North Carolina 2020 Redistricting

[Stuart98]

Fair map:

Districts split 7-7 in 2016. 1st is majority black and 12th is plurality black.

[Stuart98]

Edited to resolve the identified issues:


This made the 8th a bit more democratic (from Clinton <1 to Clinton +3.5) while the 9th shifted ~2 points to the right (to Trump +14) and the 7th shifted from about Trump +8 to Trump +21.

EDIT: Tuned the 2nd and 7th a bit to improve the compactness of the former.

[Stuart98]

Edited to resolve the identified issues:


This made the 8th a bit more democratic (from Clinton <1 to Clinton +3.5) while the 9th shifted ~2 points to the right (to Trump +14) and the 7th shifted from about Trump +8 to Trump +21.

EDIT: Tuned the 2nd and 7th a bit to improve the compactness of the former.

Sorry to nitpick--but I have a few:

- It looks like you're splitting Greensboro--easily avoidable if you send suburban Guilford into the 14th instead of the city.
-New Hanover to Johnston on the current map is a gerrymander designed to prop up Rouzer--Johnston belongs in your green district
-I feel like I'm beating a dead horse, but Chapel Hill and Durham belong together on any fair map. If you do put the 1st district into Durham, which does have some benefits elsewhere, you should take advantage of those--you can make the 7th stay on the coast.
-Chatham goes with the Triangle, ideally.

Better?

[Stuart98]

Oh my god, that's hideous. How'd that 13th vote in 2020?

[Stuart98]

POV: You are violating the voting rights act

[Stuart98]

Here's another ghastly map that was worked on earlier today.

This map is a troll, they're not doing a stupid four way Mecklenburg crack that doesn't even eliminate the Biden seat.

[Stuart98]

Weirdly NC democrats have been fairly quiet about what is happening. So far the only guy who I see has said anything is the Cumberland state senator.

Sooner the gerrymander passes, the sooner they can expeditiously get it sent to the supreme court to be thrown out before it's too late?

[Stuart98]

I remain confused as to why R gerrymanders keep giving Watauga to Cawthorn. Are they that confident in their chances there, or are they ambivalent about Cawthorn's electoral position? It would cost them nothing to make that district likely R rather than Lean R.

[Stuart98]

I imported it into DRA.

Oddly fair 6-8 in 2020 president data, with 9 and 14 very close. Who drew this thing?

[Stuart98]

Court drawn NC maps are interesting because there are 7 obvious and easy to draw districts in the eastern half of the state (the triangle and points east and south) but only enough people for 6 districts. A fair map has to choose one of these self-evidently reasonable districts to destroy.

For the record, the obvious districts are:
A. A northeastern NC Black influence district (NC-02)--this would be the obvious seat to destroy if this were say, UK redistricting rules, since it lost population and isn't a super strong CoI. But that in practice is both racially discriminatory and probably violates the VRA so a fair map shouldn't do it IMO.
B. A coastal district north of Wilmington (NC-01)--this district has the outer banks and New Bern and potentially some of various small inland cities depending on how exactly you finesse the lines with the 1st.
C. A Wilmington-based district (NC-03): Something based in New Hanover, Brunswick, and Pender, plus various adjacent rurals or Onslow/Carteret.
D. A Sandhills/Fayetteville district (split up currently between 3, 4, and : Something based in the core of Fayetteville and the Lumbee community.
E. An exurban Raleigh district (split up between 4, 5, 6, and 7): Something based in the outer parts of Wake plus various neighboring exurbs, like Johnston.
F. A Raleigh district (5)
G. A Durham and Chapel Hill based seat, also ideally could take in Chatham as well as Granville.

So the art of drawing any map of NC comes down to decide which one of these you want to utterly destroy.

Certain combos work better than others but all have bad effects. Combining B+E and C+E gives you decent district outside of the combination in the east, but forces a lot of the Triangle into a seat based in the Piedmont, either messing with G or with a logical rural Piedmont seat.

Dicing up D between C and E, with Fayetteville going to the latter, has a certain elegance and logic (possibly the best option in terms of CoI?), but also dilutes minority influence and sort of functions as a Republican gerrymander. It also forces population westward out of the Triangle.

Destroying either F or G, by dipping A into Raleigh or Durham, doesn't have that same problem but creates an obviously bizarre district. Cracking Durham is easier because Raleigh is quite white.

Some options don't work very well--in particular B+C is overpopulated without an obvious place to remove people and preserve contiguity.

So yeah, this is the fundamental problem of NC redistricting--which logical community do you absolutely destroy?

How do you feel about  my solution to the problem?

[Stuart98]

7-5-2 is a great deal for a state like NC, at least if the 2 swing districts are genuine swing districts (ie went for Biden narrowly).

Sandhills should be Clinton Trump. Its a small struggle to draw a Biden district there.

Not really.


Can easily make it bluer if you sacrifice compactness by losing most of Harnett and add Richmond and Anson.

[Stuart98]

There are so many better ways to draw a proportional map that do a much better job of preserving COIs.

[Stuart98]

Somebody or several bodies needs to read the Allen v. Milligan decision with more care, assuming they have read it at all.

Here is the cleanest map I can draw that I had the skill to draw that turns NC-01 into a Gingles CD. It was tough going.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/fe568442-204c-48a4-be07-54e2969d0fff

Can we stop with the splitting of Guilford and Forsyth counties?  I understand that they don’t need to be put in the same district, but at least keep them whole.  Something like the 2016 map is fine in this area, but just keep Guilford whole this time.

If you want to do an effective Republican gerrymander splitting Guilford is basically mandatory.

Another reason why the first order of business of Dems in their next trifecta needs to be to pass a national law mandating that counties and cities cannot be split unless a district(s) is a already fully contained within that county or city and the remainder doesn’t not have enough population to house another whole district.  Would solve the problem here and in Jacksonville FL and SLC Utah.

This is the Ohio rule and we already know it doesn't solve the problem because, uh, Ohio. Counties are bad proxies for COI. Just require partisan proportionality based on contested federal races and opportunity districts, and a requirement that metro areas not be split if it's unnecessary to achieve the prior objectives.

[Stuart98]

Somebody or several bodies needs to read the Allen v. Milligan decision with more care, assuming they have read it at all.

Here is the cleanest map I can draw that I had the skill to draw that turns NC-01 into a Gingles CD. It was tough going.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/fe568442-204c-48a4-be07-54e2969d0fff

Can we stop with the splitting of Guilford and Forsyth counties?  I understand that they don’t need to be put in the same district, but at least keep them whole.  Something like the 2016 map is fine in this area, but just keep Guilford whole this time.

If you want to do an effective Republican gerrymander splitting Guilford is basically mandatory.

Another reason why the first order of business of Dems in their next trifecta needs to be to pass a national law mandating that counties and cities cannot be split unless a district(s) is a already fully contained within that county or city and the remainder doesn’t not have enough population to house another whole district.  Would solve the problem here and in Jacksonville FL and SLC Utah.

This is the Ohio rule and we already know it doesn't solve the problem because, uh, Ohio. Counties are bad proxies for COI. Just require partisan proportionality based on contested federal races and opportunity districts, and a requirement that metro areas not be split if it's unnecessary to achieve the prior objectives.

No this isn’t the Ohio rule.  Ohio has needless exceptions to allow certain counties to be split and doesn’t have language requiring districts to be wholly contained within a city or county if population allows for it.

POV: You banned North Carolina from unnecessary county and city splits (they drew a 9R-3D-2C map anyway)
 

You cannot solve most gerrymandering instances with splitting rules! If you've got the support to solve the few gerrymandering instances you can solve with splitting rules, you might as well go further and solve the rest of the gerrymandering cases as well!

[Stuart98]

It's not that hard to tweak the current house map and get more republican seats. You can pick up one in Buncombe, one in Cabarrus, one in Cumberland, one using Caswell and Pierson counties and potentially one in Wake even though it is weak. Also they could try drawing out the minority leader and shoring up weaker seats in Almance and Forsyth. You can make 78 Budd seats: https://davesredistricting.org/join/901c3d69-36ff-4dcf-8870-7ebc7f0dfe46

This isn't in compliance with cluster rule fyi. That may be something Republicans do, but in that case you can gerrymander even more efficiently than that.

How is it not?

County cluster rules in NC, you can't deviate from these except in three greyed out sets of counties which each have two (and only two) possible clusters. Seats that span multiple county clusters are illegal.

[Stuart98]

Hopefully Democrats in New York are ready to do the right thing after what North Carolina Republicans are going to do today.

Eliminate two Republicans for every Democrat eliminated by North Carolina.

[Stuart98]

I thought 4 on the Durham-Black Belt map looked like a dummymander but opened it on DRA and the parts of Wake it has aren't blue enough or trending blue enough. Both maps are probably 11-3 the whole decade.

What do we think, is this hypothetical 50.3% BVAP district sufficiently compact for Gingles to apply? If so, any map that doesn't have a likely/safe D black belt seat seems like it should get struck down.

How long til Jeff Jackson and the rest of the drawn out people decide to run for statewide office

Jackson's already doing that, he's running for Attorney General IIRC.

[Stuart98]

No democratic voter in this state supports gerrymandering. We have been hostages to it our whole lives, one way or another.

I am pretty furious at NC dems for not passing through independent commissions when the writing was clearly on the wall. A ballot initiative in the early 00's would've completely changed the state's trajectory.

I don't agree that the writing was on the wall. The state went blue presidentially in '08 for the first time since 1976 (with Obama improving on Kerry's performance in 91/100 counties) and Democrats held the state legislature for the entire decade until 2010. Unlike a few other state legislatures at the time (Hello Arkansas!), I don't think they're to blame for not seeing the rural collapse and the resulting ramifications until it hit them in the face.