strangely comes off as the type of NIMBY post that would occur if you live in the Westside, but your location says downtown so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Residents of the present CA18 probably find it weird that the one half of the district is cut off from another half by mountains and the San Jose city line, but it works because they are all  wealthy whites.

Anyway, lets start from the beginning, and this goes for everyone that has replied since.

Cutting a Hispanic seat is verboten because California is gaining Hispanics, even while losing a seat, so CA44 is safe. You want your hispanic seats in LA to have similar levels of HVAP if possible, based of the structural rules of the VRA. Essentially, if you have more that enough pop for two seats, but one is packed full and the other just barely crosses the line, this is considered unequal representation. So you should try for balance.

Lets also remember that nothing works in a vacuum. District changes cascade across the map. For example, the best thing for the LA region could be the dropping of SLO from CA23 and sending it north. This allows you then to have both a Hispanic seat in SB and Ventura, and the suburban seat in Santa Clarita and the hill suburbs. This is an ideal pairing, but it didn't work for pop reasons and the ethnic makeup of what was leftover. However doing this in effect destroys whatever Hispanic opportunity seat can be created from Monterrey and San Benito. The other option is to pair Kern and SLO, but unless you tell me that is a COI of some kind.... Therefore, CA23 has to stay. Which in turn means Ventura is left with 66K over the limit. Sure, you can just do a bit of trading by giving Simi or TO LA and then grabbing the Malibu suburbs...but A: this separates Simi and TO, and B: destroys whatever potential Hispanic opportunity seat you had in the Oxnard Plain.

So I don't want you to show me "oh X seat can be like this," of course it can. I want you to show me your entire region. If you don't want to draw the whole map, that's fine, just create some groupings like I did in the Bay Area where you can get to X districts with Y counties. I wish to see what tradeoffs were made to favor one group over another. In effect, I'm trying to think like a commissioner here, and while the commission likes local lines such as cities or communtiies, the next most important COI is ethnicity with whites at the back of the line. Treat neighborhoods as your building blocks, and build your ethnic access seats, because that is whats most important legally in big cities.

Yeah, I live Downtown and I'm certainly no NIMBY but I do thing the Westside is a real community that needs to be respected. Same goes for CA-18 and I would never draw the district like you did, but that's another matter. My current map only has one AA seat so I was trying a quick experiment to keep the Westside, South Bay, and two AA seats intact. You can see it below. With this new map, I'd cascade my 34th, 3th, 36th, 31st, and 29th districts towards the SFV and make the 28th into some version of Schiff's current district with Glendale and Hollywood.

Can I get a link or local line map? Then I will provide criticism from my perspective. Anyway, the immediate takeaways right now are the destruction of the Diamond Bar Asian suburb region, which is an ethnic COI. Also how CA33 doesn't really work - if it's an AA seat it has way too many wealthy whites, if its a white seat it has too many low income inner southside cities. There is a reason why the present CA33 is as it is, like I described in the multiposts.

[Greedo punched first]

My second CA map.

1:  Mike Thompson, 2: Doug LaMalfa, 3: Tom McClintock, 4: Doris Matsui, 5: Ami Bera, 6: Jerry McNerney, 7: Eric Swalwell, 8: Tim Grayson?, 9: Jared Huffman, 10: Nancy Pelosi, 11: Barbara Lee, 12: Jackie Speier, 13: Anna Eshoo, 13: Ro Khanna, 15: ?, 16: Zoe Lofgren, 17: Josh Harder, 18: Devin Nunes, 19: Jim Costa, 20: Kevin McCarthy, 21: TJ Cox, 22: Jimmy Panetta, 23: Salud Carbajal, 24: Julia Brownley, 25: Brad Sherman, 26: Tony Cardenas, 27: Adam Schiff, 28: Mike Garcia/Christy Smith, 29: Judy Chu, 30: Jimmy Gomez, 31: Karen Bass, 32: Andre Quintero?, 33: Maxine Waters, 34: Ted Lieu, 35: Nanette Barragan, 36: Linda Sanchez, 37: Ed Hernandez?, 38: Norma Torres, 39: Pete Aguilar, 40: Jay Olbernolte/Christine Bubser, 41: Mark Takano, 42: Ken Calvert, 43: Gil Cisneros, 44: Diedre Nguyen?, 45: Lou Correa, 46: Harley Rouda, 47: ?, 48: ?, 49: Scott Peters, 50: Juan Vargas, 51: Georgette Gomez/Sara Jacobs, 52: Raul Ruiz

[Storr]

My second CA map.

1:  Mike Thompson, 2: Doug LaMalfa, 3: Tom McClintock, 4: Doris Matsui, 5: Ami Bera, 6: Jerry McNerney, 7: Eric Swalwell, 8: Tim Grayson?, 9: Jared Huffman, 10: Nancy Pelosi, 11: Barbara Lee, 12: Jackie Speier, 13: Anna Eshoo, 13: Ro Khanna, 15: ?, 16: Zoe Lofgren, 17: Josh Harder, 18: Devin Nunes, 19: Jim Costa, 20: Kevin McCarthy, 21: TJ Cox, 22: Jimmy Panetta, 23: Salud Carbajal, 24: Julia Brownley, 25: Brad Sherman, 26: Tony Cardenas, 27: Adam Schiff, 28: Mike Garcia/Christy Smith, 29: Judy Chu, 30: Jimmy Gomez, 31: Karen Bass, 32: Andre Quintero?, 33: Maxine Waters, 34: Ted Lieu, 35: Nanette Barragan, 36: Linda Sanchez, 37: Ed Hernandez?, 38: Norma Torres, 39: Pete Aguilar, 40: Jay Olbernolte/Christine Bubser, 41: Mark Takano, 42: Ken Calvert, 43: Gil Cisneros, 44: Diedre Nguyen?, 45: Raul Ruiz, 46: Lou Correa, 47: Harley Rouda, 48: Darrell Issa/Ammar Campa-Najjar, 49: Mike Levin, 50: Georgette Gomez/Sara Jacobs, 51: Scott Peters, 52: Juan Vargas

Can you share a close up of the Los Angeles area or PVI of the districts?

[Greedo punched first]

Los Angeles area. CA-24 is the only LA-Ventura split. CA-43 is the only LA-OC split. CA-31 is plurality AACVAP. CA-34 includes majority-white western Hawthorne, which has more in common with Manhattan Beach than with Inglewood.



My other LA map. No LA-OC splits. Everything else is mostly the same.

[SevenEleven]

Can I get a link or local line map? Then I will provide criticism from my perspective. Anyway, the immediate takeaways right now are the destruction of the Diamond Bar Asian suburb region, which is an ethnic COI. Also how CA33 doesn't really work - if it's an AA seat it has way too many wealthy whites, if its a white seat it has too many low income inner southside cities. There is a reason why the present CA33 is as it is, like I described in the multiposts.

The main difference between my map and Blairite's is that I follow city lines much more closely and I pursued the second AA seat as you did in your map (though my weaker AA seat is still more AA than either of yours). There's still a few edges I'd like to clean up (I literally just swapped Santa Monica into district 30, for example), but your map seems to take the approach that "LA doesn't really have communities of interest", which I certainly have to disagree with.

[Greedo punched first]

My second San Diego map.
CA-50: Don’t be fooled by its East County core. It leans Democratic because of Imperial and parts of San Diego proper. CA-51: I used water contiguity to connect Imperial Beach, but the state highway 75, the free Coronado bridge, allows access to the rest of the district.

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

your map seems to take the approach that "LA doesn't really have communities of interest", which I certainly have to disagree with.

Absolutely. LA is very big but it has natural internal divisions beyond just ethnic considerations. I consider the LA Times' 16 divisions in the Mapping LA project to be equivalent to individual counties and give them according weight when redistricting.

[Greedo punched first]

My second OC map. CA-43: CA-39 equivalent. CA-44: CA-47 equivalent; Asian Belt district. CA-47: CA-48 equivalent. CA-48: Not an equivalent to any real district.

[Oryxslayer]

SNIP

I mean I also obsesses over municipality cuts if there isn't an ethnic community in play. I think what we view differently is the LA city as a whole. Since LA is larger than a district, I view it as inevitably cut and therefore if a seat cuts into it, it is fine as long as they obeserve the neighborhoods.

Also...is that 26 even connected? There are three highways out of Santa Clarita to my knowledge: one west to the Oxnard Plain, on east to the Antelope Valley, and one north-southeast to LA and Bakersfield.  All other roads head some combination of north or east. 

[Greedo punched first]

SNIP

I mean I also obsesses over municipality cuts if there isn't an ethnic community in play. I think what we view differently is the LA city as a whole. Since LA is larger than a district, I view it as inevitably cut and therefore if a seat cuts into it, it is fine as long as they obeserve the neighborhoods.

Also...is that 26 even connected? There are three highways out of Santa Clarita to my knowledge: one west to the Oxnard Plain, on east to the Antelope Valley, and one north-southeast to LA and Bakersfield.  All other roads head some combination of north or east.  

Is my split of Hawthorne fine (majority-white western Hawthorne is with Manhattan Beach in Lieu's district and the rest of the city is in Waters' district)?

Please excuse the Riverside split on my CA-48 because it actually makes sense because it shares the same CoI as Fallbrook and rural Escondido.

[Oryxslayer]

your map seems to take the approach that "LA doesn't really have communities of interest", which I certainly have to disagree with.

Absolutely. LA is very big but it has natural internal divisions beyond just ethnic considerations. I consider the LA Times' 16 divisions in the Mapping LA project to be equivalent to individual counties and give them according weight when redistricting.

Guess what, I agree with you on those being the regional groupings. All Also agree with the LA times's neighborhood groupings and the the subsequent 600+ neighborhood identification project. If this was the UK or Canada, the districts would follow those lines. But we are not in a racially blind world. Since they are not counties in and of themselves, they therefore go to the back of the line. First priority is official local lines (cities, counties etc), second priority is race and it's correlating statistics like income, third priority are local intrests like there.

Now note, I am not stuck inflexibly in the mud. Everyone is so far arguing for groupings, and that is fine, I am open to it. I however need to see a way that I can change the way how LA's surrounding are altered on my map. Right now, the San Gabriel seat is inflexible because if it goes into the Empire the quad HVAP arrangement breaks. So pop transfers are rather locked from that side. SD can only go north because of CA35, either to Riv or OC. OC can loop pop around but in the end it all needs to head through the Empire. The route to the west is locked until I see a good way how someone can cycle the 273K SLO pop around through the bay and then down through the valley. There is a way you can keep the HVAP seat in the region by cutting into San Jose (questionable but fine) but then everything falls apart in the Northeast bay. If you send the pop north you can't cycle it back around because of the inflexible Placer/Ed Dorado pairing. If you send it east San Joaquin gets way too traumatized with three districts going in at minimum. One of the easiest cycle's might involve CA24, but the seat can't go any more east (not much more pop to give to LA in the west), and going east will likely involve a Simi/TO cut.

So in effect, LA is trapped right now by it's ethnic COIs. Microchange is possible between San Gabrial, the Asian seat, and their neighbors, but them and the San Fernando valley are locked under this pop arrangement unless I get some way to cycle pop from one side of LA to another.

[SevenEleven]

SNIP

I mean I also obsesses over municipality cuts if there isn't an ethnic community in play. I think what we view differently is the LA city as a whole. Since LA is larger than a district, I view it as inevitably cut and therefore if a seat cuts into it, it is fine as long as they obeserve the neighborhoods.

Yes, it is inevitably cut. That doesn't mean you can go ahead and mutilate it though. There's "approximately" zero chance that any Southern California commissioners would sign on to such a map.

Also...is that 26 even connected? There are three highways out of Santa Clarita to my knowledge: one west to the Oxnard Plain, on east to the Antelope Valley, and one north-southeast to LA and Bakersfield.  All other roads head some combination of north or east. 

Yes, its connected by Balboa Blvd via I-5: a route traveled by far more Santa Clarita residents than 126 west.