Are embedded congressional districts illegal?

[Alcibiades]

No, and in my opinion they would make sense if, for instance, you have a region that forms a clear CoI, and in the middle of that region is a city which is large enough to have its own district.

[Alcibiades]

No, and in my opinion they would make sense if, for instance, you have a region that forms a clear CoI, and in the middle of that region is a city which is large enough to have its own district.

This is done in the Missouri State Senate. District 30 (Springfield) is fully surrounded by District 20 (Christian County and the rest of Greene County).

A historical example is that Nevada and Arizona both had a nested district back when they had only 2 districts, Las Vegas surrounded by the rest of the state, and Maricopa County surrounded by the rest of the state, respectively. They obviously made sense in the context of those states, where a large proportion of the population lives in a geographically small area.

[Alcibiades]

From 1992 to 2002, the congressional map for Arizona had all of the Hopi reservation in AZ-03 and all of the Navajo reservation in AZ-06. The map was drawn that way because the two respective tribes did not want to be represented by the same congressman. This meant that the town of Moenkopi, Arizona, which is Hopi land and is surrounded on all four sides by Navajo land, was in AZ0-03 but was embedded within AZ-06.

Don't think that's so much of an embedded district as it is a completely noncontiguous district. Surprised that was allowed.

It was actually contiguous, the Hopi land was just connected to the rest of the district by an extremely narrow strip of land.

[Alcibiades]

They should be illegal, I know that much.

Nonsense. It's not incredibly common, but there are definitely scenarios where embedded districts can be the most fair outcome. Jacksonville is a good example.

It's not the case in Jacksonville, nor anywhere else. A donut is not a community of interest.

it can be.  The suburbs of a city can absoletely be a COI.

Not by any...seriously defined CoI metric. Suburbs share a COI with the city itself, barring extreme circumstances.

But, when an urban area consists of roughly two districts of population, depending on the distribution of that population, it can be fairest to draw one urban district and one suburban district, rather than two urban-suburban districts that don't respect the interests of either the urban or the suburban population. It's a relatively rare situation where the population and geography allow for it, but it's certainly better than chopping the city and the suburbs in half.

If we took your assertion seriously, a map like the map used in Nevada would also be illegal; why is it the case that surrounding *one* urban district with one suburban-rural district is always unreasonable, but surrounding *two* (or three) urban districts with one suburban-rural district is not?

When did I ever say that?

Anyway, suburbs shouldn't be split from the urban core. Indeed, two urban-suburban districts would be superior to a donut. Northern suburbs have more in common with the city than they do southern suburbs, being a suburb is not materially enough to create a CoI. Suburbs, by very nature of the word itself, are linked to the urban area they are dependent on and any fair map would reflect that.

But what about if you have a large, rural district which forms a clear CoI, and right in the middle of that district is a city with a population large enough for its own district. Surely it makes more sense to have a nested district than splitting the city in two?