US House Redistricting: New York

[muon2]

Muon2, I got the numbers from Daily Kos (oh whatever that left wing blog is called), which were linked above somewhere.  

If you have mapped the state, Mike, and have different ones, I will use those. Knowing you, I trust you more than Daily Kos! The prior CD figures I got from Barone's Almanac, and used raw numbers, so they should be precisely accurate.

They may have a block-level program, but I suspect not. My CDs all are within 1000 of the ideal pop . Here's my table (updated to the recommended plan of 3-12):

CD 1: O 51.4, M 47.6
CD 2: O 51.2, M 47.9
CD 3: O 53.5, M 45.7
CD 4: O 55.4, M 43.9
CD 5: O 86.2, M 13.4
CD 6: O 63.2, M 36.0
CD 7: O 84.3, M 15.0
CD 8: O 86.0, M 13.7
CD 9: O 84.3, M 15.2
CD 10: O 75.6, M 23.4
CD 11: O 48.3, M 50.9
CD 12: O 80.2, M 18.9
CD 13: O 93.3, M 6.2
CD 14: O 76.1, M 23.2
CD 15: O 94.6, M 5.2
CD 16: O 73.0, M 26.4
CD 17: O 58.0, M 41.2
CD 18: O 52.1, M 46.8
CD 19: O 53.0, M 45.3
CD 20: O 58.3, M 39.8
CD 21: O 51.6, M 46.7
CD 22: O 49.1, M 49.1 (McCain by 92 votes )
CD 23: O 49.6, M 48.8
CD 24: O 56.2, M 42.0
CD 25: O 58.8, M 39.9
CD 26: O 63.5, M 35.0
CD 27: O 44.5, M 53.9

[muon2]

OK, Muon2, I revised the matrix above to match your numbers. You might delete the errant matrix from your post least it cause confusion.  

We both made errors with NY-27.  I mis-entered the Obama percentage (the McCain percentage was OK), and you used the average party numbers rather than the Obama-McCain numbers. I know because I drew NY-26 and NY-27 to find out.

Regarding the tenths thing, do you know if the DRA rounds the tenths, or just drops the 4th digit? If it just drops it, that might explain a lot of the tenths action vis a vis the Kos percentages. Unless of course even if the DRA does drop the fourth digit, you cranked the raw numbers to find out how to round properly.

Thanks, I've made the correction. I also note that you don't show the swap of numbers for NY-2 and NY-3 that I would have guessed given the number of VTDs from the old districts in each. Obviously the PVIs match better the way you have it.

[muon2]

In other news, Judge Mann just tweaked her map. The changes in Brooklyn are between two minority CD's, so that has no partisan meaning, and if the Finger Lakes changes move anything by even a tenth of a point, color me surprised. So now we wait until Thursday to see what the Appellate Court does - which will probably be nothing.

And indeed, no partisan change to NY-25, NY-27 and NY-23. The change to NY-25, expanding it by a tad (maybe a couple of hundred residents), into a precinct which was already split (up there near Orleans County along the lake - it took me a long time to find that tiny jut), may be a population equalizer. The other change I assume was to avoid a split of Livingston County, and keep just Ontario County split, so a bit of territory was excised in Livingston from NY-23, and NY-23 picked up about 1,500 more folks in Ontario from NY-27 instead. Judge Mann apparently is about as fond of county splits as Muon2.  

Indeed, there was no change to the upstate percentages when I adjusted my map. NY-8 and NY-9 roughly swapped their percentages due to the differences between Ft Greene (now in and Sheepshead Bay (now in 9). My post on the previous page is now updated as well.

[muon2]

Sorry if I missed it in an earlier post, but what are the PVIs for final court map?  Also, what is the generally accepted net loss/gain for each party with that map?

Here's where I calculated the 2008 results, and where Torie turned it into PVIs based on that election alone.

[muon2]

Pity you guys picked up on the Orthodox Jewish submission. I was going to put up a poll, with all the usual suspects listed, from myself to BRTD to Muon2 to Sbane to NY Jew to Lewis to Brittain33 and so on, and ask who do you think would like the map best. But now the answer has been given away.

Here is their entire map. I got the drf file from the chap who drafted it (except for the 4 northern CD's in the Bronx and Westchester, which a Catholic friend of his drew, because of the press of time). The map has a few "problems," alas, some fixable, but the bleaching out of the Crowley CD might raise a retrogression issue. Hewing to municipal/village lines was not job one either. I quite admire the chutzpah in merging the Mahoney and Nadler CD's, as the white CD to go, in exchange for creating the "Jewish" one in Brooklyn.

I spoke to the map drawer about 3 times on the phone for a couple of hours. I initiated it because his submission had problems, and I wanted to help him fix them, if possible, even though the filing deadline had passed. By the last conversation, the federal appellate court had rejected his submission, and he want to file a petition to SCOTUS, based on ignoring communities of interest for white people and so forth, particularly Jews, who are the most victimized by hate crimes. It took some time to persuade him that the odds of SCOTUS taking the case were effectively zero.

I must say one party would like this map a whole lot better than the other party. The other party if the appellate court accepted this after making some necessary adjustments, like equalizing population, would have just gone bonkers. The Israel district goes Pub, and Lowey's is down to about Dem +2% in  PVI. (I am not sure, because I had to draw the 4 CD's the Catholic guy drew myself, and the PDF screen shots did not show the Lowey CD's northern perimeter.)  The Lowey CD needs to go farther out anyway, because overall the NYC area CD's about about 50,000-75,000 or something short of population overall.

Oh by the way, the map drawer says he spoke to the Pub Senate majority leader Skelos, and tried to persuade him to leave two Jewish state senate CD's in Brooklyn Queens somewhere alone because in another couple of years both would fall to the Pubs. Skelos said he needed another CD now, rather than two later, so he merged them to get one more sufficiently Pub to flip now. I guess the discount rate on future Pub seats, but not right now, was close to 50% per year of something.

The guy was fascinating to talk to. He knows the NYC streets like the back of his hand, and who is doing what to whom. I'm sure NY Jew would enjoy talking to him. He agreed that gay marriage did indeed tank Welperin, allowing Turner to win.

Very interesting. I'm also fascinated as to its similarity to the map I tried to submit to the court early in March, but missed the deadline. In Brooklyn one would only have to swap Bay Ridge for Gravesend and Coney Island to essentially have our maps match.

Try it. I'd be interested to see what you come up with. I'm skeptical that you can get it over 50%, especially if we're using VAP, but I'd definitely like to see.

When I tried to eyeball a compact South Brooklyn CD earlier, I was using DRA so it wasn't clear how much of 'white' was Jewish, and also I ended up having to include more Democratic parts of Brooklyn in Grimm's district such that it actually shifts several points Democratic, so it seems likely to me that were you to successfully create the district that you're talking about we'd still end up with only the one Republican CD in the city most years (possibly zero if some hawkish, religiously conservative Jewish Democrat got elected from the hypothetical district that we are discussing).

I don't know how to upload maps on this website.
the key is to move Grimm out of Brooklyn and towards the Rockways
Grimm would be +2
and the New Jewish district would be +9

and in regards to weather or not the there was a Democrat or a Republican though I would prefer a Republican I would vote for someone like Noach Dear, or Dov Hikind way before I would vote for most NY state Republicans.

If you are looking for the Orthodox precincts in DRA, use the option to color by election. They will show up as strongly McCain compared to everything else. Though I was motivated by geography and the black-majority districts, I suspect it would look similar to CD 8 in my map above (reposted here).

[muon2]

How in the world did you plan to sell it, Muon2?  Or did you not do the Westchester and Long Island gerrymanders?  What was your Hispanic percentage for the Crowley CD?

Of course I refrained from the LI/Westchester gerrys. I'm all about county integrity. For the NYC minority districts I note that the city is 22.2% BVAP and 26.7% HVAP. This would be 2.53 and 3.04 CDs respectively. I provide for three black-majority districts by including a small part of Nassau, and it is designed to make the remainder of Hempstead Town with Long Beach exactly one CD.

I provide for three CDs with a HVAP majority. If the plan is to seriously considered for Hispanic CDs then the HVAP should be large enough to consistently elect a candidate of choice without knowledge of other electoral factors. The proposed plan has only one such CD in The Bronx, with one other CD at 52% and two in the high 40% range. Crowley's success, demonstrates that the upper 40's will not elect a candidate of choice, and Velasquez' success in a neighboring district is presumably due to other factors. My CD 13 and CD 15 are 52% and 63% similar to the court plan. My CD 7 is 57.2% and should be far more likely to elect a candidate of choice for Hispanics than the two sub-50% districts in the court plan. This effectively combines populations in those two sub-50% HVAP districts, and is not retrogression since one of those districts was not electing a candidate of choice.

Here's my original post:

I had hoped to put together a plan for submission last night, but my DRA hung at about 10:30 when I was checking the districts prior to creating a file. But I can still share my work here.

I based my plan on the same model I used in the CA exercise. I started with regions of whole counties that were nearly equal to a whole number of districts:

Southern NY (CD 1-19, +1398)
Northern NY (CD 20-22, -702)
Western NY (CD 23-27, -695)

The regions were divided based on nearly whole counties with at most one town split in a county. Splits were used to get all deviations under 0.1% at the precinct level, and all but two districts are under 300 deviation. This is the resulting map for the state:



Within the NYC area districts were grouped to fit counties as well:
LI (CD 1-4, -37,948)
Queens (CD 5-7, +77,600)
Brooklyn/SI (CD 8-11, +102,600)
Manhattan/Bronx (CD 12-15, +100,151)
Lower Hudson (CD 16-19, -241,005)

Shifts and additional county breaks were made to get 3 Black-majority districts and 3 Hispanic-majority districts. The NYC area map look like this:



Here are the demographics including VAPs over 20%. Estimated PVIs are based on the 2008 Pres using Torie's spreadsheet factor.

LONG ISLAND
CD 1 (Smithtown) W 80.1% [R+2]
CD 2 (Islip) W 66.2% [D+1]
CD 3 (Hicksville) W 71.2% [R+1]
CD 4 (Hempstead) W 64.2% [D+1]

QUEENS
CD 5 (Flushing) W 43.4%, A 33.9% [D+9]
CD 6 (S Jamaica) B 50.4% [D+33]
CD 7 (Corona) H 59.4% [D+30]

BROOKLYN/STATEN ISLAND
CD 8 (Borough Park) W 55.7% A 23.4% [R+5]
CD 9 (Staten Island) W 67.1% [R+5]
CD 10 (East NY) W 23.6%, B 50.2% [D+38]
CD 11 (Flatbush) W 30.6%, B 50.3% [D+38]

MANHATTAN/BRONX
CD 12 (Manhattan) W 64.2% [D+31]
CD 13 (Harlem) B 28.2%, H 52.1% [D+40]
CD 14 (Triboro) W 54.1%, H 23.8% [D+24]
CD 15 (South Bronx) B 29.3%, H 63.1% [D+41]

LOWER HUDSON
CD 16 (Yonkers) W 41.3%, B 29.0%, H 23.3% [D+18]
CD 17 (White Plains) W 67.9% [D+5]
CD 18 (Newburgh) W 75.1% [D+1]
CD 19 (Albany) W 77.3% [D+5]

NORTHERN NY
CD 20 (Schenectady) W 90.0% [R+1]
CD 21 (Utica) W 90.2% [R+2]
CD 22 (Syracuse) W 85.8% [D+3]

WESTERN NY
CD 23 (Binghampton) W 88.9% [D+0]
CD 24 (Niagara Falls) W 91.6% [R+6]
CD 25 (Rochester) W 76.0% [D+6]
CD 26 (Elmira) W 93.1% [R+8]
CD 27 (Buffalo) W 76.5% [D+9]

[muon2]

One quick point I would like to make here in the Orthodox Jewish seat argument is that if such a seat is drawn to grant representation specifically to the Orthodox Jewish minority is that for such a seat to do just that, the main premise would be that the seat needs to be drawn so that the Orthodox community is able to elect the representative of their choice. It does not need to be majority Orthodox Jewish. We often use this standard with other minority groups throughout the country in redistricting. Note, I am not arguing that the Orthodox Jewish community is large enough that representation should be legally required, but if it is, the district needs to be drawn so that other groups will not drown out the Orthodox vote. This means that the other groups cannot be too heavily partisan against the Orthodox prefered candidate (which right now seems to be Turner).

The question I don't understand is how they make a case. To appeal to the federal court they would have to argue that they are a racial or language minority. Religion is not covered by the 15th amendment, and probably by the 1st amendment it can't be used.

[muon2]

Might be more trouble w/ other Orthodox, though, (do they still speak much Yiddish in Lithuanian yeshivas? I don't know)

I checked and the best I came up with were http://www.mla.org/map_data_results&state_id=34&place_id=38580&cty_id=(home to the Beth Medrash Govoha.
So that would probably be an English majority with significant Yiddish and Hebrew minorities amongst the Litvishers. Does that count as a linguistic minority?

According to the site there are less than 200K Yiddish and Hebrew speakers throughout NY. They would not reach the 50% of a CD required for VRA section 2 status, assuming they were a recognized minority.

There are certainly enough for legislative districts, however. If they are shown to vote as a bloc differently than the rest of the population in their area, then they would meet the Gingles test. That still leaves the question as to whether they could be recognized as such. It's perhaps useful to note that Hispanics as a language minority were not in the original VRA but were added later.

[muon2]

Ok, I was wrong in thinking that restoring Slaughter's district to Monroe only was painless for Dems. Too many Dems disagree.

But why are they that worried. With a D+6 the district looks secure on paper. If the problem is Slaughter, then that's an internal issue for the Dems.

[muon2]

In an idle moment, after the Pubs bagged three seats in NY in the last go round,I was wondering if it would ever be possible for the Pubs to get a majority of the House seats in NY.  They have nine, and needed fourteen, or five more. NY 2, NY-4, NY-18 are possible, and after the Pub came so close in Rochester, NY-25 is not impossible. However, that last one, NY-17, is a very steep climb indeed. So probably not. But wait a minute, if the Court had drawn that South Brooklyn seat, which it didn't, would that not it be possible then?  Should the court have drawn the seat? Was it possible to do so, hewing to the VRA (bearing in mind that Article 5 is now dead), and good redistricting principles (now I would like to think a bit older and wiser at it, and now no longer "fooled" by all this community of interest hype)? So I redrew one of my prior maps, and voila, it is. Indeed, the south Brooklyn seat would be by far the most Pub in NY, with a PVI of something like 10, believe it or not (56% McCain).

I wonder how my map would do in the little contest Muon2 is hosting for Virginia (not sure how erosity for intra-county lines is measured in that contest). I giggled the lines on Long Island to minimize Town chops (Towns, not villages), as well as Borough chops in NYC.

Nothing strikes me as particularly unreasonable, particularly as you seem to hew to both towns and villages, which is good in my book. Within the boroughs I'd have to see how the lines match up with the official NYC community areas as that would be the natural neutral set of subunits.

As for how your keen mapping skills might fare compared to others, I can only suggest you add your thoughts on a VA redo.