2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: Wisconsin

[EastAnglianLefty]

Starting off a new thread, as the one linked in the master list is only tangentially focused on redistricting.

House redistricting for Wisconsin doesn't strike me as that interesting - you'll get safe seats in Milwaukee and Madison, depending on how the 2020 election goes the Republicans may decide to target Kind, but we won't know if that's feasible until November, and everything else will be drawn to be safely Republican.

However, the lines for the State Assembly and the State Senate have slightly more potential to be interesting. We can expect the Republicans to draw the most aggressive map they think they can get away with. I'm not sure if the gubernatorial veto over the lines is legislative or constitutional, but if it's the former then I would expect them to repeal the veto. And obviously, the Supreme Court will back them to the hilt.

Things might get slightly more interesting if the Supreme Court flips at the next set of elections and you get a Pennsylvania-style decision striking down the map. To that end, I drew a couple of theoretical maps for the State Assembly and the State Senate which prioritise keeping counties and municipalities whole whenever possible and which try to keep fairly clean lines, but beyond that put their thumb on the scales for Democrats to the maximum extent possible.

Here's what I came up with:

Assembly:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/124050de-a05a-4023-b809-6ef6f6441566

There are 99 districts, of which 42 voted for Clinton and 45 for Evers. There's one Clinton-Walker district (in Sheboygan) but otherwise the difference is entirely down to Trump-Evers districts (primarily in the Driftless Region.)

For Evers, the tipping point seat is the 77th in Wausau, which voted for Walker by a 51.1-46.4 margin, whereas for Clinton it's the 93rd, in the Green Bay suburbs, which went for Trump 42.4-50.9.

There are 5 black-majority districts and 2 Hispanic-majority districts (on both 2018 population and 2010 VAP). It might be possible to create an additional black-majority district, but it would take fairly convoluted lines.

Senate:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/dfd73fe8-e30c-40c6-87a0-15e66b9afea4

The Senate map has 33 districts, each of which has 3 whole Assembly districts nested within it. 2 of the Senate districts are black-majority (one is only 49.4% black by 2010 VAP, but that's easily enough) and one is Hispanic-plurality by 2018 population (48.7%, vs. 39.1% white) which might not perform just yet but has a strong chance of doing so by the end of the decade. The need to provide 2 black-majority districts explains why some of the assembly districts have particularly high black populations, because this was necessary to balance out heavily white areas in and around Milwaukee that I stuck in to avoid over-packing the senate districts.

The larger size of Senate districts means it's easier to drown out Republican suburbs, meaning that Evers won 16 districts (although Clinton's poor performance in the south-west of the state means she only won 12.) For Evers the tipping point district is the 2nd, based in Racine, which went for Walker 48.8-48.9 and for Clinton it's the 18th to the north of Madison, which went for Trump by a 51-43.2 margin.


These are, fairly clearly, not good numbers for an attempted Democratic gerrymander. In a few cases extra seats could be placed on the table by a more aggressive approach to county and municipality splitting, but I was surprised by the extent of geographic sorting going on. Absent a sustained and really rapid shift in the Milwaukee suburbs, it's hard to see Democrats holding down a secure majority in either chamber.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Couldn’t Evers just veto the repeal of the veto?  Republicans don’t have two thirds majorities needed to override his veto.

There is a legit fear that the Republicans in the state legislature would attempt to do redistricting via a legislative resolution that does not require the veto of the governor. They tried this before in I think the 60's but it was struck down by the Supreme Court. Hagedorn has appeared to be fairly reasonable since joining the court last year, so maybe all hope isn't lost.

Hagedorn so far is a solid conservative yet not a power grabber. This is a problem for the legislature if they try to do redistricting via a resolution. However, Hagedorn would probably be fine if legislative/executive deadlock punts the maps up to the supreme court for them to draw. The problem for the WI GOP then would be the fact that a R-favoring court map wouldn't carve up WI03 like they want, and maybe mess with other stuff like incumbents and their bases of support.

Is that necessarily true? We've established that there are at least 3 justices on the court who are an extension of the state Republican Party, so there's every chance a court map would be nearly as hackish as an Assembly map, it just wouldn't take the hackishness down to such a granular level. So you might get a fairer map for the Assembly (which makes no difference, because it'll favour Republicans anyway) but a clear gerrymander at congressional level.

[EastAnglianLefty]

To prove the point, I just ran up a couple of clean-looking congressional maps.

The first prioritises keeping counties and municipalities whole (it has one precinct of Milwaukee in the 1st for population equality, but that's the only split) whilst still maintaining the basic orientation of the current districts: https://davesredistricting.org/join/13cd8bbf-1e30-48c6-8888-8d76c4bef3cd

Trump won 6 districts (the 1st by 5.4%, the 3rd by 4.9%) and Walker won 5 (the 3rd went for Evers 50-47.8, Walker won the 1st 51.4-46.2.) Even Baldwin only won 4 districts and her margin was pretty slim in the 1st.

The second map is similar, but it aims to shift the 3rd a bit to the right and puts Tiffany's home back into the 7th (Steil is drawn out in both maps, but only by a couple of miles and it's not like there are that many Republican votes in Janesville itself): https://davesredistricting.org/join/779381e0-692f-429d-92a5-47fab02db513

Under this map Trump won the 3rd by 7.0% and Walker won it by 2.1%.

I'm not saying that these are the best possible maps, but I am saying that if I could run these maps up in 20 minutes using nothing more than Wikipedia, I think hackish justices could too and the consultants they'll hire to draw the map certainly could.

[EastAnglianLefty]

To prove the point, I just ran up a couple of clean-looking congressional maps.

The first prioritises keeping counties and municipalities whole (it has one precinct of Milwaukee in the 1st for population equality, but that's the only split) whilst still maintaining the basic orientation of the current districts: https://davesredistricting.org/join/13cd8bbf-1e30-48c6-8888-8d76c4bef3cd

Trump won 6 districts (the 1st by 5.4%, the 3rd by 4.9%) and Walker won 5 (the 3rd went for Evers 50-47.8, Walker won the 1st 51.4-46.2.) Even Baldwin only won 4 districts and her margin was pretty slim in the 1st.

The second map is similar, but it aims to shift the 3rd a bit to the right and puts Tiffany's home back into the 7th (Steil is drawn out in both maps, but only by a couple of miles and it's not like there are that many Republican votes in Janesville itself): https://davesredistricting.org/join/779381e0-692f-429d-92a5-47fab02db513

Under this map Trump won the 3rd by 7.0% and Walker won it by 2.1%.

I'm not saying that these are the best possible maps, but I am saying that if I could run these maps up in 20 minutes using nothing more than Wikipedia, I think hackish justices could too and the consultants they'll hire to draw the map certainly could.

The GOP would prefer to dismantle the 3rd and reinforce the 1st, both of which become harder under simple COI and neatness rules. For example, the WI GOP gerry I got sitting in my DRA (using 2016 data, I have not gotten to the state in 2018 yet) get six seats to 55 - 54 Trump vs 40 - 38 Clinton. That becomes impossible under a R-tilting count plan, since WI03 and WI01 need to keep their general centers of gravity.

I think you'd need to do more than that to get to those levels. I just had a go at packing the Madison and Milwaukee seats to the maximum possible extent, and even with the centres of Racine and Kenosha thrown into the Milwaukee seat via water contiguity, the rest of the state topped out at 54.7% Trump.

[EastAnglianLefty]

To prove the point, I just ran up a couple of clean-looking congressional maps.

The first prioritises keeping counties and municipalities whole (it has one precinct of Milwaukee in the 1st for population equality, but that's the only split) whilst still maintaining the basic orientation of the current districts: https://davesredistricting.org/join/13cd8bbf-1e30-48c6-8888-8d76c4bef3cd

Trump won 6 districts (the 1st by 5.4%, the 3rd by 4.9%) and Walker won 5 (the 3rd went for Evers 50-47.8, Walker won the 1st 51.4-46.2.) Even Baldwin only won 4 districts and her margin was pretty slim in the 1st.

The second map is similar, but it aims to shift the 3rd a bit to the right and puts Tiffany's home back into the 7th (Steil is drawn out in both maps, but only by a couple of miles and it's not like there are that many Republican votes in Janesville itself): https://davesredistricting.org/join/779381e0-692f-429d-92a5-47fab02db513

Under this map Trump won the 3rd by 7.0% and Walker won it by 2.1%.

I'm not saying that these are the best possible maps, but I am saying that if I could run these maps up in 20 minutes using nothing more than Wikipedia, I think hackish justices could too and the consultants they'll hire to draw the map certainly could.

The GOP would prefer to dismantle the 3rd and reinforce the 1st, both of which become harder under simple COI and neatness rules. For example, the WI GOP gerry I got sitting in my DRA (using 2016 data, I have not gotten to the state in 2018 yet) get six seats to 55 - 54 Trump vs 40 - 38 Clinton. That becomes impossible under a R-tilting count plan, since WI03 and WI01 need to keep their general centers of gravity.

I think you'd need to do more than that to get to those levels. I just had a go at packing the Madison and Milwaukee seats to the maximum possible extent, and even with the centres of Racine and Kenosha thrown into the Milwaukee seat via water contiguity, the rest of the state topped out at 54.7% Trump.

This map sticks La Crosse in WI02 and has the rest of the state at 54.3/39.3 thanks to selective precinct selection. I basically stripped WOW in a way that diversified the GOP vote, but also in a way that isn't abnormally ugly and keeps most counties intact.

Yeah, I managed to come up with an alternative that got similar numbers statewide, by keeping La Cross in WI-3 but removing Eau Claire and Stevens Point and adding a strip to Dodge County and north-east Waukesha. 53.9% Trump. It's extremely ugly, but I suspect you could neaten it quite a lot without lowering the Trump numbers that much.

Water contiguity for WI-4 is pretty hard to justify, though - the best you can come up with as an excuse is that this means the district is very nearly black-plurality by 2018 population:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/d1486082-a4c9-4f56-8a6c-f3985e807c7a

[EastAnglianLefty]

Is WOW really a community? It's just suburban Milwaukee and whilst it makes sense as a political identifier, I don't see much to suggest shared tied between the counties themselves (as opposed to them all having similar tensions with Milwaukee.)

If you were going to gerrymander in favour of the Democrats, the simplest solution would be to Ozaukee (the least Republican of the three, and the one trending Democratic hardest) in WI-04 and use that to drag WI-01 into Milwaukee. That then lets you save Rock County for WI-03.

[EastAnglianLefty]

If we're thinking in terms of counties that form whole districts, the WOW are 100,000 short. Which is not a big deal, as Dodge and Jefferson have links to Washington and Waukesha, but I'm not sure it's a combo that draws itself.

You could just as easily say that Racine, Kenosha, Milwaukee and Ozaukee is almost the right size for two districts, and that Washington, Waukesha, Dodge and Jefferson are the right size for another.

[EastAnglianLefty]

If the intent is gerrymandering rather than competitiveness, you can extend WI-04 up to Sheboygan, give Hispanic areas of Milwaukee to WI-01 (whilst still leaving WI-04 majority-minority) and shift WI-03 southwards slightly.