50 Equal States

[Skill and Chance]

Very good work Elections Guy! Reminds me of my map were I redistricted the country for 100 Senate seats.

Very interesting.  It always amazes me how much more dense central CO is than anything within  500 miles.  Is the purple MS Delta district >50% black?  Does it include New Orleans?  Also, did Obama win the Tidewater VA/NC plus Eastern Shore district?

[Skill and Chance]

This reminds me of my "8 Californias" proposal, formed by combining existing states:

One of my goals was to keep 2 of the 8 contiguous states as rural as possible.  When targeting 50-60 CDs per state, the COI issues with the northwestern state are almost impossible to avoid.  Otherwise, I think they are pretty strong COIs, although New Mexico, Northern Ohio and South Florida probably hate me right now!

[Skill and Chance]

It looks like Romney clearly won at least 26 states and therefore the election, because even though it is overpopulated, NYC is <2X as large as the other states.  This is assuming that your LA county states have the same target size, as all the others, right?  Interestingly, a previous non-partisan equal states map also resulting in giving the electoral college to Romney in 2012.  I wonder if a Republican EC advantage might be an inherent feature of an equal population COI map?  My 8 Californias map also has Obama underperforming in 5 states relative to the nation.  Of course, a "wedges" map for major metro areas where each state gets a slice of downtown would likely favor Democrats, but that is a fairly specific permutation of equal population states.

[Skill and Chance]

It looks like Romney clearly won at least 26 states and therefore the election, because even though it is overpopulated, NYC is <2X as large as the other states.  This is assuming that your LA county states have the same target size, as all the others, right?  Interestingly, a previous non-partisan equal states map also resulting in giving the electoral college to Romney in 2012.  I wonder if a Republican EC advantage might be an inherent feature of an equal population COI map?  My 8 Californias map also has Obama underperforming in 5 states relative to the nation.  Of course, a "wedges" map for major metro areas where each state gets a slice of downtown would likely favor Democrats, but that is a fairly specific permutation of equal population states.

Yes, the same happened with the map I linked to. Romney managed to sweep all the swing States, while Obama ran ridiculously high (over 70%) in a dozen of them. Equal population apportionment really does seem to favor Republicans due to the nature of US political geography: the Dem vote is concentrated in big cities, while Republicans manage to rack up just enough support to carry the countryside and outer suburbs.

The current EC modestly favor Democrats of course, and this seems to be because large cities are frequently located along large rivers which are also frequently state boundaries.  The central states which generally use parallels without regard to population density (e.g. CO shouldn't be so large) seem to be arranged in a way that favors Republicans, while states that use rivers as boundaries split the inner suburbs in just enough large eastern cities to make multiple adjacent states Democratic leaning.  Then you throw in some luck that has Democrats retaining rural support in northern New England.