Blumenauer Congressional Plan

[Sol]

Six district Utah is really annoying to draw, something I learned awhile ago when I drew another map of it with that size for some reason I can't even remember. The problem is that the area north of Salt Lake City has enough population at this size for about 1 1/2 districts. That means one district draws pretty well but then you have a chunk that isn't big enough for its own seat, but the easiest place to connect it to is SLC proper, which isn't a good fit at all from a CoI perspective because despite proximity this area is kind of considered its own thing, Davis County is actually part of its own metro area based around it and Weber County instead of in the SLC metro. What's weird is this is called the Ogden-Clearfield Metro, even though Clearfield isn't one of the largest cities and there's the much larger Layton just south of it. It also has only a few roads into Salt Lake City and the parts of SLC these run through look pretty remote and undeveloped (it is close to the airport but airports were historically built on the outskirts of cities for obvious reasons so that's not surprising at all, the development patterns of SLC look like much of the northern part was only developed post-WWII even if it's in the city proper.) You could theoretically go east and draw a sort of district that wraps around the SLC metro core to the south of it, but this would only be continuous if you swam across the lake to the eastern end. So to avoid that I just went west...and ended up with a weird district combining rural western Utah with most of Davis County.





1, 2, 5 and 6 are obviously all Safe R. 3 is a Biden+34 seat that's Safe D. And 4...it's a kind of interesting seat combining more Democratic SLC suburbs with the more conservative ones on the south end of the county. It ended up voting about Trump+2 with a large third party vote and would probably be a good fit for Ben McAdams or another sort of conservatish Mormon Democrat. PlanScore even gives it a 48% chance of voting D.

So basically a 4R-1D-1S map. Also shows how if Utah gained even just a 5th district it'd be impossible to continue with an all R delegation, the Republicans would have to cede a D sink around Salt Lake City.

Yeah ultimately I don't think you can really justify putting Davis County with rural Eastern UT. There's a little flexibility around there but ultimately it's hard to get around the fact that Layton and Kanab are extremely far apart. SLC and Magna plus Davis County is just about the right size for a district, even if it's crummy CoI.

[Sol]

It's really not hard to draw three Black-influence districts:



It keeps heavily Arab areas in Dearborn and Dearborn Heights in one district, and unifies them with Hamtramck.

Sometimes it feels like Atlas redistricters just don't want to draw minority-influence seats.

[Sol]

It's really not hard to draw three Black-influence districts:



It keeps heavily Arab areas in Dearborn and Dearborn Heights in one district, and unifies them with Hamtramck.

Sometimes it feels like Atlas redistricters just don't want to draw minority-influence seats.

There's currently zero Black representatives from Detroit. It's not a hypothetical where a 40ish Black VAP could be risky, both current seats have failed to elect Black representatives. As the population decline continues in Detroit, it's safer to make two seats with higher Black CVAP.

It's not good to conflate the race of the representatives with whether or not they are the candidates of choice of the Black community.

2 and 3 are majority Black on CVAP; 1 is plurality white but should easily elect the preferred candidates since a large chunk of those whites are Republicans. It's of course not impossible for the Black candidate of choice to lose a primary, but that's very difficult to guarantee and the non-preferred candidate winning would require substantial support from Black voters in most cases (and you can cook up similar scenarios for higher CVAP numbers too).

[Sol]

Next, as we saw in the 2018 primary that produced Tlaib, putting the the Dearborns and African American areas together if you have the option of separating them should be avoided. One will come out on top and defeat the candidate(s) of choice of the other. Of course the commission didn't have the option to not pair the two, since they were nesting seats in Wayne, so both got paired in the district already with an Arab congresswoman who by now had taken steps for African American outreach. In a similar vein to many Los Angeles districts on various maps, you shouldn't zero-sum discriminate against one group if you have the option not to.

I'm not sure how the current outcome is zero-sum discrimination--Tlaib is now the candidate of choice for both communities and does a good job representing both groups.

Frankly, I don't think trying to maximize the Arab percentage in a district, even at this size, is worth it; Arab communities in Detroit are pretty diverse in both religion and background and highly diffuse. Even in your map, it's only 25-30%; certainly not worth throwing out fair redistricting principles for.

I'm also curious what you're considering as "adjacent groups;" Hamtramck has a lot of Yemenis but also a lot of Bangladeshis who are of course not Arab.

[Sol]

I randomly selected a state and got hawaii which also works very well with these numbers. It allows for the not-oahua islands to have a seat (blue) unto their own and a seat for ubran Oahu(green) and one for rural Oahu(purple).

The rural Oahu is interesting as it has seen some dramtic rightward trends in the last decade and could potentially have been a surprise pick up for republicans in 2022 with the right candidate, still it would have been a very longshot.




The new third would have been Hanabusa's seat. Patrick Branco might have it now.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong but: aren't the non-Oahu islands 47K+ underpopulated and the Hawaii law that okay's greater deviations for island-based nesting only applies to the legislature?

You are right but I would imagine there would be a court case over the issue as without it applying to congressional district you would have to add a small part of Oahu to the district to equal it out - a proposition the outer islands and the residents of Oahu would probably be against. Especially if you have the right AG it would get approved under the courts as any alternative is worse. It also isn't as if this is trying to gerrymander seats, but just trying to make the best out of an awkward situation



This is probably what would happen is this hypothetical court battle is lost which imo is much worse from a COI and partisanship view. You *could* do as is currently done where most of the northern half is in the outerisland seat, but then the suburban/rural Oahu seat has to take in parts of Urban Honolulu and I do not think that should be done.

The deviation is around 9.5% if my math is right, which is much much larger than anything in Congress and would be pushing the limits of legality for state legislatures, which have looser limits. The 1st district would absolutely be required to take a bite out of Oahu unfortunately, and I doubt legislators would even consider doing otherwise since it's so out of bounds under OPOV.