Challenge for map makers: white liberal districts

[Miles]

Both of these Maryland districts are 69% Obama. Blue is 55% White VAP and pink is 57%. Pretty clean by Maryland standards.



Louisiana was pretty hard, given the racial polarization. This district is 52% White VAP, 57% Obama and 61% D average. Not really good for communities of interest, but not super-ugly.

[Miles]

The new NC-04 was the inspiration for this. 88% White VAP, 67% Obama

[Miles]

87% White VAP, 65% Obama.

[Miles]

This is a variation on the new NC-04; I tried to maximize the Obama %. This is 50.3% White VAP, 75.5% Obama.

[Miles]

Would this even be possible in a state like Mississippi?  

Linking the white, college-aged areas of Starkville and Oxford to the inner Jackson suburbs to the Gulf Coast might produce such an effect.

States like Mississippi and Louisiana are very hard to draw white liberal districts...these are states where Obama got less than 15% of the white vote.

With the racial polarization, the Democrats would have a heavily black electorate, so a white liberal would have a tough time even winning the primary.

[Miles]

Would the current WI-02 be pretty high on that scale already?

[Miles]

87% White VAP, 65% Obama.

I revisited my MN map. I did some uglier line drawing; while the white % is down slightly from my last iteration (87% dropping to 85.8 ), the Obama % is up almost 6 points (up to 70.6%).

Overall, thats a 65.7% WFO rating.

[Miles]

Where are you guys getting these maps, I would love to get to use it!

Dave's Redistricting App.

[Miles]

So I made two majority-white districts that voted for Obama in Mississippi.



District 1 (blue) is 50.5% white and 45.7% black. The district would have voted for Obama 50.4% and McCain 48.9%

District 2 (green) is 52.0% white and 43.3% black. This district would have voted for Obama 50.0% to 49.3%

The other two districts voted McCain over Obama by 65ish to 33ish.

Your deviations are too high; the numbers in that column need to be as low as possible.

[Miles]

Wouldn't pretty much all of these classify as a gerrymander?

Yep.