States region map

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I decided to toy with the idea of drawing regions within states with equality of area being the main goal, kind of like French departments or something like that. I prioritized straight lines and compactness above everything else. I tended to pair major urban counties with simply every county that bordered them and marked that as a region. I decided to make one-county regions verboten.
Thoughts on the results?

[100% pro-life no matter what]

In Tennessee, Maury County is more connected to Nashville than the Northern/Western counties.  Probably Marshall County too these days.

[Biden his time]

Very reasonable regions in Florida

Only changes I'd make are splitting off St. Lucie, Indian River, Martin from the Heartland and maybe something with the panhandle, but other than that it looks really sound.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

In Tennessee, Maury County is more connected to Nashville than the Northern/Western counties.  Probably Marshall County too these days.

The thing is that these regions don't necessarily hew exactly to metro boundaries and compactness is also considered. So I just took Nashville and everything bordering it and called it a day. I also wanted to have some significant population in every region if possible.
It's to be expected that metros will spill over if they grow big enough, and broadly different areas might be paired if necessary to reach roughly equal population and/or area. I also figured that simply going with the "borders big urban county" test was good for general consistency. I envision these would have been more permanent and not necessarily tinkered by sprawl, more like French administrative subdivisions than MSAs.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Very reasonable regions in Florida

Only changes I'd make are splitting off St. Lucie, Indian River, Martin from the Heartland and maybe something with the panhandle, but other than that it looks really sound.

Thoughts on this:
Hendry-Glades-Highlands-Desoto-Hardee-Polk
Hillsborough-Pinellas-Pasco
St. Lucie-Indian River-Martin-Palm Beach-Okechobee
Broward-Miami Dade-Monroe

Everything else remains unchanged.
I feel like I want Polk to be in with Highland and other inland counties because it's not necessarily too different and without it the region is only 213,403 in population and maybe a bit small in area otherwise.

[America Needs a 13-6 Progressive SCOTUS]

This map is an artistic failure.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

This map is an artistic failure.

How so?

[Sol]

Good work!

I'd probably switch Nash and Warren in NC; the county line between Nash and Edgecombe cracks Rocky Mount down the middle and Nash and Edgecombe should be together as much as possible to keep the Rocky Mount metro together.

[Torie]

Why are the north NYC suburbs (Westchester, Putnam, Rockland, Orange and Dutchess) combined with upstate rurals?

[Born to Slay. Forced to Work.]

Darlington should be with Florence and also Marlboro/Chesterfield

[Kamala's side hoe]

It’s a bit weird to see Polk and Benton counties lumped in with the northern OR coast. I would’ve put them (and maybe Yamhill) in with the rest of the Willamette Valley.

[Goldwater]

I like how Nevada has 3 regions with approximately 0 people in them.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Good work!

I'd probably switch Nash and Warren in NC; the county line between Nash and Edgecombe cracks Rocky Mount down the middle and Nash and Edgecombe should be together as much as possible to keep the Rocky Mount metro together.

I have looked into this suggestion and it makes sense. It makes things more compact, which is quite important. And it's not like Nash directly borders Wake in a straightforward way.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Why are the north NYC suburbs (Westchester, Putnam, Rockland, Orange and Dutchess) combined with upstate rurals?

I would say I am queasy about having them form a region together with LI, and by themselves they are too small to justify forming a region by themselves, and this is atop the difference between the regional areas not being a concern to me to most of an extent.
EDIT: on second thought I could hove off Westchester Orange Rockland Putnam Duchess into its own region.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Darlington should be with Florence and also Marlboro/Chesterfield

Hard to do while keeping things roughly equal in area and compact, given the borders of the counties we're talking about here.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

It’s a bit weird to see Polk and Benton counties lumped in with the northern OR coast. I would’ve put them (and maybe Yamhill) in with the rest of the Willamette Valley.

It's not really possible to draw a singular Wilamette Valley region here, given that would be oversized. Oregon is owed a number of regions that its large area allots it too. Once the core Portland region is drawn, you end up with Clatsop and a wider valley to divide in two. I felt the river was the most natural divider, and this is also the most compact way to do it and also ensures that both regions have adequate area.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I like how Nevada has 3 regions with approximately 0 people in them.

Here's the 2020 population of each region, per DRA, referred to by the largest county by population:
Clark 2,271,016 73.14%
Nye 57,000 0.18%
Elko 64,091 0.21%
Churchill 54,554 0.18%
Washoe 657,953 21.19%
(decided to shift Lander into the Churchill one to even out the area and population a bit and to make the lines straighter).
https://davesredistricting.org/join/b1878437-f416-48c9-9dd8-ad86b8a0ebd7
Trump won all three of these regions by 50 points, and kept the margin in the Clark one to single digits. He won the Washoe one by mid-single digits.
Also, interestingly, here is the share of the population within these regions that are held within its largest county.
Clark 99.78%
Elko 84.38%
Nye 91.23%
Churchill 47.27%
Washoe 74.01%
(calculated by rounding to nearest whole thousand)

[Tekken_Guy]

I decided to toy with the idea of drawing regions within states with equality of area being the main goal, kind of like French departments or something like that. I prioritized straight lines and compactness above everything else. I tended to pair major urban counties with simply every county that bordered them and marked that as a region. I decided to make one-county regions verboten.
Thoughts on the results?

-Maricopa should be in the yellow area with Pinal
-Douglas County, CO should be with the rest of the Denver area, not Colorado Springs.
-Snohomish County should be with King and Pierce.
-The NKY counties shouldn’t be in the same area as Lexington.
-Hernando and Citrus should be with Pasco.
-Henry, Bartow, and Paulding shouldn’t be separate from the rest of Atlanta.
-Greenville shouldn’t be separate from Spartanburg, and Lexington shouldn’t be separate from Richland
-Kendall and DeKalb should be with the rest of Chicago

[sting in the rafters]

Ayyyyye let's goooooooo! I'm sick and tired of sharing a tax base with all the pillhead Trumpies from Pennsyltucky and the white hoods in lower Susquehanna. This allows for a fair and equitable society to vote for gorgeous brick rowhouse blocks to replace all the wicked baseball mom McMansions decimating Penn's Woods. Get em outta here!

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

I decided to toy with the idea of drawing regions within states with equality of area being the main goal, kind of like French departments or something like that. I prioritized straight lines and compactness above everything else. I tended to pair major urban counties with simply every county that bordered them and marked that as a region. I decided to make one-county regions verboten.
Thoughts on the results?

-Maricopa should be in the yellow area with Pinal
-Douglas County, CO should be with the rest of the Denver area, not Colorado Springs.
-Snohomish County should be with King and Pierce.
-The NKY counties shouldn’t be in the same area as Lexington.
-Hernando and Citrus should be with Pasco.
-Henry, Bartow, and Paulding shouldn’t be separate from the rest of Atlanta.
-Greenville shouldn’t be separate from Spartanburg, and Lexington shouldn’t be separate from Richland
-Kendall and DeKalb should be with the rest of Chicago

Most of these are impractical because they aren't supposed to be full metros and in the vein of French departments (which have remained vastly similar since the French Revolution), I don't think sprawling metros are a reason to tinker with them.
I can put forth an alternative AZ arrangement. I'll expound more on this possibility in a later post.

Snohomish with King+Pierce will leave an underpopulated, insufficiently compact, and undersized region in its place.

The NKY counties being severed from Lexington has the problem of creating two regions undersized (unless when noted, undersized refers to area here) while there are two large rural ones that are right nearby in the same state.

Pasco being with its neighbors to the north leaves the Hillsborough region undersized. It makes some very mild sense from a compactness POV, but I'm concerned about knock-off impacts. The region could be split in two, but that would create some new problems.

As for the Henry suggestion (referring to it as that because IIRC it has the largest population of all those three counties), it falls outside of the region with the core of the Atlanta metro for the simple reason that it's not bordering Fulton. Sprawl is not a reason for changing regional boundaries. These are designed to make sense in 1960 as well as 2020.

South Carolina's regions are simply made from taking each of the three natural regions (Lowland, Piedmont, and Upland) and splitting those in two. It's also worth noting that Greenville and Spartanburg being split in this way allow for two neat Upland regions not massively different in population, area, and compactness. Maybe it'd be easier if I drew a Columbia-centric region, but that would break up the dynamic of giving each part in the state two regions (and they are not significantly different in area either).

Kendall and DeKalb being placed in the Chicago region would be marginal positive from a equality of area perspective, but kind of lacks a rational basis when compared with how I treated most major metropolitan counties in a comparable context (Indianaopolis, Milwaukee, Columbus, Des Moines, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, etc.)

[bagelman]

Any other DRA maps of these?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Any other DRA maps of these?

Feel free to put forth requests.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

States ranked by land area/2010 land area divided by the number of regions then rounded to nearest whole number/the number of regions. This will be used to further refine the equal-area element of this. Some suggestions I have previously refused or mulled may be enacted due to their state's placing here.

Alaska 142,660 4
Texas 14,513 18
California 12,982 12
Montana 18,193 8
New Mexico 17,328 7
Arizona 18,932 6
Nevada 18,297 6
Colorado 11,516 9
Wyoming 19,419 5
Oregon 11,999 8
Idaho 11,806 7
Utah 16,434 5
Kansas 11,680 7
Minnesota 9,953 8
Nebraska 10,975 7
South Dakota 10,830 7
North Dakota 11,500 6
Missouri 7,638 9
Oklahoma 9,799 7
Washington 8,307 8
Georgia 7,189 8
Michigan 8,077 7
Iowa 7,980 7
Illinois 7,931 7
Wisconsin 7,737 7
Florida 5,958 9
Arkansas 7,434 7
Alabama 7,235 7
North Carolina 6,945 7
New York 6,732 7
Mississippi 7,821 6
Pennsylvania 7,457 6
Louisiana 6,172 7
Tennessee 5,891 7
Ohio 5,837 7
Virginia 6,582 6
Kentucky 6,581 6
Indiana 5,118 7
Maine 10,281 4
South Carolina 5,010 6
West Virginia 6,010 4
Maryland 4,854 2
Vermont 4,608 2
New Hampshire 4,476 2
Massachusetts 3,900 2
New Jersey 2,451 3
Hawaii 3,211 2
Connecticut 2,421 2
Delaware 1,949 1
Rhode Island 1,034 1

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

https://davesredistricting.org/join/d4523334-a189-4f01-95eb-68f52ecb3d1e
Adding two regions in Montana, both of them in the East.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/c22222e2-962a-47d4-8c9e-a786b4b5f3c2
Adding two regions in Arizona. Maricopa is now a region to itself, and so is Coconino. This has ended the no-one-county-region rule.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/92fda36b-af88-4f16-b59f-c06b43706d8b
Adding two regions in Nevada. The Washoe region remains unchanged. Removing the no-one-county-region rule means that Clark can form a region to itself, which is good from a straight-lines perspective. I now have some very tiny regions here, but I've more closely hewed to equal-area principles by doing this. Rural NV really is that empty.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

https://davesredistricting.org/join/9cea2141-c1cd-4b53-83fa-3fb1b976e4f3
Added a region in New Mexico, acting with equal-area and compactness in mind.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/b841de5c-4e8a-4f09-bed0-2ce67a927390
Added two new regions in Wyoming. An average of 19,000 or so square miles of land area per region is too much.

https://davesredistricting.org/join/d65b54c0-c0a3-4af6-9649-2da15410679e
Added two new regions in Utah.