Why is packing viewed negatively?

[kwabbit]

Cracking I can understand why it is bad, because you are splitting up communities and it isn't fair for their voices to be diluted. However with packing, you are literally taking voters of a certain party and guaranteeing them the representative of their choice. Is it because packing leads to less competitiveness than cracking?

There isn't a problem with a "natural pack", like of a city, so long as it means that surrounding communities don't have to be cracked.

However, a pack doesn't necessarily mean the district is compact or makes any sense from a COI standpoint. TX-35 and IL-15 are classic examples of this this cycle.

Districts should represent communities. Sometimes partisanship can mirror communities, but using it as the exclusive guiding factor is disgusting.

A city is not a natural pack. This is one of the biggest redistricting myths which perpetuates gerrymandering. It’s time to end this gaslighting campaign. A random rural town in Archuleta CO has more in common with a rural in Sedgewick than two ends of Denver proper.

Oh yeah usually not, I think the example I had in mind was Charlotte. You can nest a district pretty nicely inside the ring-road, but that usally means pairing Charlotte's suburbs with rural communities that are extremely district. On it's own, the district is fine, but collectively it screws the map.



Stand alone, this district makes a lot of sense, but when you try to implement it into a larger congressional map, it screws over the pairings with the surrounding communities.

Charlotte is a very justifiable pack. It has enough suburbs/exurbs to have a West suburban district and an Eastern suburban district. These districts might not be 100% Charlotte metro, but that's an unachievable standard in redistricting in practice. The Jeff Jackson-mander is a worse map choice IMO, although necessary if looking through the lens of partisan fairness.

When you make that district, it changes the Charlotte metro composition from 1 D 2 R to 2 D 0 R. It takes in too much of the Charlotte metro in the other districts and makes them not have a coherent COI. They go from 80% Charlotte 20% other to 35% Charlotte 65% other.

Again, it's defensible if you are looking at partisanship, but to me it's clear that the district would not be drawn if you didn't know any of the election results.