2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: Virginia

[Nyvin]

A 7D-4R map basically has two critical points -

1.  Unite Norfolk with the Virginia Beach district

2.  Unite Charlottesville/Albemarle with the Richmond suburbs.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/5cb636bc-c2b3-4214-8c01-f6b44a584f52



After those two are taken care of and you have the 2 AA districts and 3 NoVA districts, the rest of the map pretty much draws itself.

[Nyvin]

https://bluevirginia.us/2019/12/the-proposed-virginia-redistricting-amendment-is-a-bad-deal-that-needs-to-be-rejected
opposition to the amendment to delay it to 2031 so D's can redistrict in 2021 because the current one isn't good.

They give their reasons such as the VA supreme court but this was expected already.

TBF, this was a really bad redistricting proposal.

Yeah, this amendment was garbage from the start.   This sums it up perfectly-

Personally, I would never have signed the petition if I had been told that their solution would give two Republican legislators a veto over the maps and would give the Virginia Supreme Court – which is 100% controlled by Republicans – the final say over what the maps looked like.

The Virginia court system is different than most states, in that the courts are totally picked by the legislature. This means the Supreme Court is Republican-controlled, since the Republicans have had a lock on the legislature for a generation.  Also, unlike with federal courts, Virginia Supreme Court Justices serve 12-year terms, at which point they need to be reappointed by the legislature.  Therefore, every Republican Justice’s job depends on keeping the legislature red.  It is an inherent conflict of interest.


The amendment provides no real guidelines on how the Court can decide to draw the districts, so the Justices technically can do anything they want.

It was trash from the beginning and rammed through in a desperate ploy.   Get rid of it.

[Nyvin]

As far as I can tell,  there are no changes made to this amendment,  it still gives the State Supreme Court pretty much unregulated control of map making if the commission deadlocks,  which is god awful.

[Nyvin]

I doubt that the every GOP justice would want to throw away their credibility, future, and gravitas for the congressional GOP. And before anyone says "of course they will, they're GOP justices!", we've already seen Republican justices go against the party when it comes to gerrymandering all the time, from NC to OH to PA.

Whats more likely is just a rather bland, fair-ish map. Its not the gerrymander that the Dems could have made, but its at least a bit more kind to the Democrats than the current map.

In NC the case was decided on partisan lines and in PA it was one D judge joining the 2 Republican judges.

I was referring to all of the court cases that have dealt with gerrymandering, such as ones that have faced superior courts, not just the ones that the supreme courts of each state have faced.

True although this case isn't really a case but rather the VA supreme court directly gets it and is the tiebreaker for the case if there's a deadlock, atleast to the viewer's eye the map looks reasonably clean and it does limit COI splits so I think a VA supreme court thats GOP stacked would support this map.

(g) If the Commission fails to submit a plan for districts by the deadline set forth in subsection (d), the Commission shall have fourteen days following its initial failure to submit a plan to the General Assembly. If the Commission fails to submit a plan for districts to the General Assembly by this deadline, the districts shall be established by the Supreme Court of Virginia.

If the Commission submits a plan for districts within fourteen days following its initial failure to submit a plan, the General Assembly shall take a vote on the bill embodying such plan within seven days of its receipt. If the General Assembly fails to adopt such bill by this deadline, the districts shall be established by the Supreme Court of Virginia.

From what I'm reading, the Supreme Court wouldn't act as a tie breaker. They wouldn't choose between two maps, choosing the least evil. They would completely draw a new map.

And I imagine like elsewhere the court would hire a specialist to do the drawing.

Edit - Really from everything we've seen in other states in the past, any court drawn map is better than one drawn by a partisan legislature.

[Nyvin]

Northam has sent the redistricting bill back to the legislature with an inquiry about the prison gerrymandering provision.

[Nyvin]

https://twitter.com/kkrz1211/status/1259647825371111425

Krazen's masterpiece of a map.

Obviously I can't match the exact precincts, but I'm quite sure that VA-4 is only around 39% AA.  Putting all the white Richmond suburbs in the district lowers the black percentage quite a bit.

VA Dems can just make a superior AA seat and win in the courts with that map.   Visual aesthetics isn't the only thing they look at.  



The VA-5 in that map is also only 31% AA.   It's an obvious pack and crack.

[Nyvin]

Northampton and Accomack (Delmarva) really does belong with Virginia Beach, it's just too awkward not to have them together.

[Nyvin]

Heres another interesting little split I created,
5 Clinton 6 Trump
7 Northam 4 Gillepsie
8 Kaine 3 Stewart

Wanted to keep the fredricksburg area together which boxed in the tidewater. As the tidewater region is only like 200k people I decided to connect Western Henrico to the Historic Triangle both of which are very educated. Unfortunately the tidewater is stuck here. Moves half a point right to the current VA 7th. VA 1st is moved to Safe D by pushing into PWC while VA 10th is moved to tossup at Trump +1


Overall creates
5 Safe D, 2 tossups, 1 lean R and 3 Safe R.

Looks kinda risky for the R's.

[Nyvin]

Northampton and Accomack (Delmarva) really does belong with Virginia Beach, it's just too awkward not to have them together.

Placing the Delmarva Peninsula with the Tidewater makes no sense given where the bridge is

This seems like something silly to insist on, as the Delmarva-Virginia Beach connection is a pretty recent configuration (didn't exist before 2003) and the current VA-02 relies on water contiguity already to pick up Poquoson and York. 

 2003 is 17 years ago,  that's quite a significant amount of time.

The water crossing in the current VA-2 is one of the most ugly parts of the current map and should be removed, it's not needed for anything.

[Nyvin]

Slightly different take.   I'm a big fan of the Shenandoah Valley district btw.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/c7efb37e-9149-41af-8cbb-1cef67d1af22

[Nyvin]

VA Reps may push the 5-1 court to do something like this: https://davesredistricting.org/join/bce45050-8fd6-4923-9e68-81b01682d91d


5 and 7 are the leftovers, but the leftovers clearly benefit the GOP, the VRA seats are strengthened, which just happens to help shore up 2, and Albemarle honestly doesn't have a clear place to go, so I can see the 5-1 court just sticking it in Appalachia. In a vacuum, each of these decisions can clearly be justified as fine pairings, but on the broader scale, the side effects create a blatantly lopsided map, 6 might be vulnerable, but Appalachia is probably inelastic enough, 7 might also be vulnerable, but is currently D held anyways, I would not be shocked if the final map looks more like this than the quad cuts of Fairfax being proposed in this thread, and other than the NoVA seats, this map isn't even that ugly.

The Virginia Supreme Court is nominally 5 republicans and 2 democrats, but of those 5 republicans, only three are partisan hacks. One of them is basically a liberal democrat, and another is a hardcore ideologue but a very weak partisan. There is no way anything like what you've drawn becomes the map.

Everyone is acting like the Virginia Supreme Court is going to draw like a 8 to 3 or 9 to  2 GOP gerrymander and that the amendment passing prevents Democrats from winning any statewide offices next year. Its getting a bit ridiculous with the takes on this amendment.

Looking at the 2020 results...would Republicans really even "want" a 8R-3D map anymore?   Republicans in eastern Virginia (east of VA-6 basically) are kinda on thin ice as it is right now.  I don't think they really have the room to gerrymander the map all that much (sane maps that a commission would draw). 

I'm thinking it's more realistic they agree to concede VA-7 in exchange for making VA-5 and VA-1 safer.  Not much you can do with VA-2 anyway.

[Nyvin]

Put together a "plain" VA Senate map, which is kind of a pain due to Virginia having way too many giant precincts to balance out.









https://davesredistricting.org/join/969436ef-edf0-4bad-8ec0-fafa4f429ccc

I managed to get six AA districts.   The map probably works out to be 21D - 16R - 3s, the three swing districts being 6, 8, and 12.

I think 12 Nova dem districts is inevitable, also can't see a way the commission (or court) doesn't draw a Charlottesville seat.   There's also going to be some AA seats (at least 4?) in any map too.   That starts the Dems with a base of around 17 seats.

I love that Richmond almost perfectly forms an AA seat all by itself, that's beautiful. 

[Nyvin]

Here's a somewhat different take on Virginia, designed of course to favor the Democrats but not in a way that looks aggressive/overt. Still, it's an 8-3 Clinton/Northam set of districts, and only more favorable under 2020 figures.

Charlottesville-NOVA is definitely a feasible alignment that doesn't get explored much, and it does make the Shenandoah Valley much neater.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/0db3a517-d9ad-4318-a9b8-51b61866e0ad

VA-7 is a pretty bad leftovers district, lol.   Other than that great map.  Spanberger would probably love the Richmond suburb district.

[Nyvin]

Just a thought, but is it possible that VA-10 keeps it's western counties out to Frederick and instead VA-1 is the district pulled into NoVA to balance the population?

[Nyvin]

https://davesredistricting.org/join/6c0ec3dc-d539-4dd9-91df-1fb614e4b396

[Nyvin]

https://davesredistricting.org/join/6c0ec3dc-d539-4dd9-91df-1fb614e4b396

With that map, Morgan Griffith and Bob Good would essentially swap dristricts. And Griffith will be in the same district as Cline. That teal seat around Winchester would be an open race here.

The western districts are the most changed, that's due to removing VA-1 from Prince William and all the districts in general getting pulled in toward NoVA.  

Basically there's around 135k people that need to move toward NoVA, around 195k from taking VA-1 out of Prince William, and also about 98k for getting rid of that ugly northern arm of VA-5.

That's 428k people to move north from somewhere.   If that much of VA-6 gets moved north then it's basically a whole new district.  

It's possible to leave VA-1 in Prince William and pull it even more in with that 135k of excess from the three districts, but then there's nothing to fill in the lost parts with down south due to the two AA districts and the inflexibility of VA-2.

So if Staunton gets moved to VA-6 will that make Cline happy?

[Nyvin]

incumbent friendly version -



https://davesredistricting.org/join/6c0ec3dc-d539-4dd9-91df-1fb614e4b396

[Nyvin]

After reading this I'm fairly convinced the commission was designed from the beginning to deadlock and send the map drawing to the State Supreme Court.

https://twitter.com/Jaaavis/status/1428002312606437383

[Nyvin]

Along a 12-4 vote the commission voted to discard the present legislative lines and start from scratch.

That's good, right?

Yes, basically means that you don't have former districts impart their influence over the shape of new ones. See Arizona for how this shakeup influences things. It also is important in states with concentrated growth where multiple districts move from one side of the state to the other, so you let new and old districts follow community lines rather than having their surroundings mutually eat or disgorge precincts with no rhyme or reason.

Its also important to note here how the citizen commissioners are exhausted with the explicitly legislative ones.

So the commission is 8-8 Citizen/Legislative and GOP/Dem (4 D-Citizen, 4 D-Leg, 4 R-Citizen, 4 R-Leg), correct?

Do we know how the 12-4 vote played out in regards to which 4 jumped ship to the other side?

If it's the 4 R Legislative commissioners that were left isolated that's probably a good thing (and it makes sense,  the R Legislature trying to maintain their gerrymander).

[Nyvin]

So the commission is using incumbents addresses when drawing the districts and David Suetterlein in SD-19 is listed as being from Salem, while John S Edwards in SD-21 is listed as being from Roanoke.   Does this mean the D-mander SD-21 will live on?  I was thinking they could add all of Montgomery County to SD-21 to make it a bit cleaner.

Also is there any way to draw Joe Morrissey out of a district or are they stuck with him?

[Nyvin]

https://twitter.com/vpapupdates/status/1433428442712711170

They look like pretty bland maps so far, nothing crazy or special.

[Nyvin]

Here's the "B1" plan



Pretty obvious they're going for a combined 10 districts between Fairfax and Prince William Counties and their respective enclaves,  and then Loudon + Clarke will be almost exactly 2 districts.

  After that I'm thinking there will be a competitive seat in the Fredericksburg area, but not sure.

[Nyvin]

https://twitter.com/ChazNuttycombe/status/1439258925845651463?s=20

Legislative proposals are now accessible on the site. I don't these have any relation to the NOVA lines already drawn by the commission in its various hearings.

No real surprise that there's Republican and Democrat drawn maps.   The commission can't agree on anything and will most likely (almost certainly) deadlock and be sent to the State Supreme Court.  

[Nyvin]

It looks like they took the GOP map and just made a few minor tweeks to it.   Democrats can still easily win a majority but it's definitely a map that favors the Republicans.

[Nyvin]

It looks like they took the GOP map and just made a few minor tweeks to it.   Democrats can still easily win a majority but it's definitely a map that favors the Republicans.

Are you surprised they have apparently all agreed to this?

I would hope since they more or less used the GOP map for the Senate the Democrats would get their map for either congressional or house (with adjustments obviously).  

I'm counting 20 seats that Biden most likely won by double digits (12 in NoVA, 1 Charlottesville, 3 Richmond, 4 Tidewater) so the GOP definitely has an uphill battle for a majority considering there's a good number of competitive districts after that.  

The Stafford district is 50.7% Biden to 47.0% Trump in 2020.