Northern vs Southern Georgia

[Sol]

Voice of Resistance has it down. Essentially Northern Georgia is Republican Upland South in the vein of East TN or the Shenandoah valley, while the highly Republican parts of Southern Georgia (and there are Democratic parts, look at Albany for an example) are super racially polarized white majority lowland south areas. In the rural lowland deep south there's usually a pretty tight correlation between race and voting, and these happen to be some of the whiter counties in the area.

Also I'm not a Georgian, but I think South Georgia is usually considered to be the areas south of the fall line, which would sort of exclude Macon, Columbus, and Augusta.

in theory the Savannah-area district (1) could become competitive down the line, with a little bluing of the city and its surrounding suburbs.

I'm a bit skeptical tbh. Savannah is not really that big and although it's attractive to creative class types to a certain extent it's also highly attractive to upper-class southerners who are not really a demographic for the Democrats even now. Also the rest of the district is moving more Republican anyway. It is ofc possible that a hypothetical evolved Georgia puts Savannah in a district with Augusta though.

[Sol]

Yes, this was John Barrow's old GA-12. They cracked those rural Middle Georgia Black Belt counties between the 10th and 12th, and then lumped in Columbia County and some of Southeast Georgia's Trump 85%+ counties to finish him.

I still don’t get why Obama’s DOJ precleared this.  Republicans basically eliminated a black opportunity district.

Obama's DOJ played 2010 redistricting pretty conservatively, probably to prevent something like Shelby County v. Holder from happening. That was futile, of course.

[Sol]

Yeah. The minute the Senate goes blue, they pass HR1, and then we bring back districts like GA-12 to elect more moderate Dems.

Would a commission necessarily draw Augusta and Savannah together though? I get the impression that Savannah is more of a CoI with the other coastal counties.

[Sol]

you don't need a safe D seat. Savannah and Coast is GA-01. GA-12 is Augusta/central GA Black Belt counties, you can get it to be like Clinton +1.

True, though you might have to use Athens too.

[Sol]

Why exclude Columbia County?

[Sol]

Adding Columbia to the 12th makes it much more difficult to draw a proper COI-based district in East Georgia that is Dem-leaning.

Well if we're trying to draw fair districts shouldn't we prioritize CoI over partisan interest? Columbia and Richmond are incredibly interlinked and putting them together is very necessary to actually reflect CoI imo.

[Sol]

yes, but the key part of that sentence is the "Dem-leaning" bit. Adding Columbia forces the 12th to go into either Savannah, Macon, or Athens up north which are both outside the general East Georgia COIs.

That doesn't track--your proposed GA-12 already dips into Macon.

Edit: Ahh, I understand now. I guess my personal preference is that if you're drawing fair districts to focus on logical lines rather than specific partisan outcomes. That corner of Georgia is a Lean R area and a Lean R district reflects it well.

[Sol]

yes, but the key part of that sentence is the "Dem-leaning" bit. Adding Columbia forces the 12th to go into either Savannah, Macon, or Athens up north which are both outside the general East Georgia COIs.

That doesn't track--your proposed GA-12 already dips into Macon.

Edit: Ahh, I understand now. I guess my personal preference is that if you're drawing fair districts to focus on logical lines rather than specific partisan outcomes. That corner of Georgia is a Lean R area and a Lean R district reflects it well.

Though actually, now that I consider it closely, putting Athens in isn't the worse thing? It's sort of its own CoI, separate from Northeast Georgia, Exurban eastern ATL, and the Augusta area, and putting it with the latter doesn't seem much worse than putting it with either of the former.

[Sol]

Here are a couple options for an East-Central GA district:

Without Athens:


With Athens:


The former district is pretty much safe R, the latter is very slightly Republican--Trump and Kemp both won there very narrowly, and Kemp only won by a few hundred votes.

[Sol]

Yeah, one could obviously draw a fairly Dem-leaning seat in East Georgia, but it'd take a lot of gerrymandering. I think your maps are great, but putting Athens in the 12th dilutes the voting power of some of those Belt counties that are not in the 12th, like Twiggs and Wilkinson. Athens changes the anchor of the district from Augusta/Belt to Augusta/Athens and decreases the voting power of rural black Georgians. That said, though, a fairer map statewide would probably include Athens because if they don't it's fairly easy to draw GA-10 as a tossup seat with some of eastern Atlanta suburbs. In all honestly, Barrow could probably win any seat up to a Trump +8 seat.

That's fair. The tricky thing is is that the black population south of Metro Atlanta isn't really so huge; two Black influence districts in the area is pretty difficult. After all, in the map you made both the 12th or 2nd have a Republican average. And the black population in rural Georgia is declining by a fair amount so those numbers will probably get worse for representation. A GA-12 with Athens in it is probably the best chance those counties have to get represented.

I guess you could make the 12th the Black VRA district, or put the rural black counties in it (Washington, Hancock, Jefferson, etc.) in the 2nd though.

[Sol]

Yeah, it's complicated. If Dems did even 5 points better with the whites in the area, like around 2008-levels, then drawing 2 seats would be extremely easy. The other thing about GA-12 with Athens is it makes GA-10 into an extremely weird-looking seat. It's definitely tough for sure, but I can see good arguments for it.

To be honest I don't think we should take into account current districts if we're trying to draw fair ones. The current 10th is a bit of a hash of exurban Atlanta, Athens, and Augusta, splitting all three. It's not the worse district every but there are cleaner ways to do it.

[Sol]

https://davesredistricting.org/join/23a7fc86-64f0-4f03-a220-405554c1ddea

Here is one such fair map.

I'd raise you this.



There are a few things I'm unhappy with:
-the new 4th (red) is a bit of a hash forced by neighboring districts
-the new 2nd is only barely majority black
-large precinct sized make the splits in Coweta and Henry very ugly, and forced me to split Barrow rather than Walton--if this was an actual proposal precincts in Walton County would have been split.

But you get logical fair districts which respect communities of interest.

Mods, if possible, could you move the redistricting parts to the GA discussion?

[Sol]

Btw how closely related are Warner Robbins and Macon?
It looks like a urban +suburban county at first look but they seem more like seperate cities. Im not sure if they should be seperated. The Macon +Warner robbins CSA can form like 470k people which gives it significant influence over a district which I think should be done if the cities are related.

In an ideal world they would be put together, but it's basically impossible to do so and comply with the VRA since Macon is needed to make the 2nd district majority Black.

[Sol]

Fair enough. NC-11 and NC-07 would still have turned safe red, but in 2016 or 2018, not in 2012 as they were artificially forced to do. Also considering that Butterfield/Thompson regularly overperform the baseline, I'd be inclined to say that yes, their white constituents are cared for just fine.