2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: California

[Хahar 🤔]

Wrt: the yellow district, is it ok to not have an Asian seat in San Jose? The Green district is only plurality. I know the California metrics are pretty aggressive about making minority districts. (FYI, it's very hard to make a majority asian Green district without some population shifted out of the central valley.)

I was baffled by the creation of an Asian district in the first place ten years ago; there is no "Asian community" to speak of (Vietnamese in east San Jose have nothing in particular in common with Indians and Chinese in Cupertino and Fremont) and Asian candidates have no difficulty being elected in districts without Asian majorities. From the standpoint of good governance, I would personally prefer that Asian-majority districts not created unless completely necessary, because doing so invites communalist politics (as in the case of the BJP candidate who ran against Ro Khanna last year).

[Хahar 🤔]

-The North Coast-Sacramento Valley district is totally unacceptable.
-Inyo-Mono-Tahoe-Gold Country is not acceptable. Look at mountains and road connectivity, not just compactness.

I will keep this in mind for next time, thank you!

I'm just going to put in a counter-statement that your Inyo-Mono-mountains district is totally fine. There are roads there; not great roads, but there are no great roads in and out of Inyo and Mono. And Inyo and Mono don't really connect well with anywhere else in CA. Blairite and others will push for the San Bernardino alignment, and that isn't unacceptable either, but there's nothing more in common there, and the area between populated areas in Inyo and San Bernardino Counties is even wider than with points west of Mono (and you have to pass through Kern). Connecting through Yosemite is fine, and a mountains-straddling district is acceptable if everything in it is basically rural and remote mountains and foothills.

This is in contrast to the North Coast-Redding pairing, which is tougher because Redding and the North Coast are so culturally different, and also consist more of sizeable settlements and less of tiny rural towns.

"There are roads there" is true in a literal sense, I suppose, but there are no crossings of the Sierra Nevada that are open in winter between the Carson Pass in Alpine County and the Walker Pass in Kern County. Note that this means that connecting through Yosemite is not fine; the Tioga Pass, which connects the main portion of the park to the eastern entrance, is not open during the winter. Maybe you can make that connection in a sled, but you can't in a car.

By contrast, US 395, the main road through Inyo and Mono, is well-traveled all year and connects to points southward without having to go over mountains. This is why, for example, AAA assigns those two counties to its Southern California branch rather than its Northern California branch, despite their being geographically northern. This is also why Mammoth Mountain Ski Area in Mono County serves a clientele almost exclusively from Southern California, where it does almost all of its marketing; if you're coming from Northern California in the winter, you can't get there unless you fly. Mammoth Lakes has a Vons (Southern California) rather than a Safeway (Northern California). All the connections in the part of California east of the Sierra Nevada are to the south, and it's lazy to assert that the mere presence of roads that are sometimes open makes it acceptable to cross the mountains.

[Хahar 🤔]

"There are roads there" is true in a literal sense, I suppose, but there are no crossings of the Sierra Nevada that are open in winter between the Carson Pass in Alpine County and the Walker Pass in Kern County. Note that this means that connecting through Yosemite is not fine; the Tioga Pass, which connects the main portion of the park to the eastern entrance, is not open during the winter. Maybe you can make that connection in a sled, but you can't in a car.

By contrast, US 395, the main road through Inyo and Mono, is well-traveled all year and connects to points southward without having to go over mountains. This is why, for example, AAA assigns those two counties to its Southern California branch rather than its Northern California branch, despite their being geographically northern. This is also why Mammoth Mountain Ski Area in Mono County serves a clientele almost exclusively from Southern California, where it does almost all of its marketing; if you're coming from Northern California in the winter, you can't get there unless you fly. Mammoth Lakes has a Vons (Southern California) rather than a Safeway (Northern California). All the connections in the part of California east of the Sierra Nevada are to the south, and it's lazy to assert that the mere presence of roads that are sometimes open makes it acceptable to cross the mountains.

But the map he drew covers the Carson Pass, so you are making no argument whatsoever. There is as much of a connection at the northern end as at the southern end. It's true that you shouldn't directly connect Mammoth Lakes to Fresno without some other counties in the district (for example, for the State Assembly). But no one is proposing that. Instead, the choice is whether to connect the Inyo-Mono complex across the northern crossing or the southern crossing. And both are equally valid, and nothing you've said indicates otherwise.

The hyperbole on where to put Inyo and Mono is completely unwarranted. They don't fit well geographically or culturally with anywhere that isn't Nevada, so you just have to choose a road connection and put them somewhere.

No, it actually doesn't mean that those two options are equally valid. Highway 88, which crosses the Carson Pass, is a winding mountain road with minimal human settlement around it aside from one ski resort. That lack of human settlement might have to do with its crossing an 8500-foot pass, which is not something that people tend to do on a regular basis. By contrast, Highway 395 is the main thoroughfare for the movement of goods and people east of the Sierras, as you would notice from the volume of truck traffic if you were to travel that route. The idea that those two connections are the same is obviously silly.

Now, you could claim that road connectivity doesn't matter at all in California. Some evidence here would be that the state senate district that contains Mono and Inyo does not contain any part of either Alpine or Kern, meaning that there are no road connections at all between that part of the district and the Central Valley portion. That's an argument that I wouldn't be able to refute, because it's self-evidently correct, but it's not the argument you're making.

[Хahar 🤔]

California could singlehandedly solve the Republican reign of terror by gerrymandering. 

Is that what we're expecting or does CA have some type of independent commission as well?

It has a commission.  The commissioners were chosen on the basis of bios/essays they submitted, which are now public.  In addition to all of the D's, enough of the I and R commissioners to pass a map under the CA rules wrote explicitly woke personal statements.  While there are limits on what they can draw, expect a very Dem leaning map.

Not to mention the registered Republican NRDC, NARAL and Planned Parenthood donor living in BERKELEY. Who happened to write about how important California's diversity is.

That doesn't necessarily bode well for Democrats; this resume screams that this person is the type of feel-good Warren Democrat who would actually try to draw a fair/proportionality-inclined map. Not a positive in CA.

Yeah. People assume that this map will be a Democratic gerrymander, but that's the sort of thing that politicians do, not good government activists.

[Хahar 🤔]

Hate it. Republicans shouldn’t be allowed access to the pacific coast for A e s t h e t i c s

A seat linking the north coast with the Sacramento Valley would also be very stupid for practical reasons.

[Хahar 🤔]

1) North is entirely reshuffled. The coastal seat stays in it's counties, CA-01 doesn't take Yolo, Bera has more of Placer, the CA-04 successor extends southwards like many in this thread though it would a while ago. This does shift the CA-10 successor from marginally Trump in V.1 to even more Biden then now, cause removing Oakdale and the uber-white NE corner of the county makes the seat plurality Hispanic.

2) The Fremont cut is back (ugh) and the East Bay more or less resembles our current districts.

Fremont may be split but the Livermore Valley isn't now, and we don't have the bizarre district that goes from the South Bay and takes in Livermore (but not Pleasanton) and then crosses the Altamont and heads all the way out to Tracy. I think this is obviously preferable.

The Sacramento Valley also makes a lot more sense now. I'm not sure why the first map split Chico and Yuba City, and the only reason I can think of to do that would be to create a gerrymander.

This doesn't really matter, but the names given to districts in the document are very strange. The Santa Clara district is at least in Santa Clara County, although it doesn't contain Santa Clara proper, but the district labeled Cupertino is not the district with Cupertino in it. On that note, it's funny to see the way the Asian district takes a bite out of the western Santa Clara County district by taking in Cupertino. It looks ugly, it doesn't serve an actual community of interest ("Asian" isn't a community of interest), and ultimately that district still ends up only 48% Asian by VAP.

Honestly CA is too large to properly analyze. At least in say TX you can kinda break it down to segments of defined urban areas but CA is one urban slew

What? There is a very large space in between the state's two main urban areas.

[Хahar 🤔]

Interested in folk's takes on this--is drawing the lines like this worth it to make the Bay Area better, or is it better to link Fremont to the Tri-Valley to avoid this?

Apologies for not responding earlier. Admittedly I'm not neutral in that one alternative involves an area that I know well and the other an area I've only been to a few times, but I think that linking the Antelope Valley with points northward is obviously better. The connection up to Ridgecrest doesn't involve crossing any mountains except to the extent that connecting Ridgecrest to anywhere involves crossing mountains. Similarly, Tehachapi is surrounded by mountains no matter which way you go, and it's not clear to me that aside from county lines there's a compelling argument that it needs to go with the southern San Joaquin Valley rather than the Antelope Valley.