2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: Washington

[EastAnglianLefty]

Looks like WA-4 and WA-5 combined are still more or less the right size for 2 districts, so I expect you'll probably keep something like the present alignment. The other alternative would be to shift Chelan and Kittitas Counties into the 4th district, but in return have the 3rd going east. That would be awkward to do in Yakima County without splitting Yakima itself, but on 2018 numbers it looks like it's doable in Benton County if you're willing to put Richland and Kennewick in different counties.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I had a crack at a map that crosses the Cascades in the south and tries to turn WA-9 from a district that is nominally majority-minority but pretty much guaranteed to elect the choice of white voters, to a potential Asian-opportunity district. Otherwise it's mostly a least-change map:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/55c57152-605e-4039-b6f3-e51611279b6c

The 8th is shored up a little bit, but the 10th adds Lewis County and gets rather more vulnerable. Overall I'm not that happy with it, but if you want to keep representatives' homes in their districts then that forces your hand a lot of the time.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Here's an attempt at a map crossing the Cascades in the north, like the present map:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/8f72f241-69c0-49eb-80e0-56f570cff08d

My aims were clean lines and incumbent protection, although not necessarily both at the same time. The 1st and 2nd are realigned north-south rather than east-west. Del Bene's home is drawn out, but she keeps enough territory that she could move without issue (or if Smith retires, she'd have a good profile to win the 9th.)

The 8th gets considerably safer and all the Democratic seats are above 50% Clinton. The ugly cut into Thurston was me hedging my bets because I don't know who's going to win the primary in the 10th, but if that's not necessary it could easily be removed.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Washington's current map strikes me as needlessly messy. There are multiple incidents of two districts sharing the same county, not one district is fully contained within King County, and I don't think WA-01 is even contiguous by road. I don't know a lot of background info about dynamics of the last redistricting cycle there, but I would expect better from a commission.

Anyway, here's what I came up with:



1: Clinton +7
2: Clinton +36
3: Trump +8
4: Trump +23 (39% Hispanic)
5: Trump +13
6: Clinton +12
7: Clinton +77
8: Clinton +5
9: Clinton +40 (48% white)
10: Clinton +13

Not much change from a partisan standpoint, but a lot cleaner. Northern WA gets its own seat, as does Pierce County. All of Seattle is in the 7th, and the 9th is all-King County suburbs while still being minority-majority. As was mentioned, there's no good way to cross the Cascades, so I figured sticking with I-90 made the most sense. For all the oddities of the current map, I think the 8th district is about as sensible as it can be.

(I double-crossed 4 and 5 here because of the wacky precincts in Walla Walla, which is of course not necessary.)

Did you take into account incumbent residences? It looks like Larsen lives in your 1st (whereas according to Wikipedia, he doesn't live in his current seat) but I'm unsure if your 2nd reaches down far enough to take in DelBene's home.

I think you've also shifted Kilmer out of the 6th and obviously we don't know about the 10th yet, but that all seems like it would be fairly easy to fix.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Lately, a report was released suggesting that there would need to be a district that is majority-Latino by CVAP in order for the map to comply with the VRA (see this article https://patch.com/washington/seattle/proposed-wa-redistricting-maps-may-violate-voting-rights-act)

I tried editing my legislative map to satisfy that requirement, and came up with this:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/994f4a7d-6000-438a-873c-4d8e76faae93

Here's what I came up with: https://davesredistricting.org/join/7ba58930-5215-4466-9f0d-f71de289d475

The Yakima district isn't quite Hispanic majority by 2019 CVAP, but it's a secure enough plurality to control the Democratic primary. Where are the CVAP numbers from, anyway? They seem to suggest that less than a third of voting age Asians in Redmond are citizens and less than half in Sammamish, which seems suspiciously high, so I'm wondering if they tend to overestimate the white share of the electorate.