Sol's 50-state Redistricting Library

[Torie]

link

A thought: would it make sense to change the Scranton CD by removing Wyoming County and replacing it with more of Luzerne?

You have to split a county anyway, and Wyoming is also part of the Scranton-Wilkes Barre metro and portions of it are closer to the cities. You can easily do it the way you said but IMO it's basically a washout as far as communities are concerned.

Plus tbh I never see Wyoming in a Wyoming Valley district so I thought I might as well do it.

The idea is to minimize the size of a county split in population all things otherwise being equal, and they would seem to be here given that both counties in play are in the same MSA. As you can see, the size of the chop would be so small, that if PA had a law allowing for population deviations of up to 0.5% in order to avoid a county or municipal split, which would almost certainly be upheld by SCOTUS, one could avoid having any county split at all.




I quite like your PA map btw. Well done.

[Torie]

Arkansaw.

link


The state lends itself well to two urban and two rural districts; one in the southern and eastern lowlands and one in the western and northern highlands.

AR-01: Safe R, despite being a third Black. May be one of the most racially polarized districts in the country, since Dems probably have less that 10% of the white vote.

AR-02: The Little Rock district. Likely R. I would have loved to put Pine Bluff in here, but metro Little Rock is too big to fit it in.

AR-03: Safe R, despite promising trends in the extreme NW. This district is growing a lot; maybe next cycle it will be too populous to put NWA and Fort Smith together.

AR-04: Safe R of course, with basically no Democratic areas outside of small, fairly Black towns in the SW of the district. Despite the odd shape, it has a logic to it as this is the highland areas of the state.

FWIW, here is my version of the state following the Muon2 rules (so thus two metro area CD's hewing to the MSA boundaries are mandated, similar to what you did). One goal was to minimize the size of the county cuts, and two of them are under 500 people, and the third is about 2,000, so it would be legal under SCOTUS law to lose them all.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/cd33fca7-d3b8-46ef-a0f8-6529c03af21a

[Torie]

Arkansaw.

link


The state lends itself well to two urban and two rural districts; one in the southern and eastern lowlands and one in the western and northern highlands.

AR-01: Safe R, despite being a third Black. May be one of the most racially polarized districts in the country, since Dems probably have less that 10% of the white vote.

AR-02: The Little Rock district. Likely R. I would have loved to put Pine Bluff in here, but metro Little Rock is too big to fit it in.

AR-03: Safe R, despite promising trends in the extreme NW. This district is growing a lot; maybe next cycle it will be too populous to put NWA and Fort Smith together.

AR-04: Safe R of course, with basically no Democratic areas outside of small, fairly Black towns in the SW of the district. Despite the odd shape, it has a logic to it as this is the highland areas of the state.

FWIW, here is my version of the state following the Muon2 rules (so thus two metro area CD's hewing to the MSA boundaries are mandated, similar to what you did). One goal was to minimize the size of the county cuts, and two of them are under 500 people, and the third is about 2,000, so it would be legal under SCOTUS law to lose them all.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/cd33fca7-d3b8-46ef-a0f8-6529c03af21a

Makes sense to me--I'm curious though why you did the rural districts NE-SW rather than NW-SE, which matches up better to topographical and cultural patterns.



It might be technically more 'erose' but the difference between the lowland areas and Ozarks/Ouachitas is pretty quantifiable imo.

More erosity, and as I recall, larger county cuts.

Addendum: I get to this point (https://davesredistricting.org/join/534f3940-27a1-4733-a8e0-c17a8ec33c85), and now what? Poinsett and Craighead are in the same MSA, so they cannot be divided. Any other cut is big and/or ugly.

[Torie]

snip

What about something like this?

It has more erosity under the Muon2 rules (more red counties are next to more light blue counties, but that is about the best one can do if one considers flats versus hills as distinct COI's that should be given cognizance. COI's in my view outside the VRA ones and perhaps language groups tend to be a witch's brew when drawing lines. Granted here it does not make that much of a partisan difference.

Nice map of SoCal by the way. There topography has more meaning since we have mountains within counties, some so steep that no roads traverse them.

[Torie]

If you want decent road connections to Inyo and Mono, here is how I handled it.