2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: Minnesota

[patzer]

I tried making a map that's somewhat favourable to the Dems while still looking reasonable. No cities have been divided, and county splits minimized.

[patzer]

This is the sort of 5-3 map I think would be most "reasonable", especially for a court-ordered map for instance.



All incumbents' homes are kept in their districts, but Tom Emmer's district went from Trump +2 in 2016 to Biden +6 in 2020 so would be a struggle for him to hang onto. All other incumbents should be reasonably safe albeit the 8th could be competitive with a good Dem candidate.

[patzer]

This is the sort of 5-3 map I think would be most "reasonable", especially for a court-ordered map for instance.

All incumbents' homes are kept in their districts, but Tom Emmer's district went from Trump +2 in 2016 to Biden +6 in 2020 so would be a struggle for him to hang onto. All other incumbents should be reasonably safe albeit the 8th could be competitive with a good Dem candidate.

A Court will not make changes that radical. Also you have Hagadorn and Craig in the same district. And it's tough to tell from a map with no county lines but you may also have Emmer and Phillips in the same district.

I went based on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_delegations_from_Minnesota

Which said Hagedorn is in Mankato and Craig in Eagan

If the locations in that article are correct, the map works.

[patzer]

Thought I'd see how close Minnesota could be to having a VRA district.

Here's what I got- the new 6th is 42% white, 28% black, 17% Asian, 12% Hispanic, 3% Native.

So... not really a proper VRA district yet, but things are heading in a direction where one may be possible in future.

[patzer]

Democrats need to demand a 5-3 map or a  4-2-2 at worst. There's no a reason a +8 biden state should have a split delegation.

I think the best the can home for is a map that shores up Craig to give them four basically safe seats.

Probably the best feasible map is one where the 8th stretches across the north to include Moorhead, and the 1st gets a bit more competitive whilst the 2nd is shored up.

You’d end up with four safe D, two safe R, and two tilt R (the first and eighth). The 1st and 8th would continue to slowly drift away from the Dems but they could still have a shot.

[patzer]

Can anyone explain why no proposals have something like this for MN04? Seems like the area in North Dakota even has townships called West and South St Paul.  Obviously this slightly hurts Democrats as the townships in this area are more Dem than areas in Washington but it certainly seems like a decent district to draw just like one draws West Sacramento with Sacramento? Is the river that major of a dividing line? St paul itself actually crosses the river anyway. It seems like a decent dividing line although most maps now still have to cross the river in a serious way because MN02 can't go down south to take rural counties as MN01 has to grab those.

I guess at the very least one could call this a serious GOP proposal instead of the lol map from above.

I believe that double-bunks Angie Craig (from Eagan) with Betty McCollum in the 4th, which is certainly unnecessary.

If there's to be any double bunking, how about something like this... https://davesredistricting.org/join/9e2ac1d9-9651-453b-96fa-d8c10458a4a9

It's neat, fair, and forces Ilhan Omar to either contest the 2nd district where she would now live (primarying Angie Craig) or running in the new 5th which contains significantly less of her old territory. If there were some Dems who aren't a fan of Ilhan Omar and want to see her out of congress, this is the way to do it.

[patzer]

Why is it so hard to draw 5 democratic CDs in a biden +8 state. The Nevada democrats did it in a biden +2 state

The Dem vote in Minnesota is more heavily packed than the Republican vote is, which makes it a bit harder.

That being said it’s not too hard to draw five districts that at least lean D in the Twin Cities area– issue is that while the court seems to be doing five seats in that urban area, it’s likely that one will lean R unless they do fairly significant boundary changes.

It’d ironically have been easier if Minnesota had lost a seat as it nearly did– in that case the natural map would have been simply dividing up Fischbach’s seat between the other three R seats, and thus resulting in a 4D-3R map.