Georgia 2020 Redistricting Discussion

[Tintrlvr]

One thing that is appealing about Bishop's district to the Republicans is that it's a fourth AA district that may be winnable for the Republicans by the middle of the decade...

[Tintrlvr]

As for candidates of choice, that's a very stupid metric to use, hard to calculate as well.  So minorities elected by white electorates don't count?  Absurd.  

I appreciate your perspective on this, but on the Forum we're either drawing maps for the world as it exists or is likely to exist, not the world which matches our own preferences. The metric of a community electing the candidate of its choice may seem "absurd" to you, but I think it's more absurd to consider Allen Keyes being elected by a rural white district to be a better reflection of African-American voting rights than Steve Cohen successfully winning primary after primary with African-American voter support. It's about the right of the voters, not the right of the representative him or herself.

Moreover, this is what the Supreme Court and other courts have said in the past regarding the VRA, so it's really a closed question. The VRA is designed to ensure the enfranchisement of voters, not the enfranchisement of politicians, so what's important to compliance with the VRA is whether racial minority voters are properly enfranchised (when it comes to redistricting, that means not being improperly diluted or otherwise reduced in their ability to fairly elect candidates of their choice), not whether politicians that are racial minorities are being elected.

[Tintrlvr]

There is an excellent chance the Supreme Court might change the standard.

Which court case are you following that you expect will make it to the Supreme Court and lead to this outcome?  

The current one basically segregates voters on the basis of race, and legally mandates a certain number of whites be placed into districts where THEIR candidate of choice won't win, like with the Texas "fajita strips".  

Yes, the history of the U.S. shows that white voters have generally not suffered from discrimination in exercising their right to vote on the basis of race that African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans have throughout history, so they aren't treated the same.

It's also the case that white voters have a disproportionate number of districts in Texas where (non-Hispanic) white voters elect the candidate of their choice: all of the districts that elect Republicans, in particular, which constitute a majority of congressional districts in Texas while Texas is (much) less than majority non-Hispanic white (and less than majority non-Hispanic white even when only taking into account eligible voters I believe), as well at least a few Democratic districts where white voters vote Democratic, such as TX-35, so this complaint is utterly ridiculous.

The VRA does not require that all voters of all races be able to elect candidates of their choice; this is obviously not possible (at least, not without proportional representation). But it does require that reasonable accommodation be made to ensure that racial groups are not, in the aggregate, disproportionately prevented from reasonably being able to elect candidates of their choice. It isn't the case that white voters in Texas that form cohesive communities are in the aggregate unable to elect candidates of their choice, so the point is moot.

I do disagree with Brittain33 in that I think white voters are technically protected by the VRA as well, but I don't think there are any situations currently where white voters are disproportionately prevented from electing candidates of their choice. There are a variety of reasons for this: disproportionate presence of white politicians in the levers of power (even in areas that are minority-majority), the general propensity for white voters to turn out to vote at higher rates than other racial groups (so a minority white district often will still elect a candidate preferred by white voters) and the institutional structures of the parties and their respective redistricting goals.

[Tintrlvr]

There is an excellent chance the Supreme Court might change the standard.

Which court case are you following that you expect will make it to the Supreme Court and lead to this outcome?  

The current one basically segregates voters on the basis of race, and legally mandates a certain number of whites be placed into districts where THEIR candidate of choice won't win, like with the Texas "fajita strips".  

Yes, the history of the U.S. shows that white voters have generally not suffered from discrimination in exercising their right to vote on the basis of race that African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans have throughout history, so they aren't treated the same.

It's also the case that white voters have a disproportionate number of districts in Texas where (non-Hispanic) white voters elect the candidate of their choice: all of the districts that elect Republicans, in particular, which constitute a majority of congressional districts in Texas while Texas is (much) less than majority non-Hispanic white (and less than majority non-Hispanic white even when only taking into account eligible voters I believe), as well at least a few Democratic districts where white voters vote Democratic, such as TX-35, so this complaint is utterly ridiculous.

The VRA does not require that all voters of all races be able to elect candidates of their choice; this is obviously not possible (at least, not without proportional representation). But it does require that reasonable accommodation be made to ensure that racial groups are not, in the aggregate, disproportionately prevented from reasonably being able to elect candidates of their choice. It isn't the case that white voters in Texas that form cohesive communities are in the aggregate unable to elect candidates of their choice, so the point is moot.

I do disagree with Brittain33 in that I think white voters are technically protected by the VRA as well, but I don't think there are any situations currently where white voters are disproportionately prevented from electing candidates of their choice. There are a variety of reasons for this: disproportionate presence of white politicians in the levers of power (even in areas that are minority-majority), the general propensity for white voters to turn out to vote at higher rates than other racial groups (so a minority white district often will still elect a candidate preferred by white voters) and the institutional structures of the parties and their respective redistricting goals.

TX-35 whites lean R, surprisingly.  The slice of Austin it has doesn't have too many whites. https://www.deviantart.com/reagentah/art/2016-Non-Hispanic-White-Vote-Map-by-C-District-770102062
As for whites being protected under the vra, the court has never ruled in favor of a white vra district, but that's an interesting idea.  Mass immigration as already made whites a minority in multiple states and will turn others soon.  Let's look at Orange County, I seriously doubt Cisneros, Porter, or Rouda would count as white preference candidates since they lost the white vote (maybe Levin too).  If SCOTUS keeps the district requirements in place Republicans could argue for a white VRA seat in OC, because non whites vote as a bloc to defeat the white candidate of choice.  This would be unprecedented, but there would be harm in trying.  It would be interesting to see if the left would change its position on the VRA if it actually protected everyone.  Soon the California electorate will be majority non white, you don't have to be brown to be a minority.

The main problem with arguing this in OC is that you need a solid community of interest. If you could point to a majority white area that was being cracked across multiple districts (or if white voters were being packed into one district), you might have a case, but that's clearly not true under the current map even though white voters lose out anyway; the problem is that white voters are scattered around the map (contrast the original point of discussion, southwestern Georgia, where black voters form a clear and compact community of interest). Moreover, it's clear that white voters are still in the driver's seat in both parties' primaries and that a large minority of white voters are still having their preferences expressed.

Part of the reason is that white voters outside of the Deep South are not especially strong in their partisan electoral preferences, which makes their interests that much weaker when looking to protect them in the VRA; it's concerning when 90% of black voters can't elect a candidate of their choice, but much less concerning or indicative of a disparate impact on white voters (and also, practically, much more difficult to resolve through district-drawing) when only 52% of white voters are losing out.

[Tintrlvr]

Since some mentioned GA-02 (if kept with a similar composition) being a swing district by the end of the decade despite being a VRA plurality/majority black district, I now wonder if something similar has ever happened.

Has a white Republican (with ~10% black support presumably) ever won a VRA black district? GA-02 seems like it would be extremely inelastic and titanium D despite the low margins

He wasn’t white, but Anh Cao, who pretty clearly lost the black vote (by huge margins — Jefferson was getting 90+% of the vote in the heavily black precincts of NOLA) but won anyway by consolidating the non-black vote. Special circumstances, of course.

Edit: The ability for such a thing to happen has mainly to do with differential turnout. In urban VRA districts, the Republicans normally have no chance because the non-black voters in urban districts aren't monolithically Republican. On the other hand, unlike in rural VRA districts, in urban VRA districts the non-black voters on the whole often have much better turnout than the black voters, so there's more chance of the actual on-the-day electorate being majority non-black, and, if there is a perfect storm of all of the urban non-black voters voting for a Republican, as happened for Cao, they can win. In a rural VRA district, the significant turnout differential in the Republicans' (or, more specifically when comparing to urban VRA districts, non-black voters') favor does not exist as strongly, but, at the same time, in a rural VRA district (in the Deep South), the Republicans don't need extraordinary circumstances for the non-black vote to be 90% in their favor. It doesn't seem wildly implausible that the Republicans could win a VRA district GA-02 in a Democratic midterm in 2026 or 2030, or maybe even 2022, when Democratic turnout was down a bit and Republican turnout up a bit.

[Tintrlvr]

A 6-8 DEM gerrymander map:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/a82eae1f-50ee-4771-ace0-b20be61ba3dc

CD-01: Clinton +14.3, minority-majority
CD-02: Clinton +9.1, minority-majority
CD-03: Clinton +15.9, minority-majority
CD-04: Trump +44.3
CD-05: Trump +39
CD-06: Clinton +20.1, minority-majority
CD-07: Clinton +63.9, minority-majority
CD-08: Trump +47.5
CD-09: Trump +50.6
CD-10: Trump +26.6
CD-11: Clinton +34.1, minority-majority
CD-12: Clinton +10.4, minority-majority
CD-13: Clinton +23.2
CD-14: Trump +62.2

Doesn't need to be nearly so messy if you accept that a district in north Fulton/Gwinnett voted solidly for McCain and Romney but is Lean D now (much more than current GA-06, it's about Clinton+4) and rocketing leftward. The below is also an 8D-6R map with 7 minority-majority districts.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/78f679e4-1a4d-4cc4-bf82-7460181bb30b

[Tintrlvr]

Given how no one has drawn a white Dem district (is one even possible?); the number of Dem seats equals the number of black seats

So now the question is:

1: Can GA-02 be dismantled? Can it be brought to Atlanta or other black areas of the state?
2: How many black majority districts are needed in the Atlanta area?

Once you answer those 2 questions you can start drawing. The VRA essencially means Georgia will have a court designed map in practice as 11-3 is impossible.

My map above has a 63% white district in the Atlanta metro that even voted for Obama in 2008, would be solid D now. There’s also another plurality white diverse district (no minority group predominates) that voted McCain but has moved strongly to Clinton.

[Tintrlvr]

Here's five Democratic districts in Atlanta that has the same effects of Blairite's maps (3 Black VAP districts, a majority-White district, and a Gwinnett Maj-Min districts) that only splits Atlanta once along racial lines.

That's probably a better map. I assumed it was better to split Atlanta than have multiple Cobb splits or a Fulton/De Kalb split, but the COIs are probably better respected there. Cobb still looks weird though.

Now that I revisit this map, I realize it's incredibly similar to the current district alignment in Metro ATL.  The current map is almost fair, although it really should have 2 Likely Dem and 4 Safe Dem seats in Metro Atlanta under a truly fair map Democratic gerrymander, so it seems.  No way anything like the current GA-06 survives 2021 redistricting.

FIFY

This may be overstating things a little bit, but that map posted leaves a lot of Democratic or marginal areas in Republican seats, such as in Kennesaw, Marietta and north Fulton (while putting east Cobb in a competitive seat that could have been made safe Democratic with Marietta instead). It's definitely not a Democratic gerrymander.

[Tintrlvr]

Here is a fairly reliable 8-7 GA map I made based on the 2018 Governor numbers.



There are 4 minority majority districts. 5 (69.2%), 7 (63.2%), 10 (59.2%), and 2 (51.6%).

• District 1 - Abrams 11.2
• District 2 - Abrams 8.1
• District 3 - Kemp 38.6
• District 4 - Kemp 30.6
• District 5 - Abrams 51.6
• District 6 - Abrams 10
• District 7 - Abrams 70.8 (Most of the city of Atlanta)
• District 8 - Abrams 11.3
• District 9 - Abrams 12
• District 10 - Abrams 37.9
• District 11 - Kemp 33.4
• District 12 - Kemp 53
• District 13 - Kemp 41
• District 14 - Kemp 53.3

This is a pretty good fair map. Not completely agreeable in everything but quite good in reflecting the statewide composition while also keeping things clean and compact and respecting county lines.

Tbh I wasn’t trying to make a fair map, but rather a sensible dem gerrymander. How could it be improved?

You can definitely create another Dem seat if you combine Athens with the right parts of the Atlanta metro. Four majority black seats in the Atlanta metro is also very possible without going crazy with the lines (involves more splitting of the city of Atlanta, but that's in my mind not really a big deal).

[Tintrlvr]

So I assume everyone who wants a Savanah to Augusta district is fine with the Columbia to Charleston district in SC?

You can fit all of Savannah and Augusta in the same district. Not true of Charleston and Columbia.

[Tintrlvr]

The quad chop of Gwinnett is a collateral damage of my concern, but a seat could be drawn to very likely hold for the decade without the quad chop, as my previous maps did with a tri-chop. Heck, in theory even one chop would have been enough if the two pieces were relatively equal in population (in fact the share of Gwinnett for the Pub GA-8 (the purple CD) is about half of its population give or take), and that would be my first inclination if the chop were clean and avoided unpleasant municipal chops (you might notice that in the Atlanta area in particular I made a real effort to respect municipal lines, arising out of the same concern). I kept twisting the clock around Atlanta for a very specific reason, and, hint 2, it was driven by the characteristics of one and only one CD. There was something about it that raised a red flag for me that moved me to call RNC headquarters, and say, hey, I am worried about this, I think it has the potential to be like the corona virus is to the human body, particularly one like mine.

In your original map, were you concerned about the rapidly growing black population in GA-10? Including Rockdale in a Republican district was a bold choice, and Newton and Spaulding are also changing quickly. Long-term, I think there's a real chance that Walton starts to trend hard to the Democrats as the black population grows as well; the only adjacent suburbs to it these days are majority black.

Oconee County isn't in exactly the same situation (it's an Athens suburb, not Atlanta, and there is unlikely to be a surge in the black population there any time soon), but it is definitely trending Democratic as well due to spillover from Athens.

All in all, I could see GA-10 on the previous map being a concern by 2030. Taking out Rockdale and Oconee definitely helps with the long-term risk.

[Tintrlvr]

I humbly propose the following map, which generates 10 majority-minority districts, of which 7 are Black-plurality and 1 is Asian-opportunity and Hispanic-opportunity (the 7th is just over 20% Hispanic, 20% Asian, and 20% black). It does so in a mostly compact manner too. Maximizing minority representation thus is surely needed in any boundary drawing.

Any district partisanship bias is purely coincidental.

I'd been thinking about this. Probably the most effective Democratic gerrymander involves a bunch of Atlanta-south tendrils to create barely black-majority districts.

Anyway, here was my 8D-6R map, which is pretty similar to the one proposed above but developed independently:



https://davesredistricting.org/join/c8c3a345-7e6a-4900-8581-cc74ecc99039

If you want to gerrymander without tendrils, I think you could still squeeze out another Democratic district if you combine Savannah with Augusta and then send Athens into the Atlanta metro while pushing the black districts on the south side of Atlanta out further.

[Tintrlvr]

Both Cobb and DeKalb being the exact right size for a district is pretty cool.

Oklahoma County I believe is still the right size. El Paso County in CO was like that with 2019 estimates, but overshot them and needs a chunk taken out.

I wonder how the map will change in 2030. What do you expect then?

I feel like the 2030 GA redistricting will be pretty interesting insofar as 1) it’s fairly likely to be led by Democrats, 2) there could easily be another seat by then, and 3) Northern Atlanta could well be given both a Hispanic-opportunity and an Asian-opportunity district.

I think the GA Republicans will be smart enough to pass a redistricting commission amendment sometime mid-decade before they lose control, maybe in 2024.

[Tintrlvr]

I have come up with a definitely fair map. For the court-required four black majority districts, I chose to pair the urban heavily-black areas of the Atlanta area with rural areas to the south rather than with the whiter areas of Atlanta, as this makes it easier for the black candidate of choice to win the Democratic primary. Thanks to this, it made sense to eliminate the 3rd district in its current formation, to provide enough population for the four black Atlanta districts (the 5th, 4th, 13th, and new 3rd).

The whiter areas of the Atlanta area are paired together to make a new 10th district, which is in fact the bluest district on the map. The rest of the map was drawn prioritizing compactness and avoiding county splits when possible, getting rid of ugly aspects of the current map like the 8th snaking around Macon. By 2016-2020 average, there are seven Democratic-leaning districts and seven Republican-leaning ones, so I definitely see no way that this map could possibly be considered unfair, and something like this should certainly be considered when the map is being redrawn.



More images in spoiler

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

I don’t think there’s much risk of the white candidate of choice winning a Democratic primary of any hypothetical Black influence district in the Atlanta area. You can draw 4 districts in the Atlanta area with identical demographics and without drawing them into genuinely rural territory south of the city, much less cutting into suburban Macon or Columbus.

I'm pretty sure (maybe I am wrong) that this was intended as a joke way to draw a (mild, honestly) Democratic gerrymander but claim it isn't one and justify it on VRA grounds, poking fun at various attempts to justify Republican gerrymanders in other contexts.

[Tintrlvr]

With the LA ruling I suppose it is likely GA gets an another black Seat?

There was a separate ruling in GA requiring the same, thus the flurry of posts here recently.

[Tintrlvr]

Why didn't they comply with court orders ? GA republicans have so much to lose to have a Map being drawn by the courts.

In the case of the Senate, it's because the state senators who would be redistricted out are the Senate leadership.

Plus the usual not wanting to be responsible for ending any other Republican's career.