Partisan Population Distribution

[traininthedistance]

A discussion in the 1,000 district series thread prompted this:

What states population distribution naturally favor one party over another? What states are "naturally gerrymandered"?

It seems like most states favor the Republicans, due to the Rural-Urban divide. Maryland comes to mind as an extremely democratic state that nonetheless favors the GOP in redistricting.

New England States seem to favor the Dems. In Massachusetts, drawing a McCain district is barely possible.

North Carolina and Colorado seem to be roughly neutral.

What are your thoughts on this?

Maryland is not actually the worst, at least with CDs as large as they currently are.  The horrible lines are more a matter of accommodating the residences of Ruppersburger and Sarbanes than anything else.  A clean, sensible 6-2 map is trivially easy there.

The absolute worst states for this are in the Midwest, I think.  I'd say that relative to its overall partisan lean, Illinois is probably the single most skewed state in the nation.  A state that has returned 10-plus point Democratic victories in the past six Presidential elections should not naturally lend itself to maps that are liable to elect more Republicans than Democrats.  Ohio and Michigan are also particularly bad. 

[traininthedistance]

The states that are best naturally gerrymandered are generally those where the Democratic party is most reliant on blacks in order to achieve 50%.

Wrong as usual.

North Carolina is relatively good for Dems, and they most certainly rely on black voters there.

Replace "black" with "urban voters" (not the same thing by any stretch) and your statement would be more accurate- with the caveat that packing Dems in urban centers is sometimes not that bad in heavily-Republican states, letting them get a couple seats they might not have with a more even distribution.  The best example of this is probably Utah- a fair map would give the Dems one seat in Salt Lake City and environs, despite the state being so strongly Republican in general.

[traininthedistance]

Wisconsin is naturally resistant to gerrymanders (at least on the level of congressional districts though it favors Republicans with smaller districts). With 8 seats, you basically end up with 2 safe seats for each party (Madison and Milwaukee for the Dems and the Milwaukee suburbs and the Sheboygan/Fon-du-Lac/Manitowoc area for the Republicans) and 4 swingy seats unless you do some extreme gerrymandering. Vast swaths of the state vote close enough that the rest are difficult to make safe, so you can have Obama carry 7 districts in 2008 and Republicans win 5 in 2010.

But since Wisconsin is Lean D overall (it hasn't voted Republican for President since 1998), 2D/2R/4 Tossup is naturally gerrymandered for the Republicans, albeit not quite as badly as some others.

[traininthedistance]

It's better to ask which state DOESN'T have a natural bias toward Republicans because of the Democrats' concentration in urban areas.

You need states with heavily Republican areas and moderate areas. So Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, Utah... Then the New England states with sufficient districts (MA, CT) where the Republican vote is too dispersed to allow a district winnable with the current Southern oriented GOP.

I don't know that Texas's population distribution benefits Dems at all per se. The usual "pack urban liberals" into a minimum of districts works just as well here, and Texas is so large that you'd expect a few such districts even given the state's overall lean. However, most feasible maps do possibly have a slight "artificial" pro-Dem bias for two reasons:

1) the heavily Dem areas have horrible turnout, relatively depressing the Dems' statewide results,

and

2) the VRA-mandated fajita strips (a maximally compact map would probably have two Democratic Valley districts rather than three)