2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: California

[EastAnglianLefty]

My first and foremost consideration, after avoiding county splits, was avoiding municipal splits. So that explains some of the weirdness in OC.
I decided early on that in OC I had to split one of the CoI and so I chose the coast.

What's the logic for prioritising avoiding county splits? The California redistricting law attaches the same importance to keeping counties, municipalities and CoIs intact, with none explicitly trumping the others.

[EastAnglianLefty]

What's considered an illegal racial pack?

When there is enough Pop in a region to produce a certain number of districts, but you pack one seat to more than capacity to dilute the neighbors. This is best demonstrated in south texas, when the most rather orientation ends up with two uber-hispanic seats along the border and one barely Hispanic seat just to their north. It's very vague in description, but you know it when you see it.

Another good case study is Virginia. The GOP maintained a tentacle that went from Richmond to Norfolk grabbing AAs along the way and making her neighbors whiter. However, there was enough AA voters in the region to elect two candidates of their choosing, but they were being packed into one seat. So the court threw out map.

It's why the GOP in 2010 aimed for just under their states AA% in the south when drawing the number of AA seats on their maps at various levels, since then they could try to dodge this line of attack.

What percentage would count as illegal?

There is no clear percentage. It's a you know it when you see it kind of thing. A African American seat in Mississippi would be fine and legal with 62% of a district being AA, but that would be laughed out in Virginia who is good with something 20 points lower. In CA, the South Valley needs a 71% Hispanic seat (by Pop) to elect a candidate of choice because Hispanics don't vote, but in the Inland Empire you can get away with 58% or so. It's fluid.

I'm not sure you are understanding the fundamentals of the southern Central Valley properly. David Valadao wasn't getting 57% in a 55% Obama district because Hispanics don't vote. How do you think Obama got 55% in CA-21 in the first place?

Trump got less than 40% and Valadao still won in 2016.

Oh some Hispanics are voters, no sh**t, I'm not dumb. Valadao was good with a handful of crossover voters. But compared to other areas? Well....

Taking a look at DRA now, Lets use Corcoran in Kings as an example. All of it's precincts and the one surrounding the city come to 23.4K pop. It's about 69% Hispanic by pop. All told there are about 2.7K votes in the town. You can get that many votes from 10K pops worth of Hispanic precincts in LA. The truth is that Hispanics in the region are statically likely to be not voters.

Now, why are they not voters? Well, there's a whole lot of reasons which I probably don't need to explain to you ranging from citizenship issues to disconnection from government and outreach.

Maybe we are talking past each other here and both understand whats going on just using different language....

Out performing Trump by 17 points is not a "handful of crossover votes" and shouldn't be handwaved.

It's true that many Hispanics do not or can not vote. That is a fact that can not be disputed. However, the number of Hispanics in the district being too low is not the reason that Democrats have failed to win some of these districts. Hillary didn't win by 15 points in CA-21 because Hispanics don't vote.

Before David Valadao was elected to the House in 2012, he served in the State Assembly. Now, if you look at that 2010 election you will notice it's a Republican hold. If you go back to 2008, you will see it won by Republican Danny Gilmore--a Republican gain. Yes, the Republicans actually gained a seat in California in 2008 of all years. You might also notice that Valadao won that seat in 2010 by over 20 points! In a year where California Democrats picked up two seats, one of which was the seat vacated by Juan Arambula, a Fresno Democrat who became an Independent in 2009. All of the aforementioned seats have consistently voted Democratic at the presidential level with pretty hefty margins.

Jim Costa almost lost his Berman-mander seat to Andy Vidak in 2010, a near unfathomable feat. The district was a 60% Obama district. He bailed on his previous district after the new maps were released and headed north to a less Hispanic district, a smart move. Andy Vidak went on to win a State Senate seat and hold it until 2018, with him and Valadao finally losing because Trump really didn't leave a good impression on Hispanics in a rather remarkable way.

Rudy Salas' Assembly district is about a point more Hispanic and about a point more Democratic than the current CA-21, yet he has held it pretty comfortably. A one point partisan difference is not going to turn a Democratic win into a 58% Valadao win. The problem with CA-21 is that it spans from Kern County to Fresno, taking in Kings, and there is no unifying theme besides "Latinos". Not all Latinos have the same interests, however. Much like what we see in Los Angeles, with pro-labor and pro-business Hispanics often facing each other in run-offs, with some fairly interesting results, the same phenomenon is noticable in the south Valley. Pro-labor, to these Hispanics, tends to mean pro-farming, pro-water, etc. A candidate like John Hernandez (Hispanic Chamber of Commerce) is not going to be received as well by these rather conservative Hispanics as an actual farmer, like Valdao or Vidak. Likewise, a pro-labor candidate such as Emilio Huerta is going to struggle heavily with those pro-business Hispanics. Add in a 40% or so block of inflexible white Republicans and it's a recipe for disaster.

The solution, as seen in Salas' Assembly district, is to keep it simple. Don't draw a district trying to make it as Latino as possible. Draw a locally-oriented district that respects COIs. CA-21 was a failure of the current map because it did not allow Valley Hispanics to elect a candidate of their choice. Not by virtue of having too few Hispanics, as the top-level results show, but because connecting groups that have no business being lumped together means a "candidate of choice" is literally impossible. IIRC, TJ Cox had the narrowest victory of any of the CA House pickups in 2018. A 55% Clinton district struggled more to elect a Democrat than some 55% Romney districts in Orange County.

If you were trying to expand this into a more general point which might conceivably be applicable outside the Central Valley, would it be fair to say that it's much more difficult to make a VRA district perform when the relevant community only votes 70-30 in favour of its chosen candidate, rather than 90-10, and that making the district more disparate actually promotes the former?

[EastAnglianLefty]

AA over-representation is much better for Republicans than Hispanic over-representation.  Inglewood, Compton, Richmond, and Oakland are not close to any red leaning areas.  Drawing a map favorable to blacks won't hurt republicans.   But drawing a latino friendly map could.  Of course, the map will be VRA compliant, but idk about a bunch of additional hispanic opportunity seats like some here hoped for. Good to see a central valley republican on there too. 

Ridiculous take. Favoring AAs means that Latino representation will have to be made up for elsewhere.

Ridiculous take. The gingles test doesn't work like that.

Gingles test is barely applicable in California as it is.

Thats the legal standard tho

It's not the only legal standard. California has its own redistricting legislation which sets out the commission's remit, which has a more expansive view of when minority districts need to be drawn.

[EastAnglianLefty]

What's the PVI of that CA-21? I presume it's unlikely it would actually perform, even if theoretically on the numbers it ought to be able to.

[EastAnglianLefty]

What's the PVI of that CA-21? I presume it's unlikely it would actually perform, even if theoretically on the numbers it ought to be able to.

PVI is irrelevant the commission can't consider partisanship. The district is designed to elect a candidate of the Hispanic community's choice shouldn't matter what party that is. Also the current 16th and 21st I believe are held by candidates of Portuguese descent which some on here argue isn't Hispanic.

This is not how the VRA works and not how the commission works.

What that doesn't make any sense.

It makes sense and I've previously explained this to you. The same reason that the VRA districts in Virginia aren't required to be majority AA apply here. You are reducing the amount of Hispanics in the district to achieve your desires political outcome at the expense of the Hispanic community. The Central Valley district needs to be able to elect the Hispanic candidate of choice, not the White candidate of choice backed by a handful of Latinos.

It's 65% Hispanic by total population how is that not a strong Latino district. I'm not reducing anything you just don't like it because it might elect the wrong party. This easily meets the requirement of the VRA and the commission.

Because Hispanics and non-Hispanics in those districts don't turn out at the same rates, so a strong majority of the population doesn't necessarily equate to a majority of those actually turning out to vote.

I think you can reasonably question whether that interpretation of the VRA is actually equitable, in that effectively it says that for a VRA district to be performing, general elections have to be a foregone conclusion because the community it's being drawn for has to be able to control the outcome. But that is the jurisprudential assumption under which the Central Valley has been drawn recently.