2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: California

[Brittain33]

What district is Katie Porter in? She has more money than God.

[Brittain33]

How come you are all keeping the CA-21 gerrymander largely intact?

You have to have a district here that can elect a candidate of choice for the Latino community.

I made sure of that in the IE as well (I gave Torres and Aguilar majority-HCVAP seats as well). This is why I took Mono out of the Rural San Bernardino district and added Redlands to it.

It's not as necessary to do that in places that already elect Latinos. The Central Valley has never sent a Latino to Congress.

Valadao?

He's Portuguese, not Latino.

....

Really? You're going to try to create that distinction?

Uh, Latino usually indicates being from Latin America. Valadao's Family is from the Azores Islands. Very different.

Besides, it doesn’t matter if the district has elected a Latino representative or not. It’s never about the official’s ethnicity. It’s about the community being able to elect the candidate of their choice. Valadao wasn’t the Latino community’s choice; Cox is.

[Brittain33]

Finished my map: https://davesredistricting.org/join/5180a8ee-d24e-48b4-8e6f-83d0f5a041d9


Recommendations welcome, I know that the 10th is ugly, mostly because it was my leftover seat, also the Inland Empire mess is to try to draw more minority access seats.

This is a hideous gerrymander. The 4th, 7th, 9th, 35th, 41st, 46th and 48th are all abominations.

I literally LOL’d at 4 and 41.

[Brittain33]

Wow California could actually end up losing two house seats: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/07/08/study-in-a-first-california-poised-to-lose-house-seats/

Prediction: the biggest losers from this would be Garamendi and Nunes.

The article says the Bay Area is the least likely area to lose a seat because of its growing population. It seems like it would be difficult to have both seats be lost from north of L.A. County without a vacuum pulling a seat north of the line.

[Brittain33]

Is 51 or 52 districts likely now for California?

California is projected to get 52, but could remain at 53. 51 is impossible since the Census is over and California would have needed a huge mass casualty event.

[Brittain33]

Seen basically no discussion about California since the new census release.  This really seems like a state where Democrats could pick up a few seats.  I'm assuming Dem areas grew faster than GOP areas and the GOP already has a lot of marginal seats to defend.

There are a lot of Dem seats in L.A. County which are short of people and adjacent to other underpopulated Dem districts.

It's hard to talk about California because no one knows what the commission will do. I remember 10 years ago how unpredictable it all felt especially because the geography permits so many combinations.

[Brittain33]

the tendency of affluent historically Republican suburbs to go back to their roots, as seen in Orange County last year.

Huh?

Steele and Kim, no?

[Brittain33]

The new draft shows Steel (R-Seal Beach) being drawn into CA-39 with Young Kim (R-Fullerton). Also, it shows Lowenthal and Roybal-Allard being double bunked.

Is there a new new draft or is this the one from last week?

[Brittain33]

BEAVICAL is an abomination.

[Brittain33]

The new CA-3 (where I live) is hideous. What was the logic there?

Are you familiar with why Inyo and Mono often get grouped with places that aren’t close as the crow flies?

[Brittain33]

This is interesting. They kept LGBT communities united in districts wherever possible.

https://www.eqca.org/big-wins-lgbtq-redistricting/

[Brittain33]

This is interesting. They kept LGBT communities united in districts wherever possible.

https://www.eqca.org/big-wins-lgbtq-redistricting/

If LGBT qualifies as a COI, you can create a COI for literally any reason, thereby negating the practical power of the term.

Why do you say that? LGBT exists as a category in discrimination / civil rights law and we have had unique political needs.

[Brittain33]

This is interesting. They kept LGBT communities united in districts wherever possible.

https://www.eqca.org/big-wins-lgbtq-redistricting/

If LGBT qualifies as a COI, you can create a COI for literally any reason, thereby negating the practical power of the term.

Why do you say that? LGBT exists as a category in discrimination / civil rights law and we have had unique political needs.

EQCA clearly just put out a dem gerrymander which was their only goal.

I'm not getting into that argument, but I will note you can draw a Dem-favoring map without regard for LGBT communities, or you can factor them in when drawing the lines, and I give them a lot of credit for doing the latter. Otherwise they could have easily been carved up among multiple Dem districts, reducing their clout with reps.

[Brittain33]

LGBT cois certainly do exist such as palm springs or areas of SF but to draw an entire map for socal and claim it's an LGBT map is not an LGBT organization it's a Democratic group.

I don’t see any claim that the commission let LGBT communities be the driving factor in drawing maps nor any evidence they spent tons of time on keeping these communities together. The fact they did it with no one commenting on it until after the maps were passed shows it wasn’t a big time commitment to do.

[Brittain33]

On the topic of LGBT representation, there are currently 9 LGBT Congresspeople and 2 LGBT Senators. That's about 4% of the Dem caucus currently in each chamber, which is not that low, given that LGBT people are 5-10% of the population. The number of members increases each cycle as well.

It's difficult to make a district materially more LGBT as well, given that a certain percentage of people are going to be LGBT regardless of any other status, so they are more dispersed by default. I guess you could put all the more gay areas together, but changing the map to have districts that are 12% LGBT instead of 8%, especially when this also happens to improve the map significantly for Democrats at the same time, just seems like a gerrymander under the guise of advancing a minority group's representation.

Sure. But I don't think the goal of keeping the communities intact is about electing an LGBTQ representative, although obviously that's great if it happens. It's about that community having a certain weight in a single district so we can influence primaries and get our phone calls returned by the representative once they're elected. And so that representative can advocate for our parochial and individual issues in the legislature. This matters because I don't think it's possible anywhere in the U.S. for an LGBTQ community to be the majority in a Congressional district, and there are very few legislative districts where it's possible since there just aren't 50+% gay communities outside of a few tiny outliers like Wilton Manors and West Hollywood.

[Brittain33]

I'm not on expert on the LGBT community in Long Beach and specific choices there for maps so I'm not going to defend or debate details.

[Brittain33]

StateBoiler, may I ask how old you are? Someone in their 30s or older would understand intuitively why LGBT communities have specific political concerns and fears that, say, rugby players don't. But I realize that for younger people, it may feel like all battles have been won and it's non-political now.