2020 Texas Redistricting thread

[Sol]

I have a fair Texas map which still needs a lot of work--it's done but I think I need to play around with the lines a lot more--but one thing I've noticed is that it's possible to draw a pretty reasonable district just in the city of Austin:



You could probably draw a more compact version which hews less closely to Austin's goofy municipal lines.

[Sol]

I'm pretty sure your 1st map of Austin and mine are identical, lol

[Sol]

Have been playing around with Texas maps again. Did you know it's possible to draw four fajita strips now? Hard to see why it wouldn't be required.



link

[Sol]

you mean with or without a packed court?

Lol with a 6-3 court. The 5th circuit is pretty much mostly R appointees too and I assume all the district courts are too. They really will not believe that those are compact districts for the sake of the Gingles test.

Well in fairness there's no guarantee that the current majority will last through 2030--a map without fajitas might be upheld by the evil 6 in 2021 but maybe not so in 2028, and that's not including court packing.

In any case, unless I say otherwise, I try to draw fair maps that color in the lines of the VRA and fair districting principles--and again those districts are pretty easy to draw. In an ideal world where America isn't racially polarized I'd be opposed to fajitas but rn they're necessary to avoid 1 or 2 95% Latino packs and then safe R seats in south Texas.

[Sol]

But doesn't this get rid of the Hispanic district straddling San Antonio and Austin?  So it's not a net gain in Hispanic opportunities. 

Good point. I can probably remove some Latinos from the red district though, as well as further unpack yellow.

[Sol]

Here you go.

[Sol]

Don't all thr fajita maps break the "communities of interest" criteria by their own design?

That map for example is especially ugly

They break communities of interest but the VRA and minority protection generally is more important that communities of interest.

Plus I suppose there's an argument (not sure if I agree) that in some areas ethnicity is a more important community than strict geography.

[Sol]

Is Texas likelier to have 39 seats or 38?

My estimate a couple days ago suggests that Texas is more likely to have 39 seats, with seat #39 being the 432nd seat apportioned.

430. CA-52
431. IL-17
432. TX-39
433. MT-02
434. FL-29
435. AL-07
____
436. NY-26
437. MN-08
438. OH-16
439. CA-53
440. RI-02
441. ID-02

Do you mean ID-03?

[Sol]

Interestingly, I wonder if this new swing to Republicans in the RGV might mean the end of fajitas in the area, at least if you're drawing fairly. Biden seems to still have won the Latino vote in South Texas but it went to only being like 55-45--that might require higher Latino percentages than the current fajitas for those districts to elect Latino candidates of choice under the VRA.

[Sol]

The important thing is electing the Latino community's candidate of choice and any fair map should follow from that.

[Sol]

Did a blind redistricting of TX with no partisanship data; just tried to make the map VRA compliant and compact. Interestingly enough, Clinton won 20 of the 39 districts. It's clear at this point Ds have the geography advantage when i8t comes to redistricting in TX.

FYI that border district needs to be made VRA compliant.

[Sol]

TX-07 might be an illegal latino pack?

[Sol]

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)

[Sol]

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.

Yeah, I think we have a similar philosophy--I just kept Waller out of the Houston area as it's my understanding that it's a bit more of the fringes of the Houston area compared to Montgomery, Fort Bend, or Brazoria.

[Sol]

One last thing I didn't mention in the first post, the folks drawing the map aren't the state party leaders. It's not a top-down process to draw a redistricting map, but a bottom-up one. The members of the party all give their input, demands, wants, needs, etc, and the map is drawn from there. If the members agree, then there may be some broader goal to the map (such as the NC redistricting plan among Republican members), but otherwise the incumbents and their allies are the ones who draw the map.

I can't speak to TX, but in many states the map is drawn from the top down. The state party and legislative leaders decide what their objectives are and the hire an expert to draw in a way to meet those goals. Rank and file members are shown the draft product and can provide input as to adjustments they wish, but they rarely get a say at the start of the process.

That is kinda what I was getting at. The top leaders can decide broader goals for the map (as it is with the initial draft), but after that initial draft is shown to the members of the legislature, its the incumbents who make all the changes and improvements, to the point that the final product looks nothing like the initial and instead follows their wishes and demands. From what I know, which admittedly may not be too much, only NC's map was not substantially changed by the incumbents, due to the fact that there were not many R incumbents in NC to appease at the time. Texas and Florida do not fit this image.

My experience is that the rank and file make requests, but they don't all get accepted by the leadership. Many requests are ignored if there are larger issues and they deem the member suitably secure.

Interesting, our experiences appear to differ on the subject. Perhaps, if I may posit a theory, it has to do with the power each party holds in a state. A party that holds a supermajority in each chamber will be less likely to care about individual member concerns than a party with a slight majority.

Do you have a particular state/cycle that reflects your experience?

In 2011 the IL Dems had only a modest majority in the House (64-54) and they still drove the process from the top down. Some Dems didn't get what they wanted, but no one failed to get reelected if they ran. Interestingly the Dem leaders showed some of the Pubs the draft and adjustments were made to accommodate them as long as it didn't interfere with the big picture. The legislative map also was amended a week after it was originally presented since that first version toyed with the Pub spokesperson (ie the ranking member) and it was corrected just before passage.

I was involved with the MA and RI redistricting, and in those cases I saw a similar outcome. While the leaders proposed a map, the actual process revolved around the party members all bickering and squabbling amongst each other in order to secure their own demands. When I talked to a Republican colleague of mine, they divulged that the process sounded very similar to how redistricting was done in Florida and Georgia, with North Carolina being one of the few times that there was little obstruction from the members.

It's possible that either of us are having colored experiences based on the states we worked on, but if we're both right, perhaps it has more to do with how machine-like the state party is, or how secure the party views itself.

Well the NC GOP was out for full out revenge in 2010 . Not just a machine but just the harbored anger due to the coinciding of NC's strong D trend in 2008 meaning there wasn't that many party switches unlike other southern states so nothing to moderate the effect that people like Nathan Deal or Ralston had on the GA GOP.

Having spent time around NCGOP legislators, that's absolutely the case--if you bring up fair redistricting to them, the argument they always say is essentially "the Democrats controlled the legislature for 100 years, why shouldn't we have our turn." Which aside from being rather gross is also inaccurate-- a fair NCGA map would probably favor Republicans most of the time, with the occasional Dem takeover opportunity (a lot would also depend on what fair redistricting would do to the whole county requirement, which is pretty strict to the point of sometimes creating weird gerrymandered shapes).

[Sol]

I've been playing around with Texas under the new numbers and I've kind of stumbled on an interesting alternative configuration in South Texas. (Ignore the rest of the map, just playing around.)





Do y'all think this would pass VRA muster on 2020 data? TX-15 at least would have probably flipped, and possibly one of the other fajitas as well--but on the other hand TX-23 is much more likely to select the Latino candidate of choice so it might be a wash?

[Sol]

That Amarillo to Denton district is just straight up funny: "we can't trust the country music hipsters to be with the suburbanites"

[Sol]

I made a fair map of Texas.

link





It's possible to up the HVAP of TX-12 if you're willing to get a little ugly. Ironically, doing this benefits Republicans so they might actually push for a map which makes TX-12 majority Latino by total population.



Sorry about Kaufman with Southern Dallas, it's what makes everything else work.

[Sol]

2nd I would rotate your 31 and 32 within Houston to be an East-West divide rather than North-South. 31 could become the more urban seat and 32 suburban. It seems like your goal was to make 32 Hispanic, but IMO I think 30 should just be a black seat similar to the current 9th and 34th becomes a Northern Houston Hispanic seat rather than making your 30th highly competitive racially.

Like this?

[Sol]

Ye pretty much.

Ah gotcha. I'm not sure if I like this better than the other one or not--it's a bit cleaner looking but I think I prefer Alief with Fort Bend County suburbs, and creating two coalition districts with a large white population in 31 and 32 might could run the risk of white candidates winning polarized primaries thanks to differential turnout, especially in TX-32.

I may also be biased though since the first map looks more like the current map.

Would be interested in what other folks think!

[Sol]

Firstly, RGV and especially that 6th are quite extreme in trying to "stretch out" Hispanic influence and combine communities that don't have much in common. I'm not crazy when it comes to the fajitas to begin with, but at the very least I think they shouyld be more contained.

Does this look better?

[Sol]

https://davesredistricting.org/join/ad6490f1-744e-47f0-8528-53676e11c080

Here's my first draft of a VRA complient and fair Texas (2020 Pres shown above).

One thing that makes Texas tricky is that there are a lot of places where you can reach 30 or 40% seats pretty easily but actually getting over 50% without doing something absurd becomes tricky. In many cases though a 40% black district can be functional.

Another challenge in particuar with Dallas and Houston metros is that a lot of these VRA seats sort of compete with each other and are difficult to draw all at once just due to how mixed together different racial groups are.

I also tried to make Asian opportunity seats in both Dallas and Houston (TX-03 and TX-07 respectively). However in this case TX-07 came at a bit of the expense of TX-09 which is the black seat in South Houston.

Also I still wanna figure out what to do with RGV; I don't like fajitas but I'm also not a fan of this config. I wanna give TX-28 more border and TX-34 more inland while not making 34 a fajita.

I would say so far I'm most happy with I-35 corridor Austin-San Antonio districts. It creates 2 VRA Hispanic seats and one that should be functional, and generally abides to city lines and COIs quite well. Still want to fix Houston and RGV in particular; I think Dallas is close to an ideal config but needs some changes, and I think the ways rurals are chopped up could be better.

Please give feedback/suggestions.

There's actually a pretty easy group of three districts that you can nest into the Austin area-- Williamson, Travis, Hays, Bastrop, Caldwell, and Lee are a perfect size for three seats.

Personally I like to do things like this: