2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: Michigan (user search)
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  2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: Michigan (search mode)
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Author Topic: 2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: Michigan  (Read 40814 times)
EastAnglianLefty
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« on: February 05, 2020, 12:06:05 PM »

I've been working on some potential state legislative maps for Michigan, as those are reasonably easy to predict if you're following good government grounds of minimising city and county splits. I'll try to type those up and put them here.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #1 on: February 06, 2020, 06:45:19 AM »

I think it's pretty clear that no Democratic-favouring map is going to seek to put Washtenaw and Wayne in the same district. Based off the 2018 population numbers, Wayne, Macomb and Oakland have a combined entitlement to only just over 5 congressional districts, which frees up Washtenaw to soak up Republican turf in South East Michigan.

Alternatively, if that's not happening then I would expect Flint to be paired with Saginaw and Bay in a Democratic map, given that Kildee doesn't look to be vulnerable on the present lines.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #2 on: February 06, 2020, 10:41:21 AM »

I had a quick go at designing what a Democratic congressional map might look like. The places where the thumb is put on the scale are pretty obvious, but some of them are probably things that could be justified in an actual map. I've used the population estimates for counties and county sub-divisions for 2018. They don't quite match up to what the figures will be for 2020, but it's probably close enough.





MI-1: C 35.6% T 58.8% - safe R.
MI-2: C 37.5% T 56.5% - safe R. Probably more Moolenaar's district than Huizenga's, though neither lives there.
MI-3: C 42.9% T 50.2% - likely R. Maybe you could make this competitive if you combined Grand Rapids with Muskegon or Kalamazoo and stripped out the suburbs, but that's never realistically going to happen.
MI-4: C 47.8% T 46.1% - lean D. A Lansing-based central Michigan district ought to exist under any fair map, but if you top it out with counties to its south then Democratic prospects are much better than if you go north.
MI-5: C 48% T 46.9% - likely D. Possibly a worry if the competitiveness on the presidential level starts to manifest itself at a congressional level, but if that happens Democrats are screwed in Michigan anyway.
MI-6: C 38.9% T 54.9% - safe R. A more aggressive gerrymander would strip out Kalamazoo, but I wanted halfway clean lines away from Detroit.
MI-7: C 53% T 41.6% - safe D. Possibly only likely, but the Democratic base here is pretty inflexible. Keeping Washtenaw and Wayne separate ought to be a key Democratic objective.
MI-8: C 47.7% T 47.6% - lean D/toss-up. Livingston is drowned out with Democratic-trending bits of Oakland. Very vulnerable if Republicans improve their performance in highly-educated areas, but as it is Slotkin has nothing to complain about.
MI-9: C 52.9% T 42.6% - likely D. The most obviously gerrymandered district, because I didn't want to concede a seat in Macomb. If it drops Southfield to bolster MI-11 or MI-13 then you could make it less obvious, but it would be much more competitive.
MI-10: C 32.6% T 62% - safe R.
MI-11: C 61.8% T 34.8% - safe D. 50.1% white, 42.8% black. It's perhaps pushing it whether this counts as a VRA district, but the Democratic primary is certainly black-majority so it's probably OK.
MI-12: C 54.3% T 40.8% - safe D. This is designed as the white Wayne County district, so I can send both the VRA districts across county lines to soak up white Republican voters.
MI-13: C 65.9% T 30.6% - safe D. 46.7% white, 40.6% black, 9.8% Hispanic.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #3 on: February 06, 2020, 12:02:27 PM »

8 Mile Road has certainly been a COI divider historically, but is that still true to the same extent? Eastpointe isn't far off an African-American plurality at this point and similar changes can be seen in the south of Warren, so it's arguable that that dam has finally broken there.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #4 on: February 07, 2020, 04:21:47 AM »

But there are still sufficient black electors for it to be possible for them to elect two representatives of their choice and they're geographically concentrated enough to pass the Gingles test. Instead you've packed them into a district that must be about 75% AA. That's as obvious a violation of the VRA as you'll ever see.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #5 on: February 07, 2020, 09:59:05 AM »

Kent and Ottawa have too many people for a single congressional district. If you believe they ought to go in the same congressional district (and it's an eminently fair argument if you look at a map) then you have to remove some of the outlying portions of one or both of them. It's not evidence of a gerrymander, just evidence of Kent being a large county.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #6 on: February 07, 2020, 12:04:37 PM »

There's no maybe about it - the current map does so, so there's no realistic question but that it's legitimate to secure two AA-majority seats.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #7 on: February 08, 2020, 10:17:54 AM »

Flint and Saginaw are a natural combination, as they're both manufacturing cities with similar sets of economic issues.

However, if you choose not to pair them, then there's one possible combination nobody else has tried yet, namely a Lansing-Saginaw district.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/fd58f3f7-afcc-4211-b3ce-3bb4d1df620a

It's not a particularly natural pairing, but it works better than a Flint-Lansing district, as Saginaw is small enough for them to room for both it and Eaton and Clinton counties.

Flint then goes with either the Thumb counties or with Pontiac and northern Oakland (I think the latter is slightly better, as Pontiac is similar enough even if northern Oakland isn't, but reasonable minds can disagree on this.)

The Thumb then goes with northern and eastern Macomb and the 9th and 11th are neatened from their current iterations but not wildly different. The two Detroit districts can be characterised as one covering the East side, Downtown and Downriver, and one covering the West side and inner suburbs to the north and west.

Livingston, Washtenaw and Monroe aren't exactly a natural community, but it is at least a coherent district based on counties on the edge of the metro area, and I think the Kalamazoo-Battle Creek-Jackson district works rather nicely.

That then forces Ottawa into the 6th and the 3rd compacts into an essentially rectangular shape. I opted to split the rest of the Lower Peninsula on roughly east-west lines, but some might prefer a north-south split.

So the Flint and Saginaw districts are both a bit awkward, but everything else works out surprisingly neatly. Trump won 7 of those districts, but in the case of the 5th his margin was only 0.9% and it practice it would probably return seven Democrats most years.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #8 on: February 08, 2020, 03:08:59 PM »

Going into Bay was mostly a legacy effect - initially I wanted to get Bay City in (on the basis that southern Bay is fairly distinct from much more rural northern Bay) but then I found that based off 2018 population estimates it's not quite big enough. That will probably still be the case on the census figures, but it might be possible to take most of Midland instead (just leaving off the rural fringes.)
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #9 on: February 09, 2020, 05:43:01 AM »

Going into Bay was mostly a legacy effect - initially I wanted to get Bay City in (on the basis that southern Bay is fairly distinct from much more rural northern Bay) but then I found that based off 2018 population estimates it's not quite big enough. That will probably still be the case on the census figures, but it might be possible to take most of Midland instead (just leaving off the rural fringes.)
While your map doesn't really favor one party,  you split Oakland 5 ways heavily diluting their voice.  It is possible to only split it once, with one district entirely within it (probably a Dem seat) and exurban areas going elsewhere.  Also some dems might be nervous about all those Clinton+5 or less seats.  They are all trending R.

a) Oakland isn't a single thing - it's a huge county ranging from core bits of the Detroit urban area in the SE, to suburbs in the middle to rural areas in the north. 9 and 11 split the suburban bits and you can reasonably argue that it's better to unit them and then have one district solely in Macomb, but otherwise the map matches up to the different COIs in the county reasonable well.

b) Those seats aren't trending R. The northern bits of 4 are trending R, but the southern bits are trending D and there's more population in the south of the seat (and the south is growing and the north isn't). Also, Saginaw County has a significant non-white population, so there are limits to how much further it can swing unless it goes full Kentucky (in which case Democrats are screwed whatever happens.)

In 8, Washtenaw has about half the electorate and is trending D (although they may be close to tapped out in the east of the county and it's not clear whether the same will happen in the west too.) Livingston is also trending D, so it's only Monroe which is the issue and that's only about a fifth of the electorate.

In 9, most of the Macomb bits are swinging R, but the minority population in south Macomb is growing rapidly, which ought to take the edge off that. In Oakland, the trend is towards Democrats. That said, if you swapped St. Clair Shores for Mt. Clemens and part of Clinton Township (which looks cleaner on a map but splits more townships) then it probably would be an issue.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #10 on: February 09, 2020, 03:02:57 PM »

You seem to have the idea that everybody else is biased, whereas you are fair. The former may be true, the latter is frankly delusional. You're just much better at seeing other people's biases than admitting your own.

I would agree it's not necessarily a plan that is likely to be drawn, but that wasn't the point. It was just an experiment to see what happens if you draw a Lansing-Saginaw district. Answer: the Flint and Lansing districts are a bit odd, everything else makes sense in isolation but you split a few more counties than you necessarily need to.

A lot of the decisions on the map seem to come down to how Flint, Saginaw and the Thumb get treated. If you put Flint with the Thumb, you're drawing a Republican gerrymander. If you put Flint and Saginaw in the same district and extend it to the Huron coast, you're going to produce a strong Democratic map around Detroit (as you soak up heavily Republican bits of northern Macomb and/or Oakland, allowing Democratic strongholds in the south of those counties to outvote lean-Republican areas further north.) If you put Flint and Saginaw in the same district but let the Thumb district head north via Bay, it's more mixed but tends to benefit Republicans as they're going to be favoured to win the Macomb district.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #11 on: February 09, 2020, 04:32:02 PM »

You seem to have the idea that everybody else is biased, whereas you are fair. The former may be true, the latter is frankly delusional. You're just much better at seeing other people's biases than admitting your own.

I would agree it's not necessarily a plan that is likely to be drawn, but that wasn't the point. It was just an experiment to see what happens if you draw a Lansing-Saginaw district. Answer: the Flint and Lansing districts are a bit odd, everything else makes sense in isolation but you split a few more counties than you necessarily need to.

A lot of the decisions on the map seem to come down to how Flint, Saginaw and the Thumb get treated. If you put Flint with the Thumb, you're drawing a Republican gerrymander. If you put Flint and Saginaw in the same district and extend it to the Huron coast, you're going to produce a strong Democratic map around Detroit (as you soak up heavily Republican bits of northern Macomb and/or Oakland, allowing Democratic strongholds in the south of those counties to outvote lean-Republican areas further north.) If you put Flint and Saginaw in the same district but let the Thumb district head north via Bay, it's more mixed but tends to benefit Republicans as they're going to be favoured to win the Macomb district.
I never claimed not to have biases, but on this map https://imgur.com/a/pQIkR45 I turned off partisan data and based it on 538's map keeping counties whole as much as possible.  Not every map I've drawn is fair but that one is as the data shows https://imgur.com/7d7Ddl7 6D, 6R, 1 even.    Also I don't think you can get a Flint-Saginaw district all the way to northern Macomb unless you make a weird tendril which the commission isn't doing.  You can get a Flint district to the Huron coast, only if you drop Saginaw.  I think the most fair and straightforward way to divide up the northern suburbs is a solid R district that includes Livingston county, northern and western Oakland, and northern Macomb.  Then a solid D district in the remainder of Oakland, and a tossup in the remainder of Macomb.  The one potential alteration is having a black seat go into southern Oakland to get more black voters, but that doesn't really change the partisan makeup because the Oakland seat still solidly votes Clinton due to Pontiac and places like Royal Oak.  1D-1T-1R is a fair breakdown of the Macomb-Oakland-Livingston area.  Those counties combined voted Trump narrowly and Obama narrowly. 

Sorry, I didn't put that clearly - I'm not talking about the Flint-Saginaw district going into Macomb, but about the knock-on consequences. The Thumb has the electorate for half a congressional district and if you don't get the other half from Flint or from the north, then you either have to take it from Oakland or Macomb or both, which creates a Republican pack and means that you're more likely to get Democratic seats in the rest of Oakland and Macomb.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #12 on: February 10, 2020, 04:11:12 AM »

I don't really see the point of Oakland getting it's own district.   It seems...meaningless.  Oakland is huge and very diverse,  both with income and demographics.    It's as though it's making a district simply to follow county lines and literally nothing else.  

It makes the most sense to have southern Oakland cross into either Wayne or Washtenaw,  depending on what communities you want to put together.  

I could understand a Macomb-exclusive district though.   That makes way more sense since it's much more White Working Class and generally is it's own community.
An all-Oakland seat is logical especially because 8 Mile Road is better not crossed if one can help it and/or its not absolutely essential to one's plans elsewhere. The main benefit is not necessarily in a homogenous CoI but better districts elsewhere. There is much reason and much elegance in two exurban districts wrapping around the more urban metro Detroit districts.

The 8 mile rd thing is more for the Macomb-Wayne border than Oakland,  since it's what separates Black Detroit from White Macomb (the difference really is pretty stark).   In Oakland you have Oak Park and Southfield areas to the north of Detroit which are both pretty black, and the difference between the two is minimal further west.

Most of Detroit itself is suburban sprawl, there's extremely little true "Metro" in the sense of what you see in Los Angeles or New York in Detroit.

If you compare the 2010 precincts on DRA with the 2016 ones, it looks like that doesn't really apply to Macomb-Wayne any more. Eastpointe is on the path to becoming black-plurality and the bottom few rows of precincts in Warren have pretty high black populations these days. There's still a divide between 90% black precincts and 40% black ones, but on the west side of Macomb it doesn't become super-white until 9 Mile or 10 Mile Road.

I don't really see the point of Oakland getting it's own district.   It seems...meaningless.  Oakland is huge and very diverse,  both with income and demographics.    It's as though it's making a district simply to follow county lines and literally nothing else.  

It makes the most sense to have southern Oakland cross into either Wayne or Washtenaw,  depending on what communities you want to put together.  

I could understand a Macomb-exclusive district though.   That makes way more sense since it's much more White Working Class and generally is it's own community.
An all-Oakland seat is logical especially because 8 Mile Road is better not crossed if one can help it and/or its not absolutely essential to one's plans elsewhere. The main benefit is not necessarily in a homogenous CoI but better districts elsewhere. There is much reason and much elegance in two exurban districts wrapping around the more urban metro Detroit districts.

The 8 mile rd thing is more for the Macomb-Wayne border than Oakland,  since it's what separates Black Detroit from White Macomb (the difference really is pretty stark).   In Oakland you have Oak Park and Southfield areas to the north of Detroit which are both pretty black, and the difference between the two is minimal further west.
But you don't have to reach into Oakland for an adequate black district, and the more areas you take from Southern Oakland the more you need to eat into exurban metro Detroit, which is a CoI worth keeping together.
So crossing 8 Mile is still undesirable in most cases.

Has anybody successfully made 2 VRA districts solely in Wayne in this thread? It was certainly doable in 2010, I'm not convinced it is any longer.

I'm also not convinced it would be that controversial on a partisan level. You have to put a lot of SE Oakland into a Detroit district before a district entirely in Oakland starts looking competitive.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #13 on: February 11, 2020, 08:11:08 AM »
« Edited: February 11, 2020, 08:14:55 AM by EastAnglianLefty »

Two versions of possible maps for the Michigan State Senate, based on 2018 population estimates:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/04f91558-5287-438a-8efe-aa9246cbef8a

https://davesredistricting.org/join/17d7f5ff-be35-4006-95c0-9cf51d2c0e52

They're pretty similar, with the differences limited to the Tri-Cities area where I couldn't quite decide which option was superior. As I'm depending on estimates, I tried to avoid having seats right at the top or bottom of the population deviation range, unless it was unavoidable. Although the 2016 block groups I drew it with don't always respect township boundaries, in actual fact the only municipalities I had to split were Detroit, Dearborn Heights (avoidable if you're willing to use touchpoint-contiguity) and Sterling Heights (I couldn't see a way to avoid it, but it may exist.)

Highlights worth pointing out:

  • On 2020 numbers, Wayne County could just about have 7 districts but in practice it isn't really feasible now and it won't be at all by 2020
  • Wayne and Macomb combined are entitled to almost exactly 10 Senate districts, which is a better fit than you can get with Wayne and any other one county. I acknowledge the problems with crossing 8 Mile Road, but it makes it a lot easier to maintain 5 VRA districts in Detroit.
  • I think the districts I drew in Oakland are rather neat, except for the somewhat ugly pairing of Troy and Pontiac (which I think was just about avoiding splitting municipalities.) Nevertheless, they are pretty decent lines for Democrats and would undoubtedly be controversial, especially if the final census numbers do allow alternate configurations. District 11 is drawn as a black-opportunity district.
  • Livingston and Washtenaw are now two large to share two senate districts, but Washtenaw plus Monroe works perfectly. Yes, this has a definite partisan effect, but I don't see a whole-county alternative. Swapping Ypsilanti for rural Washtenaw would probably make Republicans happy, but would look ugly (though maybe not worse than my district 22?)
  • I don't love my district 19, so if you're looking to avoid a Washtenaw-Monroe combination, hopefully the solution would improve that too.
  • I tried to draw a majority-minority Grand Rapids district, but the numbers aren't there for it.
  • It's not very competitive right now, but back in 2012 district 34 would have been great for Democrats. Incidentally, does anybody know why Lake County was so Democratic up until 2016? It really shows up on a map, but I have no idea what prompts it

In a neutral year, I suspect this would be something along the lines of 22-16 or 21-17 Republican, but a Democratic majority looks like a very hard ask - it would probably entail running the table in the Detroit metro, locking down the Saginaw-Bay district, winning the Muskegon district and somehow getting over the line in either the Jackson district or the UP district.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #14 on: February 12, 2020, 11:42:55 AM »

Michigan's House of Representatives map is much less gerrymandered than its congressional or State Senate maps, because at this scale minimising splits of counties and municipalities means there's much less room to put a thumb on the scales. There are areas where it's clearly drawn to favour Republicans, but equally there are plenty of areas where you can more or less maintain the present alignments, once you've accounted for population shifts.

Once again, I worked with 2018 population estimates and tried to make sure that as much as possible seats were not right at the upper or lower limits of the allowable range. I tried to keep similar areas together, which probably promotes more safe seats, and I tried to draw as many seats winnable by minority candidates as possible, which definitely promotes safe seats. However, there are still a fair few marginals and I think it's clear that the House is a much easier target for Michigan Democrats than the State Senate.

In a few places (primarily Macomb, Grand Rapids, Lansing and Jackson) there looked to be two viable solutions, so I drew two maps. This is the first:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/90a2f6be-8fcf-4293-9b92-1a6b6a9c3d4b

  • This map has 10 black majority districts (8 in Detroit, one in Southfield, one in Flint); 1 Hispanic plurality district in Detroit (although that's probably more likely to elect a black candidate as it stands); a black-plurality district based on Pontiac; a majority-minority district in Grand Rapids; two districts where the Democratic primary is probably plurality-black (the Inkster-Romulus district and the Saginaw City district) and several other districts where the white percentage is below 60% and which might be viable coalition districts either now or by 2030. Except for the Inkster-Romulus district, these are all pretty clean. Sadly, the latest update to DRA seems to have screwed up the display of electorate data and is now only showing white and Hispanic populations, so you may just have to take me at my word.
  • Wayne and Monroe combine for 21 districts, which is one fewer than they presently have. It's mathematically possible to give Wayne 19 large districts on its own, but then Monroe lacks a convenient partner and there's nothing terribly wrong with a cross-county district there so I left it be.
  • In Macomb, I went for a least-change plan as much as possible. Warren and Clinton need to be chopped due to size and there's an extra chop in Sterling Heights. Macomb Township is now large enough for its own district.
  • In Oakland, you can mostly leave things be in the south-east. I tried to create a black-opportunity district based on Oak Park, but the numbers aren't quite there. Rochester Hills is now large enough for its own district, but Troy and Clawson are too large so Troy gets a chop. The county could theoretically stand alone for 14 seats, but Livingston is too large for two so I stuck in a cross-county seat.
  • In St. Clair, I undid the current gerrymander to create one rural district shared with Sanilac and one district focused on the St. Clair river towns. This might have been a swing district in 2008, but isn't now.
  • At the moment, Jackson County is sliced and diced to try to dilute the votes of Jackson itself. This map undoes that and creates a swing seat. Similarly, I've simplified the lines in Calhoun County. On the flipside, Shiawassee County gets carved in two.
  • Kent County is cracked quite hard at the moment. I've undone and given it seven seats of its own, which ought to usually split 4-3 Republican, with the Wyoming district possibly on the path to becoming competitive.
  • I tried a lot of options, but I don't think there are any plausible solutions in the UP that let you keep Marquette whole. That makes it even harder for Democrats to hold down a seat there than it already is.

Overall, Clinton won 42 districts to Trump's 68, but several of Trump's victories were extremely narrow and in several more Democrats tend to overperform downballot, so it would be competitive in good Democratic years.

I will post the second map either later tonight or tomorrow.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #15 on: February 13, 2020, 05:34:06 AM »

This is the second map I drew: https://davesredistricting.org/join/a2f88c52-cda9-4396-bc78-2c16f33c5600

Changes from the first map:

  • The Inkster district (16) is significantly more compact and there are two fewer municipality cuts as a result. This drops the black percentage from 40% to 33%. However, that's still probably an improvement from what it is at present and it's represented by a black candidate, so it's probably functioning. The partisan ramifications are pretty limited.
  • There's a totally different arrangement in Macomb County. Whereas in the first map I left the 18th district unchanged as a combination of Eastpointe and St. Clair Shores, in this one I combined Eastpointe with southern Warren in an attempt to create a black opportunity district. It's only 34% black at the moment, but diversifying fast and probably already black-majority in the primary.
  • The knock-on consequences mean more compact lines in northern Macomb and one less split to Sterling Heights, but Shelby township gets cut and there's also a small nick in to Clinton Township (although that may be avoidable, depending on population shifts.) I probably prefer this option, but it is more disruptive.
  • Rather than pairing Eaton and Clinton for two districts, I stuck Eaton in with Shiawassee and Genesee and Clinton in with the Lansing group. This flips district 71 and arguably better respects community identities round Lansing, but it's uglier in Jackson.
  • There's a slight re-jig in Kent in an attempt to create a purely suburban district wrapping round Grand Rapids to the north and east. Only partially successful, I think it's fair to say.
  • Slightly re-jigged lines in Ottawa, switching from a East/South/West orientation to an East/South-West/North-West one. Also minor tweaks to Muskegon, no great partisan effect in either case.
  • A slight re-jig to the lines in Saginaw, making district 95 slightly more effective as a black opportunity district.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #16 on: February 14, 2020, 04:21:32 AM »

What does the rest of the map look like? Presumably the numbers would work for putting Livingston in with Washtenaw, which is a better fit than more rural counties.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #17 on: February 16, 2020, 07:34:59 AM »

I just drew a new version of a MI map, and I'm extremely satisfied with it. The goal was to keep very close to the rule of minimizing county and municipal splits while keeping COIs together, and I think this map does an excellent job of both while also coming out with a very fair partisan balance of 6-6-1. It also has two seats that are majority or nearly majority black (and you could fiddle around with the edges to get them both to majority black, such as by switching Hamtramck). The UP-Traverse City district has no county splits at all (!!!), and the Lansing and Flint-Saginaw districts share a de minimis county split but have no splits with any other districts. The Detroit metro has two majority/near-majority black Detroit+ districts, one district entirely in Wayne, one district entirely in Oakland, one district covering the exurban parts of Oakland and Macomb and one district containing the western/southern exurbs+Ann Arbor, which I think is the best possible COI arrangement in the Detroit area. The three counties of the Lansing metro are also kept together without combining them with any other major metro (no combination with Flint, Saginaw, Livingston County, Kalamazoo, etc.)

Without further ado, the map:




MI-01 (Upper Peninsula, Traverse City): 37-59 Trump, Safe R
MI-02 (Holland, Muskegon): 37-57 Trump, Safe R
MI-03 (Grand Rapids): 41-52 Trump, Likely R
MI-04 (Bay City, Port Huron): 32-63 Trump, Safe R
MI-05 (Kalamazoo, Benton Harbor): 42-52 Trump, Likely R
MI-06 (Lansing, Battle Creek, Jackson): 48-46 Clinton, Lean D
MI-07 (Flint, Saginaw, Midland): 48-47 Clinton, Toss-up
MI-08 (Ann Arbor, Monroe, Howell): 50-45 Clinton, Likely D
MI-09 (Pontiac, Royal Oak, Novi): 53-42 Clinton, Safe D
MI-10 (Oxford, Sterling Heights, New Baltimore): 36-59 Trump, Safe R
MI-11 (Dearborn, Livonia, Romulus): 51-44 Clinton, Likely D
MI-12 (Detroit West, Southfield, Inkster): 78-19 Clinton, Safe D (51% black)
MI-13 (Detroit East, Warren, Mount Clemens): 69-28 Clinton, Safe D (49% black)

Total: 6R (4 Safe, 2 Likely), 6D (3 Safe, 2 Likely, 1 Lean), 1 Toss-up

https://davesredistricting.org/join/28069751-857c-44d0-8e44-8abde1dc2f25

Edit: I realized I had an unintentional extra municipal split in Macomb County. I've fixed that on the DRA version, and it actually increased the black percentage in MI-13 just a hair (nearly to the point of rounding up to 50%!).


I think that's probably the best effort I've seen yet in this thread.

I particularly like that MI-2 - it's very hard to make a doughnut seat that doesn't look incredibly awkward, but you pulled it off and it's a good Grand Rapids exurbs seat.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #18 on: February 16, 2020, 10:18:27 AM »

Slight tweak to get that MI-13 to 49.9% black: strip out St. Clair Shores and the remaining bit of Harrison Township, add in all of Clinton Township bar five precincts in the north-west. It makes the map look a little uglier, but it splits fewer municipalities and it doesn't really look worse on a map than the Dearborn/Dearborn Heights split does.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #19 on: February 17, 2020, 05:19:32 AM »

"Flint gets its own district" is a particularly euphemistic way of describing a fairly obvious attempt at cracking.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #20 on: February 17, 2020, 04:33:47 PM »
« Edited: February 17, 2020, 04:38:36 PM by EastAnglianLefty »

"Flint gets its own district" is a particularly euphemistic way of describing a fairly obvious attempt at cracking.

Imagine seriously defending the idea that Saginaw has more of a COI with the west coast of Michigan than with Flint.
Not with western MI, with the tri-cities area.  Saginaw-Flint breaks up the tri-cities area.

What's so special about that grouping in particular? They don't have anything more in common with each other than Saginaw has with Flint. Less, generally, as there are significant demographic differences. For example, Bay City and Midland are nearly 100% white while Saginaw has a large black population. Saginaw is also historically an industrial city while Bay City is a shipping center and Midland is more high tech and services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saginaw,_Midland,_and_Bay_City_metropolitan_area
Tri cities are a region of MI, Flint and Saginaw are two different cities that both happen to have black people.  Race doesn't make a COI, but it matters for VRA purposes in Detroit.

Let's look at the actual criteria for COI:

The constitution prioritizes the criteria:

(1) Equal Population.
(2) Contiguity
(3) COI " Districts shall reflect the state's diverse population and communities of interest. Communities of interest may include, but shall not be limited to, populations that share cultural or historical characteristics or economic interests."
(4) Political fairness.
(5) Not favoring/disfavoring incumbent or candidate.
(6) Reflect consideration of county, city, and township boundaries.
(7) Reasonably compact.

The existence of minority communities can fairly clearly be argued to be a cultural characteristic (and to some extent also reflects historic economic patterns.) Historically, Genesee and the bulk of Saginaw's population have been in the same congressional district since 1992 and Saginaw and Midland haven't been in the same district since at least 1972. And yes, post-industrial cities rapidly losing population have more in common with each economically other than they do with rural areas with no industrial heritage whatsoever.

I would also note that it's not even an either/or whether Saginaw goes with Genesee or with Bay and Midland. Based on 2018 numbers, that four county group has about 2% too many people, which can easily be dealt with by cutting out western Midland or northern Bay, neither or which are obviously out of place in a northern Michigan district. Your argument actually depends upon the notion that the Thumb can't go with exurban Macomb and/or Oakland, which is not a proposition you've actually made coherently yet.
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EastAnglianLefty
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Posts: 1,563


« Reply #21 on: February 17, 2020, 04:56:52 PM »

"Flint gets its own district" is a particularly euphemistic way of describing a fairly obvious attempt at cracking.

Imagine seriously defending the idea that Saginaw has more of a COI with the west coast of Michigan than with Flint.
Not with western MI, with the tri-cities area.  Saginaw-Flint breaks up the tri-cities area.

What's so special about that grouping in particular? They don't have anything more in common with each other than Saginaw has with Flint. Less, generally, as there are significant demographic differences. For example, Bay City and Midland are nearly 100% white while Saginaw has a large black population. Saginaw is also historically an industrial city while Bay City is a shipping center and Midland is more high tech and services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saginaw,_Midland,_and_Bay_City_metropolitan_area
Tri cities are a region of MI, Flint and Saginaw are two different cities that both happen to have black people.  Race doesn't make a COI, but it matters for VRA purposes in Detroit.

Let's look at the actual criteria for COI:

The constitution prioritizes the criteria:

(1) Equal Population.
(2) Contiguity
(3) COI " Districts shall reflect the state's diverse population and communities of interest. Communities of interest may include, but shall not be limited to, populations that share cultural or historical characteristics or economic interests."
(4) Political fairness.
(5) Not favoring/disfavoring incumbent or candidate.
(6) Reflect consideration of county, city, and township boundaries.
(7) Reasonably compact.

The existence of minority communities can fairly clearly be argued to be a cultural characteristic (and to some extent also reflects historic economic patterns.) Historically, Genesee and the bulk of Saginaw's population have been in the same congressional district since 1992 and Saginaw and Midland haven't been in the same district since at least 1972. And yes, post-industrial cities rapidly losing population have more in common with each economically other than they do with rural areas with no industrial heritage whatsoever.

I would also note that it's not even an either/or whether Saginaw goes with Genesee or with Bay and Midland. Based on 2018 numbers, that four county group has about 2% too many people, which can easily be dealt with by cutting out western Midland or northern Bay, neither or which are obviously out of place in a northern Michigan district. Your argument actually depends upon the notion that the Thumb can't go with exurban Macomb and/or Oakland, which is not a proposition you've actually made coherently yet.
I thought it had been settled metro Detroit was a COI.  Exurban Detroit with the Thumb makes no sense.  The thumb would go better with Flint, tri cities, or the rest of the coast.  Detroit is its own thing.

Detroit is its own thing. The Detroit metropolitan area is a thing. I see no evidence that's the same thing as the northern townships of Oakland and Macomb, which aren't urbanised to any significant degree. The fact that Ray township is in the same county as Warren doesn't mean it is actually meaningfully like Warren.

FWIW, I think the Thumb probably goes best with northern Michigan via Bay (I might even be tempted to cut out Bay City into the Flint/Tri-Cities district and jump the Saginaw River, though I doubt a commission would go for that.) But I see no reason to get precious about breaching the St. Clair-Macomb boundary or the Oakland-Lapeer boundary if you're not going to reach down into the actual urban area itself.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #22 on: February 19, 2020, 01:15:33 PM »
« Edited: February 19, 2020, 01:54:48 PM by EastAnglianLefty »

As it happens, I just finished drawing a similar map based off a district jumping over the Saginaw River:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/38383e2f-7132-4b5e-89b0-7b8c8bdcd477

The major differences to Oryxslayer's map are that Shiawassee goes in the Lansing district and Jackson mostly in the Kalamazoo district and that Grand Rapids district goes west instead of east.

Clinton wins six districts in this map, but two of them only narrowly. Obama carried ten of them in 2008 (though not the Grand Rapids district, which these days is probably the seventh best Democratic prospect.)

I think this map has some positives to it, but overall I think it shows the problem of a Thumb/Huron Shore district, which is that the two areas aren't really big enough for a congressional district. To get the necessary population, you either need to reach into exurban Macomb, or the Tri-Cities area, or well into the interior of northern Michigan, or some combination thereof. And if you're going to do that, why not just go the whole hog and tack the two areas on to separate districts?
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EastAnglianLefty
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Posts: 1,563


« Reply #23 on: February 19, 2020, 01:59:30 PM »

It looks like quite a tight cut on Bay City. Given that there isn't a bridge over the Saginaw north of there and the 4th hence can't be contiguous by road whatever you do, you may as well do a looser cut.

Regarding Mt Pleasant, I still think the solution is to shift Jackson into the sixth (making it more compact), send the Lansing district into Montcalm and Ionia (as they're not that closely linked to GR), stick eastern Ottawa into the 3rd (as that is closely linked to GR) then re-align the boundary between the 2nd and the 6th (which should allow you to keep most of Michiana together.)

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EastAnglianLefty
Jr. Member
***
Posts: 1,563


« Reply #24 on: February 20, 2020, 10:54:20 AM »

As it happens, I just finished drawing a similar map based off a district jumping over the Saginaw River:

https://davesredistricting.org/join/38383e2f-7132-4b5e-89b0-7b8c8bdcd477

The major differences to Oryxslayer's map are that Shiawassee goes in the Lansing district and Jackson mostly in the Kalamazoo district and that Grand Rapids district goes west instead of east.

Clinton wins six districts in this map, but two of them only narrowly. Obama carried ten of them in 2008 (though not the Grand Rapids district, which these days is probably the seventh best Democratic prospect.)

I think this map has some positives to it, but overall I think it shows the problem of a Thumb/Huron Shore district, which is that the two areas aren't really big enough for a congressional district. To get the necessary population, you either need to reach into exurban Macomb, or the Tri-Cities area, or well into the interior of northern Michigan, or some combination thereof. And if you're going to do that, why not just go the whole hog and tack the two areas on to separate districts?
How much population is north of Muskegon-Kent-Clinton-Midland-Bay? Can you get two districts, even coming further south without touching those urban counties.

Assuming that you treat Gratiot and Ionia as the rest of the boundary, just under 1.2m people according to the 2016 estimates. So not that much more than a district and a half.
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