North Carolina 2020 Redistricting

[lfromnj]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/03/madison-cawthorn-republican-party-gerrymandering

LOL.

[Roll Roons]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/03/madison-cawthorn-republican-party-gerrymandering

LOL.

I literally can't.

This is meant to be a prestigious newspaper but the guy can't even do the most basic research.

[lfromnj]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/03/madison-cawthorn-republican-party-gerrymandering

LOL.

I literally can't.

This is meant to be a prestigious newspaper but the guy can't even do the most basic research.

Its better, this guy wrote Ratf**cked.

[Thunder98 🇮🇱 🤝 🇵🇸]

I was able to make a 9-6 Dem Gerrymander. I was trying to do a 10-4 D map by making two Dem seats in the Winston-Salem and Greensboro area, but the margins were way too small to be sustainable for the Dems, so I had to combined that area.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/b920bf1a-b50f-420f-8e33-cdf93731c92f

[Non Swing Voter]

I was able to make a 9-6 Dem Gerrymander. I was trying to do a 10-4 D map by making two Dem seats in the Winston-Salem and Greensboro area, but the margins were way too small to be sustainable for the Dems, so I had to combined that area.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/b920bf1a-b50f-420f-8e33-cdf93731c92f

That map is hideous.  Unbelievable that it takes that much effort to do 9-6 D gerrymander in a relatively close state.

[Vern]

I was able to make a 9-6 Dem Gerrymander. I was trying to do a 10-4 D map by making two Dem seats in the Winston-Salem and Greensboro area, but the margins were way too small to be sustainable for the Dems, so I had to combined that area.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/b920bf1a-b50f-420f-8e33-cdf93731c92f

That map is hideous.  Unbelievable that it takes that much effort to do 9-6 D gerrymander in a relatively close state.

It’s because the Democrats are in a few area of the state while the rest lean Republican.

[Non Swing Voter]

I was able to make a 9-6 Dem Gerrymander. I was trying to do a 10-4 D map by making two Dem seats in the Winston-Salem and Greensboro area, but the margins were way too small to be sustainable for the Dems, so I had to combined that area.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/b920bf1a-b50f-420f-8e33-cdf93731c92f

That map is hideous.  Unbelievable that it takes that much effort to do 9-6 D gerrymander in a relatively close state.

It’s because the Democrats are in a few area of the state while the rest lean Republican.

That's the case in most states though.

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

I was able to make a 9-6 Dem Gerrymander. I was trying to do a 10-4 D map by making two Dem seats in the Winston-Salem and Greensboro area, but the margins were way too small to be sustainable for the Dems, so I had to combined that area.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/b920bf1a-b50f-420f-8e33-cdf93731c92f

I did make a 10-4/9-4-1 map on page 19 of the thread. VRA complaint too

[Sorenroy]

I wanted to see how badly I could gerrymander the NC State House for the Republicans while abiding by (most of) the redistricting criteria of the legislature.

• Equal Population: The largest district is 4,335 people above the ideal district, or 4.98% and the smallest district is 4,341 people below the ideal district, or 4.99%.
• Contiguity: All districts are fully contiguous by the criteria's definition, i.e. some are only contiguous by thin strips of water
• Counties, Groupings, and Traversals: All districts in this map are drawn with the consideration of the Stephenson ruling. That is, the number of county splits is minimized as much as possible by creating pairs or sets of counties when counties are unable to fully house districts within themselves. I ended up using Duke's set of optimal county clusters after finding that doing so on my own would be unfeasible (without software built for this kind of thing). In instances where multiple county clusterings were optimal, I used the clustering that best fit the other criteria. Additionally, as per the rules, if any county was large enough to fully encapsulate a district by itself, it is done. This did result in several snaking districts used to absorb the extra population of counties only slightly over the population limit in some instances, which would be unavoidable even under an ungerrymandered system. I did not consider double bunking at all, so no accommodations were needed to allow for it here.
• Racial Data: Racial data was not used in the creation of these districts.
• VTDs: The criteria doesn't really lay out what the voting districts, or VTDs, are that should only be split when necessary. I interpreted this as requiring minimal precinct spitting. Across the whole state, only one precinct is split, and this is out of necessity. Including it in either possible district means making one district smaller than the 5% limit imposed by the equal population requirement.
• Compactness: Without the ability to run some type of algorithm the sift through all the possible districts and come up with the most compact option, selecting for compactness was just unfeasible. I would have liked to do more with this, but it's just not something I could have done.
• Municipal Boundaries: In areas where Republicans already beat the gerrymandering criteria and nothing could be done to gerrymander further in their favor, I did my best to maintain municipalities. In the case of municipalities too large to fit into one district or municipalities that interlocked with others to create a cluster of precincts too large to fit into one district, I did my best to minimize (1) the number of municipality splits and (2) minimize the number of districts any municipality was split into. I tried to maintain larger municipalities when possible, but if breaking one larger municipality would maintain two smaller ones, I used the raw number of splits as the deciding factor. If there were multiple ways to divide districts with minimal splits, I then went back to making each district as Republican as possible.
• Election Data: As I fully expect the legislature to do, I ignored this criteria. Given that the point of this exercise was the gerrymander for the Republicans, not looking at the Republican vote share was not doable.
• Member Residence: Something that I already think is a stupid rule that only works to protect incumbents elected in previously gerrymandered districts, I wasn't going to weaken my map just to protect them in this hypothetical. Any districts that do serve to protect incumbents are purely happenstantial.
• Community Consideration: Given that this requirement is already explicitly made secondary to the other goals of redistricting, and given that I have no way of getting community input for a hypothetical map, there really is no community consideration given here.

Since there is no generally accepted level for what is considered safely gerrymandered, I figured that a 60-40 split for the national environment as established by the Popular Vote Index would be a decent place to start. Abiding by Duke's county clusters and not splitting precincts, this is the best I could come up with. I will continue using Abdullah's formatting for things until it is no longer the most elegant way to show this type of information.

The Population Deviation is 9.97%, and it reflects the 2020 Census.

54/100 on Dave's Proportionality Index
39/100 on the Compactness Index
100/100 on County Splitting
71/100 on the Minority Representation index
15/100 on Dave's competitiveness index

The map above shows results from the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.

DRA Link.


Partisan Breakdown by Election

2016 Gubernatorial Election: 74R to 46D

2016 Presidential Election: 75R to 45D

2020 Gubernatorial Election: 69R to 51D

2020 Presidential Election: 73R to 47D

2016/2020 PVI: 75R to 45D


While I didn't go into this attempting any specific seat distribution, it did end up being the case that the 60th seat is R+10 PVI. With it being this close, I decided to make a quick edit to make a Republican majority as safe as possible. The only change that needed to be made was in the Columbus-Robeson county pair. The PVI of both counties combined is R+9.82, but in order to bring one of the two districts within the pair over R+10, the weaker set had to be lowered to R+9.65. The change below (following the same set of constraints and goals listed above) represents two almost identical districts with only one municipal split in Fairmont that only cuts across one unpopulated block. This changes the districts to be R+9.81 (blue) and R+9.84 (green).

DRA Link.

Beyond that, it's worth looking at the one necessary precinct split. The 18,203 person Havelock precinct in Craven county sits between the 78,616 person block of District 3 (in purple) and the 71,587 person block of District 13 (in brown). It is the only precinct between the two sections and thus is forced to be divided so that both districts can hit their minimum allowed population. Unfortunately, 16,621 of those 18,203 people live in the town of Havelock itself, so it isn't even possible to keep the precinct's only municipality whole. I ended up deciding to split the precinct down the Croatan National Forest on the left, and then split the city down Slocum Creek, the river that runs through the center of the town.

However, without detailed data on how the different blocks vote, it is technically possible that the land contained within District 3's boarders houses all the Democrats in the district and none of the Republicans. In this hypothetical, District 3 could drop as low as R+9.02. The workaround is to snake District 3 through the upper part of the precinct and into its neighboring Harlowe, the only precinct in Craven county fully withing District 13. By doing this, you can still split one precinct while guaranteeing both districts remain above R+10.

With both of those changes made, the 61st district lies at R+9.81, creating a safely gerrymandered State House that could easily withstand even a 2008 Obama-level national environment.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Well done.

[Thunder98 🇮🇱 🤝 🇵🇸]

Here's this horrendous VRA violating lawsuit galore 11R - 3D GOP Gerrymander map of NC. 


https://davesredistricting.org/join/f892b4e8-0c3d-4d12-944c-0741ed172aa5

[lfromnj]

https://www.johnlocke.org/update/redistricting-dilemmas-legislators-must-either-split-fayetteville-or-surround-it/

Lol although county split rules are usually fine, they kinda screwed the map in this area. An ideal map would probably have Exurban Fayetville placed with rural Sampson and Bladen counties but I am guessing that would mess with other county clusters.

[Vern]

Tomorrow, well I guess today the 5th, I believe they will start the process of putting the maps together or at least getting a game plan going. Public Comment tour is over and they are meeting.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I used the same essential clusters that Sorenroy used, with more of an emphasis on compactness. I sought to create a hackish Democratic gerrymander of the NC state house to see what I could produce.
I was only able to create 63 Biden seats. The state house majority is basically a tossup, leaning Dem. The road to an R majority runs through taking the seat in Pasquotank County, the seat in Onslow County, and the seat in Cabbarus County. These three were all Biden plurality or very slim Biden majority seats in 2020. Taking all these while winning all Trump seats would get Rs to 60 seats. To get to 61 and thus an outright majority, they need to win a Biden seat elsewhere. The easiest one would probably be the one in Wayne County, which voted for Biden by only 3 points. It would be lean Dem, but at least it's realistically winnable - unlike many seats in more urban counties.
The Rs would likely have to play defense in the marginally pro-Trump district in Cabbarus, which is trending Dem, and the marginally pro-Trump district in the southern corner of Wake County, which is in a likewise situation. They also might face some difficulties in the gerrymandered district in Johnston County, which is barely Trump+5, but they should easily hold it, at least in 2022. And the district that takes in most of Nash is Trump-voting by a very slim majority, so it might be good ground for Democrats as well.
All in all Ds are definitely in the better position in a neutral year, but Rs can still win under this map. Goes to show how even the most hackishly pro-Dem linedrawing can fail to put the state legislature away. The geography of the state isn't as D-friendly as it used to be.
DRA of the map

[Pericles]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I've made a lot of NC maps on DRA attempting to be fair and I keep getting 9-5, is this the natural alignment for the state?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I've made a lot of NC maps on DRA attempting to be fair and I keep getting 9-5, is this the natural alignment for the state?

Fair for NC? Depends if there are enough swing districts that would vote in line with the state at large in case of an outright Dem win, and how tight your definition of "fair" is.
EDIT: I realize I misunderstood you, "fair"=/="natural".
What is natural stems from the choices you make - split Wake down the middle (it's been done before), or keep it mostly or completely whole (also been done before); place Durham with the Black Belt, with Chapel Hill, or separate from each of them; and so on. Probably a consensus "natural" map would have Ds with 5 to 6 seats, with Rs with 7 to 8, with a seat too close to be counted in either column.

[Vern]

They are working on the NC House and Senate maps today.

[S019]

https://twitter.com/lekhashupeck/status/1445808307009204227

Looks like the first draft congressional map is 11-3, though who knows if it will stay that way.

looks eerily similar in some ways to the leaked "draft" that we got a while back. Anyways, hopefully the courts can de-gerrymander this horrendous monstrosity.

[Stuart98]

POV: You are violating the voting rights act

[Nyvin]

That's definitely 11-3,  I doubt cracking NC-1 would survive in the court.   

Weird they're putting Watauga into NC-11 though.

Cracking NC-6 was expected all along,  NC Republicans and all.

[GALeftist]

This is a foolish map even from a partisan R perspective because that NC-01 would result in a successful lawsuit and a court drawn map putting you back at square one.

[If my soul was made of stone]

That 11th is pretty ideal, and the idea of a competitive Fayetteville-Wilmington seat would be solid if it actually had Wilmington in it and Robeson were removed. The rest of the map, however, is abominable, and I hope that the proper groups sue on VRA grounds for that awful dismantling of Butterfield's seat.

[ProgressiveModerate]

That's definitely 11-3,  I doubt cracking NC-1 would survive in the court.   

Weird they're putting Watauga into NC-11 though.

Cracking NC-6 was expected all along,  NC Republicans and all.

Uh in that image it looks like NC-6 survives though you have to look closely

[S019]

That's definitely 11-3,  I doubt cracking NC-1 would survive in the court.   

Weird they're putting Watauga into NC-11 though.

Cracking NC-6 was expected all along,  NC Republicans and all.

Uh in that image it looks like NC-6 survives though you have to look closely

No, we have Youtube videos of the NC leg stream where this came from, they took Greensboro out of the 6th and shoved into some rural seat

[ProgressiveModerate]

That's definitely 11-3,  I doubt cracking NC-1 would survive in the court.   

Weird they're putting Watauga into NC-11 though.

Cracking NC-6 was expected all along,  NC Republicans and all.

Uh in that image it looks like NC-6 survives though you have to look closely

No, we have Youtube videos of the NC leg stream where this came from, they took Greensboro out of the 6th and shoved into some rural seat

Link?