2020 Texas Redistricting thread

[beesley]

https://davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap::ce5db554-f503-450d-8419-cc3f7d66b22b

Could I ask what people think of this 2022 scenario? I'm not sure that it's legally compliant. It will never happen, but I think this is a fair map according to my definition of fair. The partisan figures are 2016 President, so 32 should now be Dem and 27 probably GOP now. Van Duyne, Nehls and Cuellar would probably be worst hit by this map.

[beesley]

Is that two Hispanic districts in Houston - 29 and the blue one with two lobes on top of 18?

Yeah - 29 is maj Hispanic, while 37 (the other one) is only plurality Hispanic CVAP. Interestingly it's a McCain-Obama-Clinton-Biden district.

[beesley]

I drew up a map of Texas, trying to add more competitive districts.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/45b94b38-2be3-40c7-b42b-9c1fe1ba0106

I counted 8 competitive districts, was that right?

Thoughts on the choices this map made and the overall impact this had on the map overall?
https://davesredistricting.org/join/886aa4fd-4622-4a21-a446-14f9354f8f04

I don't know what your choices were that led to this but I feel there are a lot of districts that just hoover up the remaining space with no real COIs or anything. Having said that I think your map is similar to mine in a lot of ways.

[beesley]

Here's a pic from the Houston area from a fair map I've been playing with:



link (ignore the rest of the map--it's not finished yet and I want to draw several different versions with different VRA districts)

The Green District is 55% Latino on CVAP and nearly 70% on total VAP, the periwinkle is 41% Latino on CVAP (plurality) and majority on total pop.

Purple is a Black influence district (strong majority on CVAP, plurality on total numbers) and red is an extremely diverse (maybe the most in the country?) coalition seat which is plurality Black.

Yellow is minority-majority and narrowly Trump 16, while orange is a Clinton 2016 district by a fair amount.

Everything else is safe R (though cyan is technically majority minority)

Quite similar to mine, if you scroll up. The main difference is that all of maj-min Fort Bend + Waller is in the one district in mine.

[beesley]

I don't know what your choices were that led to this but I feel there are a lot of districts that just hoover up the remaining space with no real COIs or anything. Having said that I think your map is similar to mine in a lot of ways.

Any districts that specifically come to mind here?

District 19 from the coast, through Bryan to past Waco. I know I had a district that went from the coast to near Austin, and another from the coast to Hays county, but it seems a bit far. I also didn't like how parts of Bexar county were attached to districts 35 and 38, which left other areas being attached to 31 and 32. It depends what your upper limit for Hispanic CVAP is, I suppose. If you had kept Travis to two districts it would've been more logical in my view, then 34 could've hoovered up North Bexar and 35 eaten into 16. The final one I'm not as keen on is District 8. If you have to go northwards I would've put the rest of Tarrant into a district with parts of Denton and the remaining parts of Denton with the OK border, or mixed it all up with District 12 and had another Tarrant only district.

I hope I haven't been too critical! I'm sure you could find objections to my map.

After contorting the lines, and then contorting them some more, I was able to squeeze out a clearly performing Hispanic CD entirely within Dallas County (36.5% HCAVP, with a 30% Trump 2016 vote in TX-37), and a second clearly performing Hispanic CD in Houston (40.7% HCVAP with a 25% Trump 2016 vote in TX-20). A bonus point is that revised the boundaries between TX-21 and TX-18 to follow more naturally municipal and geographic boundaries (e.g., a river), so that it would not be deemed an illegal Hispanic pack not created to create a performing minority CD elsewhere. That got the HCVAP percentage in TX-21 down to 50.5% HCVAP from about 61%.

Under my interpretation of the current iteration of the VRA, if one does not stay close to Goldilocks (only gerrymander to help minorities and not to waste their votes for partisan reasons), you ran a substantial risk of going down in legal flames. Thus, I think the borders between black and Hispanic CD’s can be contorted within a relative compact area to create another performing CD for one or both groups, but if you have an excess minority population next to a white CD, you had better have lines between them that hew to non- partisan criteria, or revise them to so hew at least to the point that the pack is removed.   That is my grand unified theory of it all.

Yes I was incentivized to tackle this matter because another poster above got close to drawing a second performing Hispanic CD in Houston which was a wake up call. To the extent other data sets are used to draw minority CD's under the VRA, to the extent that allows smoothing out the lines, that should be. As it is, the contortions are necessary given the current data set used by the DRA redistricting tool.

Was that me you're referring to? If it was, your map is probably better for CVAP numbers, just depends whether you can better configure 24. I think yours is more likely to be compliant than mine anyway.

[beesley]

They is still in some quarters a misunderstanding of the VRA in some quarters that assumes that because one can draw an extremely gerrymandered 50% CVAP CD, that a performing minority CD must be drawn. I disagree. One prong to mandate that is such a CD must be reasonably compact, and that does not include wandering around chopping into disparate and dispersed city to pick up the needed minority voters. But I have said all I am going to say on that. Some seem to disagree, which is OK. We shall see.

Hi Torie - I know you promised not to say anymore, but could I ask you how what you said in the quote would relate to District 38 on this map? It sounds exactly like what you described. If you also had any comments on the VRA and my configuration in Bexar County I'd appreciate those.

https://davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap::ce5db554-f503-450d-8419-cc3f7d66b22b

[beesley]

You need to go to your map on the DRA, and assuming it is already "published," you need to hit  the "share map" button in the top column, and then hit the copy button and paste it here. The link will have the word "join" in it. That said, even assuming your TX-38 is majority HCVAP, and further assuming a majority of the Hispanics vote Dem there (not clear that would be the case, but maybe), there are too many Hispanic Pubs there, and their turnout is way to low, to make the CD deemed performing Hispanic, so the VRA is not in play at all. No matter how you draw the lines, the CD will vote Pub. But if I could access the map, I could answer your question more definitively, to the extent anything about the VRA is definitive these days, absent something really egregious.

Understood - I've just been able to do as you asked, but it seems as if on the 2019 figures I've discovered they just uploaded the difference in population means that the district and the knock-on has become plurality white and is likely to stay that way. I will have a play around to see if it's possible rebalance the figures, but in the meantime your answer has already been of value so thank you very much for that. If I still have that same question I will respond to you again with a new link. Sorry for the difficulty.

[beesley]

http://

Do you know who's favoured in the Austin Thunderdome for the new ultra blue district ?

I could see a new socialist "squad" member coming from that district, knowing Austin. They seem to be more friendly to progressives.

He's not really a natural 'squad' member, but I presume Mike Siegel is likely to run, given it takes the North Austin parts of the current TX-10.