How would you gerrymander a district to be most likely to vote 3rd party?

[Crumpets]

Imagine you had unlimited gerrymandering powers and the only requirement was you had to stick to the rough target for population size and couldn't cross state lines. What district would you carve out to theoretically give a non-Democrat, non-Republican candidate of any ideological persuasion or party the best chance of winning?

Personally, I think the best bet would be trying to create some kind of strongly Green seat in California by lumping together a bunch of the most leftist areas of the state, colleges, hippie communes, national parks, etc. No idea if that's even theoretically feasible though, and I think you'd still be looking at a 10% Green district at best.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

I think your imagined district would basically be CA-02 but switching undesired bits (especially in Marin County I guess) for areas in counties such as Lake, Butte, Nevada.
The problem is even in a perfect storm scenario I can see the Greens beating the Republicans for second place but I don't see them being actually competitive for first place.



My answer to the question is actually surprising simple: I would just draw Alaska at-large.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Orthodox Jewish district in Brooklyn - it'd vote for the candidate rather than the party, so most chance of an independent candidate (or at least a candidate willing to caucus with whoever gave him the best deal) elected.

[Former President tack50]

Using 2020 data it is kind of impossible since Jorgensen's best result was what, 2.6%?

However, using 2016 data, here are my very quick and very improvable attempts at a McMullin and a Johnson congressional district (in UT and NM respectively)


"other" gets 13.8% of the vote


Other gets 34.7% of the vote

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Using 2020 data it is kind of impossible since Jorgensen's best result was what, 2.6%?

However, using 2016 data, here are my very quick and very improvable attempts at a McMullin and a Johnson congressional district (in UT and NM respectively)

https://i.snipboard.io/S3ClOp.jpg
"other" gets 13.8% of the vote

https://i.snipboard.io/DJuxrn.jpg
Other gets 34.7% of the vote

Well but Johnson and McMullin were one-time events, so it doesn't really answer the question.

Also, I don't think Johnson won in any sizable area of New Mexico (probably not even in a single precinct) in 2016. However McMullin in Utah certainly did. I wonder what's the most populated district of some kind that could be drawn where McMullin beat both Trump and Clinton.

[muon2]

Wouldn't VT vote for Bernie even If he ran as an independent?

There was actually quite a bit of professional analysis done on this question before the 2016 election. Bloomberg hired a bunch of data crunchers to see what he could win as an Indy. His conclusion was that if Bernie was the Dem nominee then he could carry enough states to win, but if Hillary got the nod he could win some, but split too much of the vote and hand the election to Trump.