US House Redistricting: Indiana

[Torie]

Yes, Lake County south of Mordor on the Lake, actually has some pretty nice towns. I have been to a couple.  I saw a dermatologist down there for some reason, when I lived in Chicago. Along the lake it does really look like Mordor at night, with the flames from the steel mills illuminating the sky. I lost a wallet something, and some good Samaritan picked it up in the parking lot of a steel mill, and gave it to a security guy who called me, and though the cash was gone, the credit cards, and driver's license were still in it, so down I went to pick it up. Oh dear, I will never forget my little journey through the slag heaps. It was a long way from the ivory tower zone where I lived - a very long way, as it were.

[Torie]

Yes, taking rural areas that bounce around some, and appending them to reliable GOP suburban and exurban areas is a very good strategy. And that is why Carson's CD needs to be left alone. All those Indianapolis suburbs and exurbs are needed to beef up the GOP districts. The trick as always is to pack as many Dems as possible into the Carson CD.

[Torie]

It turns out that in the existing Indianapolis CD (IN-07), there are some McCain precincts, or some marginal ones. They have been removed to max the Dem pack in Marion County. So that enables IN-07 to pick up Bloomington, which is a very beautiful thing indeed.

IN-01 is of course a max Dem pack too, per Torie SOP. For South Bend, I just picked up all the precincts that had a significant black percentage as a proxy for finding the Dems (along of course with picking up the precincts immediately around Notre Dame University), rather than look each precinct up.

For Marion County (and Lake County along the edges of IN-01, it as another precinct by precinct job. There is no other substitute for doing that, when exploring what are the possibilities are. Indeed, for Marion County, it was only by doing that, and culling out acceptable precincts to put in a Pubbie CD, that I was able to pack in Bloomington, finding of course the lightly populated precincts to get down there. Interestingly, except to the east in Marion County, and one prong to the north (probably the paths of black expansion), the existing map from 10 years ago, is still pretty good as a dividing line between where the Pubbies are, and the Dems - good but far from "perfect."

If this map were adopted, there will be next to zero suspense as to which party will win which CD's in Indiana for the next ten years. And except for the minor exception of the gold and yellow CD's, I made everything less erose, and respected county boundaries, and was just really a good boy and civic minded citizen all around. Perhaps after PA, I got my fill of erosity - for the moment. And there you have it.

[Torie]

Joe Donnelly is playing the only card he has; the "I'm going to run for governor if you don't give me a district" card.

It worked for Sherrod Brown 10 years ago.

It won't work this time. He's done.

[Torie]

Certainly you could cover your tracks a little better by putting the South Indy precincts in CD6 instead of that green monster?

No, that screws up the map elsewhere, and there is a certain elegance in IN-05 taking in the inner suburbs of Indianapolis, and some of what used to be suburbs in Marion County.  It may be that IN-06 could be bounced out of its few precincts in east Marion County, just to complete the thought. Would that make you happier?

[Torie]

Getting rid of Bloomington will remove any problems for the GOP in IN-9.  But what has been done about the bloody eighth?  The rest of the map is obviously very good.

Well Sam old chap, you don't miss much do you?  Are you a lawyer or something?

The stats are below, and yes, IN-08 having now done the estimated calcs, is about a Pubbie point short of my hopes and dreams. Sure, it is a 52.28% McCain CD, up about 30 basis points, and probably around a 56.5% Bush 2004 CD, and that more than meets my standards. But yes, a law and order Tory Dem sheriff from Evansville, might be able to take down an eccentric and ineffectual incumbent with certain odd religious quirks, but surely that is unlikely right?  

And IN-04 does have a few Pubbies to spare. But to ship them down south, would require IN-04 having to pick up some carefully selected precincts in Vigo County (Terre Haute - by the way did you know Terre Haute had a higher population in 1900 than now?), with IN-08 getting in exchange some precincts in Morgan County (leaving a strand so CD-04 can get down and pick up some marginal precincts in Monroe County, unless we do a more extension redraw, and CD-08 also picks up west Monroe County).  Whether the Pubbies really want to do that, is a close question I would think. How strong is the new Pubbie in IN-08?  Surely he is better than the H man was back when no?

What do you think the Pubbie preference would be Sam? Incumbents don't like wading into strange new territory, particularly urban territory, unless they are told that they have to, for the good of the "cause." That is one thing of which our mappers here need to take more cognizance, IMO. Try to keep the CD's in general as close as possible to what they were before for incumbents that you are trying to protect, absent more compelling considerations. That is why in my maps now, I use the "Old CD" button, and then get just the right color depth, so one can see in each CD what territory is new, and what is more familiar to it (based on color shading variations). It is an important consideration. And the first thing I do, is have Dave Bradlee's utility map display for me the old CD's, and then I adjust those.

I guess I will put up an alternative map in due course, but it will take looking up precincts in Vigo County. Boo!  

By the way, I wonder where the incumbent in IN-04 lives. Does anyone know off hand? That CD moved around enough, that he may have been accidentally excised from his CD.

[Torie]

Terre Haute - by the way did you know Terre Haute had a higher population in 1900 than now?

Yes.
One of the worst declined cities that rarely if ever gets mentioned anywhere is Saint Joseph, Missouri, by the by.

And I suppose I'll have to do it myself to see what the problem with my suggested amendation is.

Yes, St. Joseph saw its heyday when the Pony Express was in full swing, and has been in decline ever since, basically.

Good luck with your map, Lewis. I look forward to reviewing it. If you want me to email to you my data file, I would be happy to do so, so you can work from it, assuming you don't think my map in general is a piece of trash (from the Pubbie perspective obviously; this is not a civics exercise).

[Torie]

Or you could just tell me how much rural territory the district would have to take in instead and what that would do to the partisan breakdowns.

I will blank out the precincts that are in IN-05 for you in south Marion, and tell you what the population number is for that area. How about that?  My guess is that the precincts are about 55-45 McCain, but that is just a guess. I was focusing on finding Pubbie acceptable  precincts inside IN-07, or unacceptable Dem precincts outside, and not so much just how Pubbie this south sector of IN-05 actually was, after I had completed my handiwork.

[Torie]

Young lives in Bloomington, Torie. You've cut him out of his district and given it to Pence.

CD-06 does not impinge on Monroe County. Did you mean to say something else Verily?

[Torie]

Certainly you could cover your tracks a little better by putting the South Indy precincts in CD6 instead of that green monster?

No, that screws up the map elsewhere, and there is a certain elegance in IN-05 taking in the inner suburbs of Indianapolis, and some of what used to be suburbs in Marion County.  It may be that IN-06 could be bounced out of its few precincts in east Marion County, just to complete the thought. Would that make you happier?

How much does it screw up the map/PVI to shift some counties south of Ft Wayne to CD5 in exchange for some of the south suburbs of Indy to CD 6?

It would make IN-03 more Pubbie, and way over Pubbied, and IN-06 more Dem. Thus I deliberately avoided that. The three counties south of Ft. Wayne (Allen County) are heavily Pubbie, like 62% McCain, while the south Marion County precincts are more like 55% McCain as a guess, although I am not sure. It could be a bit plus or minus from that. So we would be going backwards, and to me that makes no sense because we want a third CD to wander in to Marion County.  IN-06 has a bit of work to do as it is, neutralizing some Dem areas. McCain only got about 53% in the old IN-06, and the areas it lost to IN-09 are pretty heavily Pubbie, and even though it got some Pubbie east Indianapolis exurbs, they are not the prime Pubbie areas, so I don't think IN-06 got any more Pubbie with its new lines.

[Torie]

Or you could just tell me how much rural territory the district would have to take in instead and what that would do to the partisan breakdowns.

OK, Lewis, the south Marion County salient of IN-05, plus its few connector precincts in Hancock County (IN-06 does not impinge at all into Marion County at present; my bad, I mixed up which row of townships was the boundary of Marion), has 111,976 people in it. Good luck Lewis!  

[Torie]

Torie, where did you get precinct data for Indiana?  

I had to go to each county, and look at the precinct data, which in Indiana have all offices listed for each precinct, not in tabular form, so then I need to hit the find button a lot, to get the POTUS race data, and find the precincts or townships that were of interest to me, and then bold the precincts I wanted in or out on a spreadsheet, and then have a triple split screen, and go precinct by precinct, looking at a precinct map, the returns for that precinct, and the Dave Bradlee application all at once. And for Marion, the precinct numbers did not match, and some were combined, so I need to cross match by visual shape.  Sometimes, a whole township or most of it, or city, was mostly good or bad, and then I just shoved the whole darn thing into one CD or the other, unless there was one or two outlier precincts that I wanted in or out, and then I needed to find where they were exactly. Oh, and then I needed to convert my excel data into columns from rows in a couple of counties, after the copy and paste, and it took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to do that, using the sort data feature on excel and a couple of other strategic copy and pastes. I don't think you want to do that, do you?  

And that is why I try to avoid that if I can, if I have a good proxy, like black percentages in South Bend.

[Torie]

OK, here is the map that I think shifts one Pubbie point from IN-04 to IN-08, plus or minus maybe 40 basis points. I can't find any precinct data for Vigo County, other than the 2010 Coats-Ellsworth Senate race, so I had to use that to generate inferential data, and then I decided to not split Morgan County at all, and gave CD-08 close to half of Vigo County, and kind of assumed that the additional chunk was about even between Coats and Ellsworth, as the prior chunk was, and I still have not sorted out the data mess in Monroe County (its website is my next pit stop), and I saw what taking in most of Vigo did to IN-04 before dealing with the cut out of Morgan, and with Monroe at all (a drop of two Pubbie points from 56.5% McCain to 54.5% McCain), and decided that that was too much, so abandoned splitting Morgan, and gave IN-08 a larger chunk of Vigo. (There are more people in the Monroe County handful of precincts than I thought in part.)

Oh, and I also moved tiny but heavily GOP Union County over to IN-06 from IN-09.  It probably beefs up IN-06 by maybe 10-15 basis points or so, and makes the map look prettier. I also shifted two or three other precincts to make things look prettier, and kid rid of a couple of one precinct county splits.

So, I think this map is getting close to being in final form, meaning that it becomes the 4th state of the quartet that I have done so far. I do need to check more thoroughly the stats on IN-06 just to make sure I have not made it more than just a smidgen more Dem, if that. I don't think I have, but in this case an educated guess just won't cut it.

[Torie]

Would Pence be happy being drawn into the 9th? He lives in Columbus (Bartholomew County).

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. I have not checked the residencies for IN-09 and 06 yet. I have for IN-09 and 04 now, and made sure Young's residence in Bloomington is included in his district. I guess that explains the salient into Columbus through the NE corner in the old map. I guess I will have to shove an IN-06 prong down into Columbus to pick up Pence's home. Beyond despoiling the map, that will just make IN-09 even more uber Republican, as you can see from this map. It just doesn't have much if any Dem territory left, and I can't keep Perry County in the CD without making the map look ridiculous, and it is only worth about 30 basis points anyway. Other than Perry County, there just isn't any Dem territory for IN-09 to pick up anymore that will help out another Pubbie CD.

Nonsense. Your CD9 needs to add a single-precinct-wide connector along the river into half of Evansville ASAP.

In general, I only make Dem seats an erose mess - call them the Torie yellow and gold seats. So far I have two in Indiana, four in Pennsylvania ( ran out of yellow shades for that state), and one that comes close in Michigan (MI-05)

[Torie]

And if you really want to get IN-08 (the dark green CD) all Pubbied up, the map below is the way to do it.  What do you all think? The tricky part of this map was keeping Young's home in Bloomington still in his IN-09 (the blue) CD.    And yes one huge university precinct (about 6,000 in population) in IN-08 that it now needs to traverse, will have to be redrawn to keep it out of the CD.

[Torie]

I think this map is now in final form.

In this iteration, I gave IN-08 from IN-09 very marginally GOP Crawford County, in exchange for IN-09 picking up some very marginally Dem territory in Monroe County from IN-08. It only picked up 5 basis points for IN-08, but made the map less erose, so I went for it. IN-07 will need more people when the intra county census figures come in for Marion County, and if IN-08 ends up needing to shed a few from the intra county shifts in Vigo County, IN-08 might pick up another 15 GOP basis points, and if IN-09 needs to pick up a few folks from the intra county figures in Johnson, IN-08 might pick up another few GOP basis points, and get up to perhaps McCain 53.1% or so as a guess.  Meanwhile,  IN-02 will get about 25-50 basis points more GOP, when the intra county census population numbers come in from Lake, LaPorte, Porter and St. Joseph Counties, while IN-05 may get close to a full point more GOP, as IN-07 gets more Dem, all due to Marion County action. We shall see.

Come to think of it, one way to get perhaps that extra Pubbie point, or some of it, in IN-05 (which does not need it), down to IN-08 (which does, along perhaps with IN-04 maybe), is for IN-04 to cut into IN-05 in NW Marion County above the IN-07 zone, to drain IN-05 of excess population, or some of it, IN-08 then cutting into heavily GOP Morgan County to offset what IN-04 gained in NW Marion, and IN-07 then picking up the population it needs from about 5 pretty large and fairly heavily Dem precincts in Monroe County. So this game would be pursued to the extent necessary to excise from IN-08 and into the IN-07 Dem sink its few problem precincts in Monroe County. This exercise would perhaps shove up the numbers I speculated about above, up by another 50-75 basis points or so, with a bit of that going to IN-04 perhaps.

Any comments are welcome.

[Torie]

That doesn't guarantee Donnelly's defeat, and it does probably guarantee that the 8th will flip back as soon as there's another strong Democratic year. It's still the Bloody Eight after all.

No, it doesn't as to Donnelly (although Donnelly would have lost in 2010 in his newly redrawn CD by about a 57-43 margin, in yes, a GOP wave year, particularly in this part of the country), but the odds I think are pretty heavily against him.  As to the 8th, the 8th only flipped before due to a confluence of a Dem trend year, weak incumbent and ideally situated challenger.  Now the 8th is another point farther into the GOP zone.  So it is going to be tough for another Tory Dem sheriff type from Evansville to take out Larry Buschon (a heart surgeon, and the voters just love MD's, yes they do - unlike what they think of that peculiar species of pond scum commonly referred
to as lawyers ).

In any event, this map I think is the absolutely best that can be done for the GOP (every precinct in the critical zones was carefully massaged), without going nutter, and giving folks new districts, and all sorts of other crazy stuff that will no happen.

[Torie]

Is there no way your 9th can swap some Republican territory with the 8th? 56% McCain seems unnecessarily high for the former.

Well you could do the map below, giving IN-09 Perry County, with IN-09 getting most of Washington County in exchange, but the lines become more erose.  IN-08 gets more GOP by about 65 basis points, moving from  McCain 52.87% to McCain 53.52%. Do you think it is worth doing that? Everything in life is a balancing test.

[Torie]

This map reflects the updated (although not final) intra county population figures for Indiana. The updated figures caused the Dems to lose ground in all of the GOP friendly CD's except for IN-02, which moved 27 basis points towards the Dems primarily due to having to take in about 9,500 evenly divided voters as between Obama and McCain in northern Tippecanoe County, and IN-03, which stayed the same.

The action was mostly generated by the old city of Indianapolis (prior to merging with the county of Marion), suffering rather drastic population losses as compared to the old suburban ring of Marion County. As a consequence, IN-07 now sucks up most of Monroe County, and all those university affiliated Dems - almost all of them.

[Torie]

As to the 8th, the 8th only flipped before due to a confluence of a Dem trend year, weak incumbent and ideally situated challenger.

Uh, no. That's merely why Hostettler lost by 22 points.
Incidentally, in your map a combination of strong Dem year and geographic polarization might flip the 4th.

Anything can flip, but one can't do much about CD's with a GOP PVI way up there if they turn. IN-04 has a 2008 GOP PVI of over 7, and its 2004 PVI is up there so high, that it is barely in earth's atmosphere. What do you mean by "geographic polarization" in this context Lewis?

As to the H man, well I said that he was flawed, but no, I didn't know that he tanked as badly as he did. If Indianapolis loses more folks in the next 10 years, maybe I will take the IN-07 down to Evansville next time. IN-07 to Evansville, and PA-14 to Sharon is my motto.

[Torie]

Are you going to be updating this with the actual census count numbers? Your first is about 7000 people short (meaning you can screw Donnelly a little further), didn't check anywhere else.

The Bradlee utility now has the actual census numbers?

Addendum: I opened it up with my map, and the numbers did not change. What are you using?

[Torie]

If you have a saved map, it will open up with whatever numbers you were using before. You'd have to redo it to update it with the 2010 census numbers.

I was afraid that you were going to say that. I have already redrawn that map about 10 f'ing times!  Boo! 

[Torie]

Here is a new CD map for Indiana, revised to reflect the actual census numbers which became available for Indiana in the past fortnight or so. The Dems won't like it - at all. Among other things, there are very few Dem precincts left for IN-01 to suck up now, and even those not sucked up in the IN-01 sweep are not really very Dem in any event; 55-45 stuff. So IN-02 is now very close to 54% McCain, and might have even hit it [addendum: it did hit it]. Meanwhile, IN-09 becomes one of the most GOP CD's in the nation north of the Mason Dixon line (it got even more GOP, taking in another slug of hyper GOP precincts in Johnson County).  Basically, very little money will be spend on General CD elections in Indiana for the next 10 years if this map is adopted, absent highly unusual circumstances. I will put up the stats in due course. [Now up.] Thanks heavens the Marion County precinct returns are in copy and paste spreadsheet form, so I can do searches, and sorts, and stuff to cherry pick efficiently. I sorted by percent McCain, and went from there. Without the sort function on excel, I would have given up this endeavor long ago.

[Torie]

Final stats are up for Indiana now.

[Torie]

Man, they left a lot of points on the table, and left IN-02 and IN-08 rather marginal. And they put Burton in the Indianapolis CD, IN-O7, along with all those Pubbies in south Marion County.  In a word, the map sucks!