US House Redistricting: Mississippi

[muon2]

Mississippi has four CDs and a large number of small counties, yet unlike IA or AR which have the same situation, MS does not try to keep counties whole, but goes for exact population equaliy. Out of curiosity, I drew a map of MS using the 2010 Census data following the style of AR with whole counties only. The maximum deviation is 983 (0.13%) and CD2 is 59% black VAP.



CD 1 (brown) 742,807
CD 2 (green) 741,494
CD 3 (yellow) 741,041
CD 4 (slate) 740,955

[muon2]

Looks about right. Just take the 2 counties with the most blacks and throw them in the black district, and population balance.

I doubt this will be hard.

Yet MS doesn't bother to keep counties intact. The VRA district is solid enough that I wouldn't think that a few hundred people would cause a map to fail preclearance. In any case, MS could follow the example of AR in 2001 and have a second map that was essentially the same but with exact equality as a backup plan.

[muon2]

Looks about right. Just take the 2 counties with the most blacks and throw them in the black district, and population balance.

I doubt this will be hard.

You're talking of the rl map? Yeah, to be more precise you take Natchez and most of Panola County.

From the existing map, Adams, Wilkinson, and Panola counties go in CD-2. Then you just need to shift about 22k people between the 3 GOP districts.

FWIW, the current representatives are from:

MS-1 Nunnelee, Tupelo
MS-2 Thompson, Bolton (Hinds County)
MS-3 Harper, Pearl (Rankin County)
MS-4 Palazzo, Gulfport

Is it possible to put all of Madison County in MS-2?

I kind of like going for the Mississippi is just like Iowa solution.

I certainly could and did. There's really no reason to further split white precincts from MS-2. It's well over 50% and the increased numbers border on racial gerrymandering.

[muon2]

It looks like judges will be drawing the congressional districts.

Perhaps they'll look at the map in my OP.