Talk Elections

As I kind of suspected, but hadn't "proved" because I have not really studied the CA map, the Dems just  ran circles (http://www.propublica.org/article/how-democrats-fooled-californias-redistricting-commission) around the Pubs in CA, with shill groups testifying for this and that, the Pubs not understanding the partisan implications of uniting this but not that, and the Pubs having no organized campaign to get their own self serving shills into the fray. It is a real, real, pity that I was not on that commission. Heck, just checking out the organizations on the internet, and at the CA Secretary of State website, I could have unmasked some of them as Dem fronts. And I would have known immediately what the partisan implications were of all of this disingenuous chatter. Sad. :(

Well, all is fair in love and war, and the Pubs just dropped the ball. But then CA Pubs have been dysfunctional since rocks cooled in CA. So 2 to 3 seats lost due to CA Pub incompetence, and Dem Machiavellian, but clever - and effective - tactics. Some of it has little echos of AZ, where I suspect similar shills paraded before the Commission, but there of course, the Commission was stacked, and in the end I kind of suspect, just had professional Dem operatives essentially draw the map for them, and then worked on how best to justify it. That was more a matter of just reverse engineering. But the Pubs not calling the Dems out on the phony partisan break even point at least was particularly pathetic in AZ.

From what I can tell the GOP was particularly weak at recognizing underlying bias in some neutral mathematical models. In AZ the GOP assumed that the blame was solely on the partisan chair, but even a neutral chair would have had a hard time overcoming the state competitiveness directive given the bias in the chosen elections.

In CA my sense was that the lack of understanding by the GOP of the impact of socioeconomic grouping as a preferred community of interest. The underlying math here works against the GOP as much as a maximally square grid with minimum area districts works against the Dems.

Who chose the elections to use in AZ, and why were their not experts to opine on what they thought the break even points were?  Yes, the "class warfare" concept united Hancock Park with Palos Verdes in the LA area, taking in the heavy Dem Wilshire corridor along the way, put the beach cities CD out of reach for example. I am not sure how appending Westminster to Long Beach was justified yet.  Oddly, in the end, that CD was put just out of reach of the GOP too.  Maybe that was just a coincidence. :P

The examples they cited add up to one distict solidified for the Dems (McNerney), one kept from being made less safe (Sanchez), and one where the dispute was intra-party (Chu losing a Latino city.) Some of the developments south of San Joaquin were pretty unfriendly for Dems, giving then more uncertainty around Fresno, Bakersfield, and San Bernardino. It looks like the general factors muon identified in drawing the maps where what led to the Pubbie massacre there...

...although I would love to know if there's a dirty story associated with Simi Valley being sent to a solid R district.

The map is hardly a lot different that it would have been without any of this input, which was rather minor in the broad scope of things.

Republicans got to draw Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina into a total mess, so them losing seats in California under a fair map is not really that big of a deal.

aren't you a lawyer? You could have testified at the hearings.

I don't think being a lawyer here gives me some special access in this venue - surprising I know, since typically, given that we essentially write the laws, we are a very cosseted guild indeed. :P

Yes, I could have made this my all consuming hobby, but I guess I thought the pros were competent, and anyway I am too busy being an aging playboy, and running my "real estate empire," and annoying the youngs around here with my little old man perspective on life, and whatnot. Yes, I do feel sort of bad I did not get more involved. I guess I was demoralized when I was chopped off the applicants considered with the first cut. They thought they found about 500 more folks more qualified than I, I guess, who survived the first chop. I was just so hurt!  :(

In Arizona, the game was over the minute the Democratic mapping firm was picked. Inevitably, there were in a position to equate "strongly leans Democratic" with "competitive." That is why Mathis went to great lengths to intimidate/bribe the Republican commissioners into going along with a unanimous vote to select the Democratic firm. She wanted the inevitable Democratic gerrymander to have a veneer of "bipartisanship."

It doesn't really matter too much. Dems are still vulnerable to losing seats in a wave election under the new lines.

There's no evidence that there will ever be such an election.

Real unemployment above 15%, a fifteen trillion dollar deficit, a war going on longer than any in American history, Solyndra, and the list continues.

Sure thing. Democrats are going to continue to win elections in California, and Californians are going to continue to put up with all the craziness the loons who dominate the party put into law. ::) The redistricting gives Republicans excellent shots of making net gains in the Congressional delegation and State Assembly.

It's been that way since the election of 1996. Last year, in the midst of a huge Republican wave, the California Republicans made no gains whatsoever. You tell me when it's coming.

This is the reason no wave hit last year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California%27s_congressional_districts#2002:_Bipartisan_gerrymandering

Yeah, this is why the GOP got screwed. Except for that Long Beach to Garden Grove district, everything else is justifiable. Especially Mcnerney's district. I would have switched out Lodi for Tracy though, but overall it's a Bay Area exurban district. Huge amounts of commuters come into the Bay Area from San Joaquin county. As someone who has driven on I-580 in the tri valley a good bit, I know this for a fact. Same with people in eastern Contra Costa who also have long, ridiculous commutes. A gas tax or an increase in vehicle registration fees would not be popular in these parts.

If we look at the Santa Clarita to Simi Valley district, one has to ask where the extra people would come from if not from Simi Valley. I think dipping into the San Fernando valley would have caused more of an outrage. If we look at the San Gabriel Valley, obviously it's not perfect, but I fail to see the vast left wing conspiracy. South El monte got put in a latino district based primarily in the gateway cities. Oh well. The article states it was put in a less Latino district and a more affluent district. If it got put in the SGV latino district, it would have been the same case. I do wonder why Rowland Heights, Walnut and Diamond Bar weren't added to the Asian district, as opposed to Glendora, Claremont and Upland. The partisan lean wouldn't have changed much mind you, but it would have made more sense. The maps aren't perfect, but I fail to see the controversy....except for the Long Beach to Garden Grove district. Even there you could argue it was just the odd man out once all the Hispanic districts were drawn. It would have been nice if a Republican district could have been drawn in OC with a high Asian influence. Just add Cerritos, Buena Park and Fullerton to the Vietnamese areas and you almost have a district.


I agree with this. Of course the Republicans have to reform themselves. I just heard some California Republican legislator lambast Latinos. These people need to stop living in the 80's.

And just to follow up on my response to redcommander, I think CA republicans are comfortable with the current situation where they can do whatever they want with more than 33% of the chamber. That is why they are so up in arms over this map, since their guaranteed seats are vanishing. They don't care there are going to be more Dems who can be targeted since they are not interested in actually winning an election and controlling the chamber. They still want to hold views more appropriate for Oklahoma instead of actually competing in California.

I wouldn't say the party is as right as it is in Oklahoma, but I would say they aren't doing a good job at trying to expand themselves. The first thing they need to do is rebuild their bench in the next election. Start with shoring up any incumbents that are vulnerable from redistricting, and target the most marginal seats that they pick up from Democrats. That could possibly put them up to around 30-32 in the State Assembly. A poor performance still, but an improvement over the 28 they hold now. In the short term, the party just doesn't have a wide enough pool of potential candidates or strong enough registration numbers and GOTV support to make headway into LA and most of Northern California. If the party starts working towards improving upon that, perhaps by the end of the decade it will be a lot stronger. Republicans don't necessarily need to moderate their positions, but they do need to soften the rhetoric and fear mongering, and go out of their comfort zone to at least try and win over voters. It's necessary now for them to stop cowering in the corner with their safe gerrymandered districts disappearing, and learn how to compete again in the state.

Sorry red but that's a lot of coulda shoulda woulda. The base refuses to allow Republicans to even pretend to moderate themselves. The open primaries may help...or it may just be the shove that throws your party off the cliff for good. I don't expect the maps to help Democrats as much as some of my fellow Democrats do, though I underestimate our strength in California if that CA-36 election was any indicator. You might see what's left of the bench eliminated if Pubbies can't have an epiphany or two real, real soon.

I would accept that argument if the Democrats hadn't gotten over 54% of the vote for State Assembly last November. It's not about the boundaries; California voters just have no desire to vote Republican.

Muon,

Of the legal criteria for redistricting, "competiveness" is the least important.

1. Districts shall comply with the United States Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act. 2. Both legislative and congressional districts shall be equal in population, to the extent practicable. This establishes a new strict population equality standard for legislative districts. 3. Districts shall be geographically compact and contiguous, as much as practical. 4. District boundaries shall respect "communities of interest," as much as practical. 5. District lines shall follow visible geographic features, and city, town and county boundaries and undivided "census tracts" as much as practical. 6. Political party registration, voting history data and residences of incumbents and other candidates may not be used to create district maps. 7. "Competitive districts" are favored if competitive districts do not significantly harm the other goals listed.

What the commission did on the congressional districts is violate rules 3 (compactness) 4 (communities of interest), 5 (geographical/political boundaries) and 6 (party history) in order to create as many Democrat friendly districts as possible.

The entire process from the time Mathis got appointed has been a charade, with the three Democrats (Mathis pretends to be an Independent, but is is fact a dogmatic Democrat) even picked the "Republican" legal counsel!

Seems like someone forgot to tell Brad Sherman, Howard Berman, Laura Richardson, Janice Hahn, John Garamendi and Lois Capps about this left-wing conspiracy.

As I understand it, the above goals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 are given equal priority in the AZ Constitution. Federal law elevates goals 1 and 2 as well as the contiguity part of goal 3. The compactness part of goal 3 has historically been given wide discretion by the courts. Item 6 in your list is not a goal, but a requirement during the initial phase of mapping, but is then relaxed in order to test the map against the goals. Specifically voting behavior is necessary for the voting rights act (1) and competitiveness (7).

My point is that any commission is faced after the initial phase with the task of balancing items 3, 4, 5, and 7 and that includes the use of voting data. Competitiveness is easier to objectively measure than communities of interest, but is sensitive to the underlying set of election data. Any commission stuck with slanted election data to test the goals, would be drawn towards districts like the purported swing districts in the AZ plan (see my analysis on the AZ thread).

A truly independent chair might not have been enough given the data used to test the goals. Had the election data been properly vetted, inherent biases in the map would be easier to expose regardless of the chair.

The new map does make a few Democrats more vulnerable, but I would be surprised if they dropped below their current numbers in the House.

Muon,

Yes, the plans and data presented to the Commission were "slanted," but that was because Mathis and her fellow Democrats on the Commission retained a Democrat firm to present such "slanted" data and maps.

However, the slanted data was not the cause of the of the biased maps, but rather a deliberate, intentional, malicious and willfull distortion which would not have occurred if an honest-unbiased consultant had been hired.

Next, I agree that the authors of the ballot measure for the redistricting commission seemed to contradict themselves on items 6 and 7.

However, I must totally disagree with you that competitiveness is as important under Arizona law as any other criteria.  

Now, it is abundantly clear that the commission ignored compactness (3), communities of interest (4) geographic features/boundaries (5) in an attempt to create as many Democrat friendly districts.  There was NO attempt to comply with provisions 3,4 and 5 by the commission!  There was NO balancing whatsoever of the criteria, but merely an attempt to create as many Democrat friendly districts as possible.

Now, to me, slashing through smaller communities like Oreo Valley, Marana, etc. is easy to see while trying to obtain "competitiveness" is rather murky.

The world hasn't been the same since thesaurus.com went live.

Those lines were beneficial to Republicans, most of the gerrymandering was for their members.

Well, surprise, surprise, the article that I linked is being used by the Pubs to call for the CD map to be tanked (http://www.politico.com/blogs/david-catanese/2011/12/gop-pushes-to-scrap-ca-map-108417.html). Is there really any chance of that happening? Er, no. The Pubs are calling for investigations and the like. Hey Pubs, your dropping the ball, and the commissioners being duped by clever Dems, is not a grounds to have the map tanked. It would be like having a verdict in a civil case reversed because you lost on the grounds that you had a suck lawyer represent you. That dog won't hunt. Get over it! You deserve what you got. Geez!

Gerrymandering draws weaker challengers and therefore weaker results for the minority party, wave or not. Having an incumbent governor with pathetic approval ratings doesn't help the Republican cause much either.

The legal analogy would be if one of the parties had been shown to have contacted the judge through an undisclosed intermediary. Democratic front groups may be one thing. Individual Congressmen having undisclosed groups is another.

The districts honestly look much better now than during the bi-partisan-mander monstrosity. Personally I see this just as liberal grass-roots organizations doing a better job of working the system, which is entirely fine and is one of the purposes of the public hearings (to give a voice to the various interests groups).


By the way one of my favorite sections of the article Tory cited:
"One woman who purported to represent the Asian community of the San Gabriel Valley was actually a lobbyist who grew up in rural Idaho, and lives in Sacramento. "
Who cares where she grew up? If this woman lives in Sacramento now that is what is important.

Members of Congress can't properly be labeled "grassroots."


If she claims to be a resident of "San Gabriel Valley" it matters that she in fact lives in government central.

Am I the only Democrat willing to put partisanship aside and be objective? :(

If she grew up in the SGV and now lives in Sacramento, she could claim ties to the community. Apparently she is just a puppet. But does anyone have any doubts that Republicans tried and failed to accomplish the same? Isn't this "their" commission idea? :)

I am going to put up my CA maps on this thread, because the purpose of the exercise is to evaluate the Commission's work, and if flawed, what partisan difference it made, if any.  I don't expect very dramatic differences actually, despite whatever it was the Dem manipulation accomplished. So to start, here is LA County, except for a few bits. No Pub CD's emerge, but that red CD, the Asian CD (CA-32) is but lean Dem (58.2% Obama). Yes, I chose the color "red" for the this CD deliberately. They appreciate the glories of the color red as much as I - strong, masculine, and just a fabulous accent color.  Go Asians! :)

I am thinking btw of adjusting the McCain partisan baseline in CA up by 2 or 3 points for PVI purposes by the way. CA just went bonkers over Obama in 2008, including yours truly. Stay tuned. So CA-32 might have a say 2%-4% Dem PVI, in other words lean Dem, but competitive, particularly if Asians trend GOP, and the tea leaves suggest that in CA that they might be going in that direction. The incumbent Chu should have no problems however.

It was fun drawing CD's in a part of the world that I actually know intimately. I know where the "communities of interest" are. I know where the lines of neighborhood council districts  are. I got particular joy drawing the eastern edge of CA-30,, where I know every block. This map was a celebration of both class and racial "warfare," so both parameters are met that the Commission was interested in. CA-30 must be one of the most wealthy CD's in the nation, if not the wealthiest.  And it contains the entirety of my real estate "empire" in LA County the way I drew it to boot.  :)

I will update this particular post as I complete more work, and finally do a compare and contrast, and render a final judgment. I am quite satisfied with my LA county lines, except possibly for the Santa Fe Springs, Whittier area. That may change a bit when the SD, OC, Riverside, and San Bernadino Counties are completed.

By the way, you can see how the formerly "black ghetto" has been gutted, and dramatically so, by demographic changes, as Hispanics move in, and blacks move out. There is but one "black" CD now (CA-37), about 45% black, which is about as middle class, as lower class. ()

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Here is how I would draw my map. First of all I adjoined Imperial county to SD.  Adding it to the Palm Springs area does not make sense since you need to go into Perris or Moreno Valley to get enough Hispanics. A map like that makes sense for the AD map since you don't need to cross over into LA exurbia. Then I only crossed over from SD county into Riverside County and not at all into Orange County, so only one county split there. In SBD and Riverside counties I drew two swing districts, with a dem lean. They both voted for Obama by about 16 points. Both districts voted for Brown by 7 points, but I bet Fiorina won both by a hair's breadth. Unlike most of urban California, in the IE Fiorina performed better than Whitman. Or it was more a case of Boxer being disliked more than Brown. The Riverside based district is 51% Hispanic and the SBD district is 53% Hispanic making them both Latino influence districts.

In OC I drew an Asian influence district at 36% Asian VAP. It's safe Republican and voted for Mccain by 2 points. Then I stretched the 37th into Huntington Beach. There is no way around it since OC has enough population for more than 4 districts. But before you start decrying it as a Democratic gerrymander, note that it actually voted for Whitman by about a point. Look closely and you will see Lakewood is included in the district and the ghetto parts of Long Beach are excluded.

In LA I drew the Asian district but did not include Glendora, which is not really that Asian, and it's not really the sort of place Asians will move to with it's mostly 50's and 60's housing stock. Instead I included the via verde neighborhood in San Dimas. I did not include Chino Hills to cut down on the county splits, but putting it in the Asian district certainly makes sense. It voted about 20 points for Obama. I also made one Black vs Hispanic district in the 35th and a Black district in the 33rd. Now the big question that remains is which district crosses over from LA county into Ventura. Do I do what the commission did and add Simi valley to the Santa Clarita district, or do I add parts of Thousand Oaks into the westside high SES zone district? Neither will make Republicans happy, but the positioning of Republicans in Ventura county is very inconvenient from a Republican perspective.

It looks like you "lost" a 60% plus Hispanic CD in LA County, sbane.  I have six of them in LA County. Am I confused?  

I would have to see the whole map of LA County to comment. I was very careful to follow communities of interest lines, and class lines, and racial lines, with the VRA in mind. I did the best I could, and let the chips fall where they may. The Beach Cities CD slipped away, when it had to take all of Venice, and some Hispanic, Bohemian, Hollywood wanna-be, UCLA grad student, and independent minded undergrads who don't like dorm living precincts, just to the east of Santa Monica - a little pocket of left wing un-wealth. It was gone. Better areas for it had to go into the Hispanic CD down south. The end. It is amazing how that Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, La Canada, La Crecenta CD has become solid Dem now. It would have been Pubbie wonderland when I was a kid. But the, CA-30 would have been marginal - then (e.g., even then, West Hollywood was gay :) ).

Glendora is upper middle class Anglo (one of my pals lives there, an Anglo liberal Dem.  :) ). But the Asian CD had to go somewhere, and it was not going to chop further into SB County, and was otherwise totally boxed in. So it got about half or a bit more or so of Glendora. That was the nearest available town. Azusa is just so freaking Hispanic, which was most inconvenient. Absent that, and the map would have been much cleaner there.

All these Republican controlled states are ramming through extreme gerrymanders, that's perfectly fine, but when a Democratic state has a bipartisan commission, that's suddenly horrible.

Yup, there will be two more Latino districts that will be drawn. One centered around downtown and of course the San Fernando valley.

I think the differences in our maps stem from you starting in LA, whereas I started in Imperial and SD. I'm trying to avoid pushing Socal districts into the central valley or the mountains. I think the only one that will be pushed outside Socal will be the coast district, which actually is fine from a communities of interest perspective.

We shall see. I still think you lost an Hispanic CD - my Carson wrap-around one, but yes, the population numbers to the south, could affect things. But not by much per my map. I have some leeway, and I know that when I did my earlier map, with OC and SD drawn, OC "wanted" to jut into Long Beach by a tad, and this map instead juts into OC, to take Seal Beach. But that is a swing of maybe 50,000 folks max. It's rather trivial. The line between SoCal, and the rest of the state is the Sierra Nevada Mountain chain, the Tehatchapis-grapevine (sp), and the LA County line on the coast. The population discrepancy, and the best fix, will drive the outcome. Yes, butting into Ventura County is acceptable, but so is sucking up some of Kern County. Or if the flow is the other way, then the Owens Valley is in play, appended to the Bakersfield CD. I doubt it will present much of a problem.

And here is an alternative that gets rid of the Glendora salient, "solves the Santa Fe Springs-Whittier issue sort of (but notice that CA-32 has to cross an empty zone to get down there that while not as much of a reach as going to Glendora, is a reach across an "empty zone" barrier, and into territory which CA-32 has less in common with potentially, and particularly over time, than going to Glendora does (I don't think Asians are planning to move down to La Mirada adjacent, and the more bourgeoisie parts of Whittier (once part of the Midwestern WASP Pub diaspora back when), anytime soon. The major "cost" however is a much deeper jut by CA-35 into OC, and a deeper just into the San Gabriel Valley by the presumably Anglo based CD in SB County. So it is probably not worth it on balance, even though it makes both CA-35 and CA-32 a tad more Pub. So it is not as if, if the Dems on the Commission demanded it, that I would just so "no."  :)

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Here is the LA area completed. The gray district, the 26th, is a Hispanic district being 62% Hispanic VAP. The 35th that you can see in the previous map is also a Hispanic district with a Black influence. It's 54% Hispanic VAP and 21.1% Black VAP. Yes, your ugly u shaped district (sorry) probably does a better job of making the district more safer for a Hispanic, but at the expense of Black voters. Here I try to make everyone happy. The rest of the Latino districts in LA county are the 28th, 42nd, 34th and the 31st. So overall there are 6.

Turns out I didn't need to go that much into Ventura county. The 25th attains full population as long as you add all those areas north of the 118 freeway, and the 30th really should be a LA district, so the 27th has to go into Ventura County. The Ventura county district is a bit more Republican than what the commission drew and voted for Whitman by 5 points and Obama by 11 points. The city of Ventura is split and is added to the SB/SLO district, and about 50,000 people from SLO county will go into the Monterey county district. No districts split the northern county line of either LA or SBD county.

OK, but that deep jut of yours into OC so that a CD that goes from Bellflower (well Lawndale, better) via Long Beach to consume that only all of Huntington Beach, but a slice of Fountain Valley, is just a deal killer sbane. The OC-LA County line is a pretty hard one, trust me (ignored by the Commission when it snapped up Westminster), and any cuts need to have a very compelling reason indeed. There is a very good case for consuming Seal Beach, and in a pinch, even that Los Alamitos gated Seizure World, if need be, since they both go to Long Beach for nearly everything (going south is this huge field of oil wells and strawberry farms and such, and navy stuff, and is probably a toxic waste dump), but that is about it.

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Here is a redo. I still like what I drew before, and this new map does not really accomplish anything other than keeping Huntington Beach out of a LA district. The net result is that the 37th which actually voted for Whitman, becomes a Dem district. The Asian district gets a little more Republican, about 17 points Obama and 7 points Brown, and the Asian influence gets reduced in the OC district. I also have to cross the Riverside-Orange County line which imo is just as bad as putting Long Beach and Huntington Beach together. A good thing that happens though is the SBD swing district becomes more Hispanic, going from 53-56%.

You should add all of Arcadia to the Asian district and think about adding the south hills neighborhood of West Covina as well. That way you don't need to dip into Whittier and La Habra and split cities there.

Ah, and give Glendora to the Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank based CD connected via the very steep face of the San Gabriel Mountains in lieu of the Asian contagion going there. And give South Pasadena and La Habra Heights to the Asian CD too, so that the Anglo WASP commie-lib CD can take all of Glendora, with which it has a lot in common (other than partisan preference). That is probably a good idea, although it is a 15 yard penalty play for the Pubs. You would have made a good Dem shill operative for the Dems sbane. :P

Are the county lines generally meaningful in SoCal or is it just that stretch of line you reference. I ask since sometime ago when I was drawing CA maps there seemed to be consensus that a district would have to overlap at some point. Is that better towards the northern end of the LA-OC border?

Thanks to sbane's help, the map below I think presents the best OC-LA County cuts.  You can see how the cut in the south just takes in an area isolated by real estate largely devoid of people, and ditto the southern border there of the red tiger, which no longer reaches down to that problem child - Whittier. And CA-32 now moves up to 51.8% Asian, which is simply grand. It's perfect!  Pity that the Obama percentage is up to 59% now. And to think now heavily Dem S. Pasadena used to be this charming understated middle to upper middle class WASP Pubbie heaven.  Where have all the flowers gone?  One just can't have it all, can one?  :(

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And this looks even better!  :)  

I also fixed the borderland between CA-38 and CA-42 (the lime green CD), so that Maywood (a place you probably don't want to live in since it is the most down market of that band of former Okie white working class suburbs that did a near "perfect" job of keeping blacks out, and are now solidly to - in places - almost unanimously, Hispanic), and a little slice of Huntington Park, were put in CA-38. In exchange, CA-42 took part of unincorporated Florence.

That aspect of the map has been vexing me since I first drew it. I am vexed no more. :) The line re-jigling creates an "empty quarter" (a little Saudi Arabian reference for you) as a natural border between the two CD's. I mean what can be more empty than Vernon, which has about 35 voters, almost all of whom are on the municipal payroll, at vast salaries (or were - I think the state is trying to disincorporate Vernon).

And land greedy City of Commerce (that famed land of casino card clubs that have been there for about as long as Vegas has been separating folks from their money), while having a few more people, like a grand total of 3,500 voters, most of them are away from its southern edge (where the card clubs, with vast parking lots, and that former Firestone Tire plant cheek-to-jowl to the 5 Freeway, which looked like a medieval fort, and is now a retail outlet center behind the fort facade, are to be found rather than housing).   Yes, we wants to have empty zones as "natural" CD borders, yes we wants that little "precious" a lot.  :)

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yep. That used to be represented by Edgar Hiestand (a john bircher), H. Allen Smith and Glenard Lipscomb.

Below is my completed map for the southern half of the state. I invite comments. I am not going to put up the partisan stats, least they bias one. Tell me where the flaws are from a VRA, community of interest and compactness standpoint, with minimum county and municipal chops, and how a superior product can be created. I think at the moment the map is flawless, and frankly inspired genius. :P Tell me how I am delusional about that. :)  Thanks in advance.

Oh yes, all Hispanic CD's are at least 60% Hispanic VAP - the lowest being 61.9% Hispanic VAP (CA-33). Addendum: Oh, I take that back.  CA-31 is 57.4% Hispanic VAP, and can be beefed up by trading territory with 75.6% Hispanic VAP next door CA-34, but it will break through some municipal lines and empty quarters, and make the map uglier and cross communities of interest. 57.6% Hispanic should be enough given that 22.8% are low voting Asians (they are low voting in that neighborhood), but I guess that could be discussed. The incumbent Becerra runs reasonably well with Anglos anyway (he went to Harvard Law School, and a lawyer friend of mine knew him quite well - he gets hit up for contributions by him all the time :P), and should have no problem at all winning a Dem primary there (that CD is not in play in the General  :P).

CA-43 is 57.4% Hispanic, but it can't get much higher without crossing into Riverside County, and trading territory with CA-42 (which is great from a Pub standpoint, but is not something that I think is appropriate, and don't think required by the VRA, since it is not as if the heavy Hispanic precincts live right on the county line with San Bernadino).

In due course, we shall have a detailed compare and contrast of this map with the Commission's one, putting under the microscope what happened, and try to fathom why.  

Addendum 2: At the bottom I put up the ethnic stats. Pale green is the color of an Asian "influence" CD, and lighter brown the same for Hispanics. As to partisanship, I will give you a hint. Other than CA-17, they are listed in the order of partisan preference. :P  

And yes, the two "whitest of white" CD's are also the wealthiest of those that I have mapped (right up there near the top of the nation), even if of distinctly different partisan preference. :) In fact,  more and more in Socal, and considerably more so than in the nation at large, if you're white, you tend to be rather high income. Down-market whites have packed their bags, and split, replaced by Hispanics.

And yes, I have dropped the Pub baseline in CA by two points, down to 44.3% McCain, splitting the difference more or less with the 4% and something Dem trend for the state as a whole in 2008. That probably does not obtain in the Central Valley, and may understate things in the prime snapback areas in CA in 2010, but I think that it is the best number overall for the state. I feel there is some Dem trend in CA, but Obama really juiced it up, and for the marginal CD's,  with maybe one exception (not to be disclosed at this time, since this is a CD I have not yet drawn, and I am just speculating), I don't think using a single baseline number will change the partisan odds much from trying to get more customized.

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Must there be a district from San Luis Obispo to Santa Cruz?

The city of San Luis Obispo is entirely within CA-23, not CA-17, and CA-17 does not take in any of metro Santa Cruz (just farming areas and agricultural Watsonville), but yes, there must.  It's trapped by mountains and the VRA, and where the roads go.

I'm slowly digesting the Torie map, and it's made harder in that I can't get the 2010 block groups for CA to load in my DRA 2.2 (2000 is fine as are all other 2010 states :P). One early observation I would make is that if one is worried about a commission tilted one way as they draw then one needs additional objective measures to constrain them. Communities of interest are very subjective, VRA districts are moderately objective, and political lines like counties and munis are very objective. So my initial test is to look at county splits that are not needed for the VRA.

On that measure I generally like the SD-OC-Riverside districts. Of course I have some caveats. ;)

In a muon world without the VRA I see the following. SD+OC+Imperial is about 46K under the number needed for 9 CDs and Riverside is about 80K over the count for 3 CDs. LA county is 22K short of the population for 14 CDs. I would see some of the Riverside excess go to an OC district, and then from 22K go from OC or the Inland Empire to LA. The remaining bits then can go to San Bernardino with Inyo and Mono and grab 28K from SE Kern. That makes 29 CDs in total.

I also know that VRA concerns will trump counties on occasion. For instance Torie's Asian CD-32 has to make a crossing into San B county and looks good, but without a working App I can't tell how much needs to come across.

I'm also concerned about the lack of an Inland Empire Latino CD. MALDEF drew 2 with 62%+ HVAP - one with Fontana/Ontario and the other linking San Bernardino to Parris. The Commission drew the first as well, but reduced the second to 50% HVAP. As Torie noted, his San B district only gets 57% HVAP, and no other breaks 50%. I'd draw the MALDEF districts and use that to justify any county splits in the Inland Empire and hopefully get rid of the little fragment of Torie CD-41 in Riverside.

More later ...

Muon2, I think the 2010 election districts will load, and I had the same problem and switched to those. Check it out.  

The cut into Riverside County by CA-41 is tiny by the way.  Something has to cut into it, since the only other cut is CA-48 into the middle class white part of Corona, and that cut is also mandatory, since CA-48 is walled in indirectly by the Seal Beach, OC County line, the Asian CD CA-32, and the Saddleback Mountains between OC and Riverside County, with the pass and the Freeway being where I cut into Corona. CA-43 and CA-26 can switch out precincts to make CA-43 more Hispanic, but it means another municipal cut into Ontario, and I wouldn't do it, but maybe it should be done. I will draw an alternative map that way. That will make CA-26 more GOP.  

The way I drew the map, I don't think another Hispanic CD is possible, without cutting into Riverside, and I agree with the commission that that should not be done. It not legally mandated, and enough is enough.

I drew two more CD's by the way. They are drawn about the only way they can be drawn given the VRA and the mountains, unless one does not mind erosity and more chops, and I do mind. CA-20 is 59.8% Hispanic VAP.

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Unfortunately the 2010 VTDs don't load for me either. :(

If you are going to preserve the San B - Riverside county line (and I like that you do). Then I think you will have to beef up your Latino districts. The commission report indicates that there is racially polarized voting in the Inland Empire and they had to go to 64% HVAP in the San B district to get CVAP over 50%. In the Riverside district they brought the HVAP over just 50%, which seems like a reasonable compromise between county integrity and Latino community interests. I still think it should be possible to slide some blocks and get 41 out of Riverside - if only my DRA worked. :P

I'm also concerned about attaching San Benito to CD-17. The commission didn't seem to check on whether racial polarized voting exists in the San Jose area, but it might, and if so then I think San Benito has to go with San Jose. San Benito isn't that populous and could be replaced by some extra folks from Santa Cruz in CD-17.

I thought I would go into a little more detail on the methods I mentions above.

I divide the state into regions, each roughly equal to a whole number of CDs. In most states I would try to get the regions within 0.5% of the ideal population, but with so many high population counties and natural barriers between regions my tolerance was quite a bit higher.

My goal is to place the districts largely within their region. As I divide each region into districts I look to avoid unnecessary county and municipal splits while complying with the VRA. The purpose of this is to create a starting point that minimizes external influence towards a partisan outcome.

Here are my CA regions, the number of districts, and the deviation from ideal population.

North Coast (2) +4968
Upper Sacramento (2) +4658
Lower Sacramento (6) -51670
San Fransisco Bay (7) -49467
Central Coast (3) +85547
Central Valley (4) +33896
Los Angeles (14) -22065
Inland Empire (6) +40169
South Coast (9) -46072

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I would say that Contra Costa County has far more in common with Alameda County than any of the counties to its east; if possible, it would be best to keep the East Bay together.

I would agree if this method were only bout communities of interest. This method relies on a first step of creating regions that are nearly a whole number of CDs. Contra Costa has the size for one and a half districts and shifting it would create regions that were not nearly a whole number of districts. In any case Contra Costa plus Solano is just over two districts in population, so my division of the region would create one district entirely within Contra Costa and one that is split between Contra Costa and Solano.

Well, this map sure isn't inspired genius. That would be the map I posted. :P

One thing that immediately stands out is that 22nd district. It violates the VRA by diluting Hispanic voting strength in the Central Valley. Indeed looking at the maps you posted later, your map needs major work in the Central Valley.

You chose to go into OC from SD whereas I went into Riverside, which leads to some differences in our maps. I don't think Escondido goes well with a coastal SD CD. I think putting Fallbrook, Vista and Escondido with Temecula and Murrieta works fine. Anyways, that's not a big deal, just a choice on where to go. I like your cut from OC into Riverside better than mine actually, so going up into OC from SD makes that easier to do. I don't like how you split both Corona and Moreno Valley though. Couldn't you add all of Moreno Valley into the 42nd and transfer the rest of Corona into the 44th? This will also increase the Hispanic percentage in that district which is necessary.

I don't like how you use the outer SBD county district to take in the Owens valley. It also causes you to put Redlands into the 43rd, which unnecessarily lowers the Hispanic percentage. Better to not split the northern boundary of the Socal counties(and I will get to this again later). Also you might have to put Pomona into the other SBD county district like I did. This creates a real Hispanic opportunity district there and the SGV Hispanic district is still above 60% Hispanic. Claremont doesn't have a high Hispanic population, but San Dimas, La Verne and Glendora do, believe it or not. It's not as Hispanic as Pomona of course, but switching out those cities for Pomona doesn't drop the Hispanic percentage as much as you might think and it leads to another Hispanic opportunity district. And Pomona goes better with the IE than with the SGV.

The split of LA county into Kern County is absolutely ridiculous. I don't like the split the commission did, and I don't like what you did. Kern County has nothing in common with LA county. You should have gone into Ventura County. You already split that line, so why the Kern split in addition to that? I would not accept a map like that. You should put Porter Ranch and surrounding neighborhoods north of 118 into the 25th, and extend the 27th into Thousand Oaks. Also San Benito going with SJ might be necessary too, in order to create a Hispanic opportunity district. That's what Muon suggested and I drew it. I will post my Norcal map later.

Got to run off, but as to the Kern cut it's perfect. The division is the Tehachapi Mountain range, which divides the Central Valley from the desert (and only 30,000 people). It's a natural physical barrier. Sending CA-25 into Ventura is far less desirable, and it would go down that river and have to take Fillmore, with which it has nothing in common. CA-44 taking CA-48's share of Corona is fine, but 1) what does CA-48 take instead, and 2), that would only reduce the cut into the Moreno Valley, not eliminate it.  If CA-50 does not take Escondido, what does? I spent a long time thinking about communities of interest. That is what this map is all about. And in this neck of woods (less so in the Bay area), I know the hoods. I haven't done it, but I don't think you can create another Hispanic CD in the south end of the Central Valley.  

Addendum. Oh, CA-44 could take the share of Corona that CA-42 has. That might be good (although it makes things more erose), if that allows CA-42 to take all, or almost all, of Moreno Valley. Corona is really joined at the hip with Riverside, particularly after you get out of the Anglo zone next to the mountains, and kind of chops into the heart of the Riverside metro area, rather than the far edges (SE Moreno Valley). It is worth experimenting with though. Good thought.

Minor issue, but what is there in desert San Diego besides Indian Reservations and in desert Riverside besides the Chuckwalla Pen? I'd like to see both placed in the 53rd if possible. :) (And Blythe might go into the 41st I guess.)

I think a cut into thousand oaks by a western San Fernando valley district makes more sense than cutting into Kern or into the Fillmore area with the 25th. Thousand oaks has a lot in common with that area, as opposed to the other combos mentioned which make less sense.

Ca-48 should remain as is but if ca-44 and ca-42 can trade territories to eliminate the cut in Moreno valley, it should be done. And it results in a more Hispanic district which might be required of the map. Corona is  joined to the hip with Riverside but so is Moreno valley.

Escondido has to be put into Ca-50 if you cut into OC instead of riverside. You can put it, San Marcos and Vista into the 49th and in exchange the entire coast including camp Pendleton gets put in the 50th. Obviously won't work if you are going into OC from SD.

The cut into Kern is perfect. The desert there is the same as the desert as Lancaster, a flat plain, and indistinguishable from the landscape that Lancaster is in, and the folks who live there shop, and largely work - in Lancaster. It is indeed one community of interest. Simi Valley is over a little mountain range and a world of its own, although many do commute. Simi Valley would have to be chopped to boot, and chopping deeply big towns is bad, bad, bad to boot. The Kern chop is the superior one in every way for the 30,000 people involved.

I accept the change out of the balance of Corona for the balance of Moreno Valley, primarily because the change loses one municipal cut, with just Corona now being cut, rather than both Moreno Valley and Corona (albeit the cut is with two different CD's).  That is the decisive factor for me. The new map is below. It works well.

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Does the below precinct exchange between CA-43 and CA-26, a late term "abortion" as it were,  which trashes every reasonable "good-government" parameter on the grounds that doing  racial gerrymandering  via just doing the  VRA deep on steroids, turn anyone on? It gets CA-43 up to 62.2% VAP Hispanic (up from 57.6% Hispanic). Isn't that exciting?


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I still think that you would make it better by letting CA-43 jut into Riverside instead of CA-41. It can go pick up some Latino areas and you can rationalize the unavoidable cut, by claiming it is the will of the VRA. For reference 64.7% HVAP gives 51.9% CVAP in that area, so 62.2% would project to 49.4% CVAP, so some additional Latino areas would be useful.

I think your map would be improved if you follow the the lead of the commission and MALDEF and move 43 to the SW. They use Chino, Ontario, Rialto, and a bit of San B to get a solid Latino seat. That would let you preserve Ontario as an intact muni.

Looking at my map again, my 43rd isn't actually that much more Hispanic than what Torie drew before, about 58% HVAP. I thought it was due to him putting Redlands in his Latino district, but that is not the case. Perhaps that isn't enough for MALDEF, but it makes the map messier. Maybe it needs to be done. Meh.

Torie, I just disagree with cutting the LA-Kern County line. I disagree with what the commission did, and I disagree with your map. I wouldn't split Simi Valley though, I would split Thousand Oaks. Like I said before, putting a part of the city in a western San Fernando district makes sense from a community of interest perspective. Of course it isn't desirable to split the city, but it's not desirable to split the LA-Kern county line either.

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CA-20 is 69.2% HVAP and CA-18 is 56.1% HVAP. CA-16, the San Jose to San Benito County district, is 42.1% HVAP and CA-17, the Monterey district, is 40.4% HVAP. I wonder if it wouldn't be a better idea to just combine the Hispanic areas there. The 15th, which takes in the highly Asian areas of Fremont and goes down to Milpitas, Asian parts of San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale and Cupertino is 52.6% Asian VAP.

In Sacramento County I saw that it had population for a 2 districts and change. Since a split needed to happen, I decided to put West Sacramento with the Sacramento district and put all of the rural areas of Sacramento County into the 2nd. In San Joaquin County I did something similar and put most of the rural areas in the 19th. Ideally the city of Lodi and more areas in the north of the county would have gone in the 19th as well but that would have led to a very odd looking 1st or 2nd district and would have added to the county splits. I think this is a good compromise between community of interests and respecting city and county lines. In Contra Costa County the 11th picks up Brentwood and Discovery Bay. The rest of the eastern Contra Costa, including Oakley, gets put in the 7th district. This creates two exurban Bay area districts, and deservedly so since a lot of the growth in northern California has occurred in these areas.

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Look familiar? This leads to the 38th becoming 65.2% HVAP. The 43rd drops to 45.1% HVAP and it's 50.1% Hispanic for the total population. And this is superior to the commission map since it doesn't split Upland or Highland, and the 43rd doesn't contain Redlands. Another reason to not extend the SBD desert district into the Owens valley!

Another thing I should note about Pomona and the San Gabriel valley Hispanic district. If you don't add Pomona to that district, it becomes 58% HVAP. This is not enough to create a 50% HCVAP district in many areas but in the San Gabriel valley it does seem to be possible (probably due to more established Hispanics living in cities like San Dimas, La Verne, Glendora etc.). Just take a look at the racial stats of the 32nd district as drawn by the commission to see what I am saying. This is why I am comfortable with putting Pomona in the 38th district. That area does need a higher Hispanic population to get to 50% HCVAP. Refer to the 35th as drawn by the commission to see the stats.

Thanks, that's exactly what I was suggesting. I only wish I could load CA 2010 into my computer. :'(

OTOH, I agree with Torie about the cut into Kern. There's a very natural divide that separates the SE corner. I would attach it to Barstow, Inyo and Mono as a Mohave Desert district, but the point is the same. The Central Valley counties in my regional map were over the count of 4 CDs by 34 K, and that's just about exactly the number of people SE of the mountains in Kern.

Yes, the Kern cut stays. I do see that Pomona is part of an Hispanic area that is contiguous. We shall see what we can do. That is a rather compelling factor. I see more municipal cuts in LA County however. In my world, I would just live with the 57% Hispanic San Bernadino district, but I guess if the Hispanic voting habits are that different in the San Gabriel Valley, that is a very important factor. 

My cut of CA-41 into Riverside County is a grand total of 7,758 people. Getting rid of it "solves" nothing. And CA-41 just has too many  people to take Redlands.

I have been avoiding really looking at the Commission map, because it might bias me. But I did here. It's map is a mess in this area. I quite dislike it. Sbane's is better.  We shall see given the shape of my map elsewhere, which has very good reasons for doing what it did, what if anything can be done here, without making a hash of it.

I see the Commission really screwed up the CD numbering system too. So many districts get new numbers - needlessly. Sigh.

#firstworldproblems

The same sort of complaints were made in Missouri after the judicial redistricting panel pretty much changed the district numbers of every State House district, outside of a few in STL. I just joked it was a concession to the business card printing lobby. But there were a few state house members openly unhappy about the number changes.

The CA US House districts didn't seem to be that huge of a problem and the same applies now.

Does this carve-up of the inland "empire" make everyone deliriously happy?  CA-38 is 61.4% Hispanic, CA-26 is 67% Hispanic, and CA-43 is 41.6% Hispanic. And Muon2 gets his f'ing Riverside County cut, which becomes more "convenient" with this map version - all 7,000 or so residents of it.

The key of course is the Pomona chop. We don't like to chop in half big towns like this, but the VRA is a harsh mistress - apparently. We also get a nice erose CA-43,and chop of a couple of more towns in LA County between CA-29 and CA-38.  Life is beautiful.

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A win-win-win can be a beautiful thing. :)

Can anyone draw a CA map with more than 25 <53% Obama districts? Mine has 25 with Ca-10 and Ca-36 about 55-56% Obama. Now on to my massive Dem gerrymander!!

Yeah, not bad. If the Owens valley goes in the 41st then Redlands has to go in the 43rd, otherwise we end up with my map. Keeping Redlands and Yucaipa together is probably a good idea, and the Owens valley can be put in another district. . I Disagree about the Kern cut as well. The 25th to me is an exurban LA district. There are a lot of commuters who commute into either the Santa Clarita valley or into LA from Palmdale and Lancaster. Yes, those areas of Kern are high desert like those two cities but other than that they have very little in common.

I haven't done a Republican gerrymander of California yet. Probably wouldn't look so different from the current map. :P I did draw a Democratic gerrymander of California and IIRC I was able to keep the Republican districts in the single digits. Maybe 10 or 11. I lost that file though so I cannot tell you for sure.

My goal is 7.

I doubt you can get to 7 without violating the VRA.

That's why I put SE Kern with Barstow and Death Valley. It keeps the high desert together better IMO.

Yes, that would be better. It might mess up the Latino influence district I drew though, which was about 45%VAP.

Mike, would you direct me to your "high desert" map?  I think I disagree with your perspective here, but before I comment beyond my tentative thought below, I want to see the impact on adjacent CD's.  The fundamental problem however is connecting a lot of desert to a central valley based CD, and it won't be all of the "high desert" anyway. Victorville is more or less "high desert," and separating it from the balance of the otherwise very lightly populated "high desert," is the consequence.

I'm afraid it is only a conceptual map since I can't load actual 2010 data. The best I have is from 2008, and I used that to sketch the San Bernardino districts. The Ontario district is about 65% HVAP. Rancho Cucamonga is linked to San Bernardino along the north side of I-15, and in principle I would extend up into the foothills more, but that wasn't an option with my data. To the main idea, I linked Victorville and Barstow to SE Kern to put the whole US 395 corridor in one district. I'd love to know what the actual populations are in these districts.

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Muon2, where did the north LA County CD pick up its extra 30,000 residents?  Did it cut into the City of LA?  That Kern bit can go in either CD, but the northern LA County CD going into Ventura County towards Fillmore or into the San Fernando Valley is undesirable, as is biting a piece off the Victorville-Hesperia-Adalante metro area, which is a long way from the population centers of the northern LA County CD.

Presumably from where you have an SB district pick up a piece of LA County, no?

Santa Clarita grew by 24,000 residents in the past 10 years. I imagine that Lancaster and Palmdale make up for the rest of that 6k.

It will be interesting to see if Santa Clarita can be moved into a more competitive district. Maybe then we can finally buck Mr. "Buck" McKeon out of office. :D

No, that cut is into Westlake Village along Hwy 101, a long way from the north LA County CD. As I said, I don't like any of the cuts for the north LA County CD, other than into Kern County. Those cuts represent far less of a community of interest, and cutting into the city of LA to pick up a few people would just be awful.

Right, there's a CD and the San Gabriel wilderness in between. Silly me. Still true "net", of course, but there'd have to be some shift through the 28th given where the road link is. How many people does your 29th have within the city of LA - since it seems it has a portion of the Valley?

I understand your reticence to go into the far northern tip of LA city to join with Santa Clarita, etc., but I think that sbane's version is preferable.

I think we all agree that Inyo and Mono should go with eastern SBD, but without using SE Kern, then Inyo only connects by a minor road through Trona or across Death Valley. From that perspective, Inyo and Mono could just as well connect across the Sierras to Fresno. US-395 is hanging right across the line in Kern and the CoI there matches as well.

I don't think that the crossing into LA from the north to balance population is so bad. To me, the connection from Santa Clarita to NW LA along I-5 seems not unlike the OC to Corona connection which is required to balance population there.

Given the choice of attaching two small counties to a large district with minimal road connections or chopping a small part of a large city just over the mountains but following along a freeway, I would strongly prefer with the latter.

Changed your mind eh Mike?   You said you liked my cut, and now you don't. :P  Anyway, I don't think HWY 395, the connector road into the Owens Valley temporarily drifting off slightly into another CD is the worst thing in the world (who cares?), but if you can stand a tri-chop of Kern, that problem can be "solved."  That has some appeal, since Ridgecrest is so divorced from Bakersfield actually.  Cutting into the agricultural river valley that Fillmore is in, with which the northern LA County CD has nothing in common, does not. That is far less desirable than Hwy 395 drifting a few miles temporarily out of CA-41, in my not very humble opinion.  :)  Heck, just move Hwy 395 to the east of Ridgecrest rather than west, and that would do the trick too. The land there is all flat. It would be a piece of cake - just costing a few million bucks is all. :P

32,000 residents are involved with Ridgecrest, so that means most of Highland goes from CA-41 to CA-43. Does that make everyone happy? There will be a rather huge 32,000 resident counter-clockwise turn of the clock actually, ending up with a deeper cut into Westlake, and squeezing San Luis Obispo city. It is already under pressure when I got rid of the Riverside County chop involving 7,000 residents (which has not been posted yet) by turning the clock by that much. So maybe it won't work well given the SLO issue. If so, then well I am going to settle for the Hwy 395 drift-out myself. I consider that issue minor actually.  Nobody would care or know.

CA-29 has 52,000 residents in the city of LA Lewis, an Anglo area in a valley on the other side of a mini mountain range from the San Fernando Valley connecting down to LaCanada-Flintridge and Pasadena with no road to CA-25, other than through a bunch of Hispanics. Sorry about that.

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My CA magnum opus map slowly continues to take shape. Silicon Valley and the Peninsula have now been drawn. So much of CA is a story of mountain ranges and Freeways (precinct lines tend to love following freeways, so using them makes for nice pretty lines). As always, comments are welcome.

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By the way, I seriously played with the idea of CA-41 cutting into Kern, attempting to arrange matters, so that the Tulare CD was knocked out of Kern, to avoid a quad chop of Kern. It just doesn't work. The clock cannot be turned much counterclockwise, without generating a host of ancillary problems, including a nasty chop of Santa Cruz, or SLO, or messing up the Hispanic Fresno based CD, or all three. It just doesn't work. The clock in this map has stopped at about just the right place. CA just has too many mountain and ethnic barriers to have much flexibility in the end as to what to do.

And I got rid of the Riverside County chop!  

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This was accomplished by using the Riverside-SB line as the hard line, rather than Seal Beach for the border of CA-37 and CA-40 and CA-46 (county lines in general should take precedence over municipal ones). So CA-37 takes gated geezer Rossmoor, and loses two Seal Beach precincts, and then you twist the clock (e.g., CA-48 taking more of Corona). The twist goes in the following order: CA 41-43-26-38-29-31-34-39-37-40-48-44-45-42. It is that laborious, because there are so many hard boundaries (muni lines, county lines, ethnic lines, mountain ridge lines) that cannot be crossed. Fun stuff.

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Looks pretty good, Torie, but what's up with that random extension of CD47 there?

Since San Francisco is too large for one district, I think I would extend the 12th into the Sunset, like both the old and new maps do. That part of the city is most like Daly City.

80% Hispanic precincts, and too "good" not to go and grab. I think they are next to a rail line running from beautiful downtown Orange to Riverside - of course. The Orange RR station where you switched commuter trains to and from Riverside from the main SD to LA line, used to have this great micro brewery pub in it, which a friend of a friend owned. It was too Yuppie for the zip code and died. Sad.

The area next to the ocean and the San Mateo County line is pretty upscale as I recall (not like Daley City at all, and Sunset Beach is up north), and my cut into SF is an Asian node, and I thought I would join that with the Asians just to the south. Plus it is nicely delimited by freeways, which tend to define precincts, and often neighborhoods, and tend to in this case. However, I will take a peek at the Commission's map, to see what they did, something that in general I try to avoid doing. None of this makes the slightest difference in partisan terms of course, but I am trying to do the very best job that I can, viewing myself as a Commissioner.

Watsonville would be a better fit for that Salinas district, but I guess it's too many people and would end up split? Also not happy about the 14th/15th arrangement, but something's got to give  - the 12th southern and 16th western perimeter look perfect to me, so it's either this or a trichop of San Jose. I'd maybe have to see what that would look like. (California is a bitch to load, and I don't know enough about LA to dare argue with you two there, so I'm not bothering loading it at all.)

Here is what the cut into Santa Cruz County would look like. Yes, CA-17 taking just Watsonville and nothing more would be ideal, but the cut goes into the Santa Cruz metro area, and that sucks really. So given that CA-17 already had Hollister, with Gilroy and Morgan Hill just up the road from it and being rather isolated from the Silicon Valley, and everything else for that matter, and agriculturally oriented, to me that was the better cut. Gilroy and Morgan Hill should not be in CA-14 in any event, which means one of the San Jose CD's would have to stretch down there, also not very attractive. So it was my judgement, that this was the best compromise. I went back and forth on this, and even tried to twist the clock to try to get to the Watsonville only "solution," but then you chop the city of SLO in exchange, and the twist creates other problems. So there was no escape really.

By the way, I am impressed with just how integrated the Bay area is. It is not like LA County, which is far more ethnically segregated. I don't think the VRA will rear its ugly head in the Bay area, which kind of surprises me.

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Not a bad job with the south bay. I would try and not split Sunnyvale though. Keep Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino and the heavily Asian adjoining areas of San Jose together. In exchange you can grab more precincts along CA-85. Or pick up Campbell if you don't want to chop San Jose again. Though grabbing the Almaden Valley and putting it in the same district as Los Gatos and Saratoga would make a lot of sense.

I drew a more Asian district in the area, but it's not really necessary. The Vietnamese and Filipino heavy areas of eastern and southern San Jose don't go that well with the more upscale Asian areas of the western valley anyways.

I like your OC districts. What is the Asian VAP of the 40th?

As to what areas the 12th should take in SF, I think your chop may make more sense than what is there currently (and I am not sure how the commission drew it). I think those areas of SF might be more Filipino than Chinese, which is similar to Daly City. Though I am not familiar enough with the area to know for sure.

Hey, that is perfect sbane - just perfect. Yes, the map looks a bit uglier, but the population numbers work almost perfectly - no muni cuts at all, other than a precinct or two rounding error. It doesn't increase the Asian percentage much in CA-15 (maybe 50 basis points), but keeping ethnic nodes together all things otherwise being equal, is typically desirable. Here you get not only that (not that the Asian areas here are all that Asian, but they are a substantial minority), but it largely loses a municipal cut to boot.

So your suggestion is hereby adopted.  :)

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Oh, and here are the stats for CA-40:

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You seem to have a trapped precinct in East San Jose. :)

Man, you have good eyes, Lewis.  It's gone now. :)

The constitution requires that districts be numbered north to south.  The commission interpreted this to mean that districts are numbered based on the latitude of their northernmost point¹.  But if you are searching a map you tend to concentrate on the center of the district. 

There is one district (CD-8) that extends northward through the Owen Valley, but with most of the population in San Bernardino County, including 29 Palms is "north" of San Francisco and Oakland, and almost as far north as Sacramento.

Part of San Francisco County is in the bay almost to the San Rafael-Richmond bridge, so that San Francisco is "north" of Berkeley.

I have been told that someone pointed out that California has a northernmost point and indeed it is all District 1.

¹ Senate districts are numbered slightly differently, since odd-numbered and even-numbered districts elect a senator in alternate elections.  If a voter is moved from an odd-numbered district to an even-numbered district, they will help elect a senator in 2010 and 2012; but if they were moved from an odd-numbered to an even-numbered district, they would elect a senator in 2008 and 2014.  If the senator elected in 2008 was term-limited it would be illegal for such a voter to even have a senator who they had once voted for.

The commission placed the districts into odd and even groups based on the percentage of the population that overlapped current odd- and even-numbered districts, so as to "minimize" the number of disenfranchised and extrafranchised persons, and then applied the north to south rule.

Still, about 10% of the population will vote for 12 years of senatorial representation in a redistricting decade; and 10% will vote for 8 years of senatorial representation.  This 40% variation is much larger than the 0.8% deviation that bothered the judges in West Virginia, and because of the methodology used in drawing the districts the burden will fall on communities of interest that the commission identified.

Morgan Hill certainly can't be in a Santa Cruz district; there's no usable road through the mountains there, and to get from Morgan Hill or Gilroy to Santa Cruz you need to go through either Watsonville or San Jose.

Cupertino has more in common with Los Altos or Saratoga than it does with San Jose, whereas Campbell would fit better with the San Jose district than with the richer areas to its south. Demographically, Cupertino now has a large Asian majority, but income is probably a better indicator of communities of interest in the South Bay than race would be. It would be nice to simply switch Campbell with Cupertino (and the districts would look cleaner, too), but unfortunately Cupertino is significantly larger.

I'm not sure what Torie's HVAP numbers are for his CD 17, but I was expecting Watsonville to be with the Gilroy/Salinas/Hollister district. Then the question looms as to whether the district needs to extend into SJ and lose Monterrey to break 50% HCVAP.

You really are the King of racial gerrymanders, aren't you Mike?  :P

Anyhoo, one can't get to anywhere near 50% HCVAP for CA-17 (they are farm workers to a substantial degree), no matter how much you just trash the map to try to get there, ignoring every other factor.

I have 3 maps below, one my existing lines for CA-17, one that does an extra county chop, and ups the Hispanic percentage by about 3 points, and then finally, the cf  Hispanic max pack version excrescence going where no man has gone before. Which would you pick, Mike?  :)

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Do you like this version of CA-15 better, Xahar, with its chop of Cupertino?  Yes, you are right, Cupertino has twice the median income of Campbell (140K versus 70K).  But it does not help the Asian "cause," because CA-15 is more Asian than CA-14 of course. The Asian VAP percentages with this chop are 17% for CA-14, 29.5% for CA-15 (down from 32% with my version), and 42.7% for CA-16. But in addition to furthering along the class warfare metric, the Cupertino chop also makes the map less erose. I am inclined to accept Xahar's suggestion, unless someone changes my mind. When it comes to the Bay area, I do listen more than when it comes to my neck of the woods in Socal (where I think I know next to everything). :)

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The second, I think. -_- Though my name is not Mike.

I am very sensitive to where VRA attacks on a map might emerge. ;) I was curious to see that the CA Commission didn't ask about racially polarized voting in the Salinas area. The population is certainly enough to get well above 50% HVAP, and in some areas of the state upper 50's translates to a CVAP majority, but I don't know if 50% CVAP is in reach there. In any case the issue of whether 50% HCVAP is needed to elect a candidate of choice if there is sufficient control in the primary is an unanswered question on the national stage.


My concept was most similar to your map 3. I would leave a corridor along the coast, since I wouldn't want to mess up your nice work down south by creating a barrier between Monterey and Santa Cruz.

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Opinionated little intermeddling Kraut, aren't you Lewis, and you have not even a lawyer. :)

We shall see what the rest of the crowd thinks, and why. Xahar is right about CA-14 not being able to get to Morgan Hill, so with this version, CA-15 would need to snake down to pick up Morgan Hill, going through an unpopulated zone to get there (a natural barrier, which we like to use as CD border country where possible), making it look like a bit of an elongated siphon. That is not the end of the world, but is it really worth those 3 extra Hispanic points?

It isn't Mike, trust me. I drained the swamp dry. Nothing is left. The CVAP for this little VRA monster I bet is closer to something like 40%, maybe a tad higher - no more. You don't really think the courts would require this VRA monster to actually be drawn do you?

Your version does less to trash the map overall, requiring major surgeries all over the place, but it does drop the Hispanic percentage by one or two points. What I drew was the  max pack, saying F it to everything else, just as a masturbatory exercise.

I still stand by this comment, of course:

There would also be the question whether the most hispanic sections of San Jose are any sort of CoI with Watsonville and the Salinas Valley, as opposed to other parts of that I believe fairly integrated city.

I took a peek at MALDEF's version for that area and they claim 45% HCVAP. Their map is pretty similar to mine, so I'm guessing I have about the same.

Here's the legal problem I see. SCOTUS said that you have to meet the Gingles test to claim a section 2 violation. That includes a majority minority in a compact area and racially polarized voting. In Bartlett they said that a majority meant a voting age majority of a single group. They punted on the citizen question. I see a door left open for a voting age majority in the area, yet a sub 50% amount in a specific district as long as the single group had the opportunity to elect a candidate of choice. The Dems made this type of case in their IL legislative map, and they prevailed in court last month. But you're the lawyer, so you tell me if a court would go there in CA.

I don't see these conditions met in the area. I'd content myself with drawing a (not VRA-mandated) "Hispanic influence" district... but even that does mean you don't let Watsonville lie just outside it without very very good reason.

I think there is a good possibility they would be met. There is a 50% HVAP population that can be placed in the district, as evidenced by both Torie's map and my own. Polarized voting was identified by teh Commission in the Central Valley as well as in LA county, so I think there is a reasonable expectation that it might be present here as well, though it was not tested. That would satisfy Gingles/Bartlett, and leaves only the question as to whether 45% HCVAP is sufficient elect a candidate of choice in a primary and then general election.

I am fine with this map. Lowers the Asian % even more though, but that's not hugely important. Mike Honda would easily get through a primary here. And this creates a middle class district in the Silicon Valley. Then again the other district contains Mountain View, which has a similar income to Sunnyvale and Santa Clara. If we drop the pretense of having a high Asian % district, you can just add Mountain view to the 15th, and get rid of the chop in Cupertino, add the parts of SJ adjacent to Cupertino (similar incomes I think) to the 14th as well as the Almaden Valley. That would create a better middle of the road district though the 14th would still have all of Santa Cruz so it can't be a wholly upper class district in any case. The map you drew might just be a compromise of all these variables.

I assume that a perfectly valid interpretation would use the geographic center or center of population as the point to determine latitude. If so, the geographic center makes more sense than the northernmost point. As CA-8 illustrates, using an extremum of the district as the point of measurement can result in unexpected outcomes due to long extensions in the preferred direction.

I have no special expertise when it comes to this VRA stuff really, lawyer though I am, sadly.  But there is nothing "compact" about racing into central city San Jose via a long pencil line along a Freeway, and I don't think any court in the world would require that. That is ludicrous. So we can't get to 50% HVAP, and that is not going to be enough to elect an Hispanic in any event. I am just not doing it. Sorry.

So then the issue is whether there is a significant risk a court would demand that a CA-17 as drawn below would be required. Absent someone persuading me that it is, I am not drawing it either. None of these maps are remotely justifiable absent a VRA requirement that they be drawn.

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Moving right along, does the map below turn anyone on?  It tri-chops San Jose, but further facilitates the class warfare concept, while keeping erosity under control. The Asian percentage drops a point or so in CA-16, but the Hispanic percentage goes up a couple of percent, probably leaving about the same the percentage of Asians of the whole who actually vote in CA-16.

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In other news, drawing Contra Costa County is an absolute nightmare. I suspect a Solano based CD will need to cross a couple of bridges in two separate salients into Contra Costa to make it work, while consuming that  long leg down river of Sacto County to "secure" the second bridge into eastern and rather rural Contra Costa.

This is one way to do it. The other way is the one I posted on page 5. That one has less county splits. This might do a better job of keep communities of interest together. It also leads to a split of Oakland (though it's not a lot of people) while the other map doesn't.
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Not all that different than mine, Sbane. As I said, it is cf city. I would post mine, but my Bradlee utility crashed again. It does so, more and more, as I complete more CD's in CA. When it is up again, I will put up my version, and we can discuss it further. Each of our versions has its merits and demerits. My version has a minor little chop into the town in which you grew up. :P

Are you getting error messages when it crashes? I have been, and I'm curious if yours are the same as mine. :(

No it just freezes, sometimes corrupting my data file at the same time. It is just so much fun!

And here is my little East Bay effort. I will be reluctant to part with my shape of CA-09, which just maps so perfectly, but I am open here to good advice. There is no good solution to the Contra Costa mess. I did make sure there were roads connecting stuff, sometimes rather minor ones. :)  CA-10 is white middle class heaven, although it voted 65% Obama. :P  It sets up a Solano CD however, as potentially an Hispanic influence CD at least. The blacks seems to have largely decamped from the Bay area.


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The eastern parts of Contra Costa shouldn't be put in the 10th. It can rather pick up other areas closer to it like Bay Point or Pittsburg. Use the eastern parts of Contra Costa for a Bay Area exurban district. Connecting it to San Joaquin makes the most sense. Or to Solano depending on how many people you need in that district.

We shall see whether they are enough white/Asian people left near the Bay in the NW corner of Contra Costa, to excise the east CC salient from CA-10. If it isn't? It really needs to be all or nothing.

Addendum: and the answer is that there are not. We are 63,000 folks short, and cutting to the east along the Sacto River/SF Bay estuary enters heavily Hispanic territory. Now what?

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This is the opinion of the DC district court in the Texas preclearance trial as to what the standard for measuring retrogression under Section 5 is:

http://tinyurl.com/74ppdvv

No, you need to add Pittsburg, which is northeast of CA-10 to the district and take it out of the Brentwood area. And you can add Hispanics and Blacks too, not just Whites and Asians......

I.E., slashing into Hispanic-dom, in lieu of all those white people in the eastern salient of CC? Why, sbane?

There's not going to be a Hispanic district out there, or at least I'd like to see how it is. No need to put central valley areas into a suburban district just because those areas aren't as Hispanic.

Chopping down to Monterey is butt-ugly, and I'd avoid it if I could. Seems like Morgan Hill (which, hilariously, is not named for a hill named for a guy whose surname was Morgan, but instead is named for a guy whose first name was Morgan and whose surname was Hill :D ) is much more of a common suburb these days, and is just 34% Hispanic (versus 58% in Gilroy and 82% in Watsonville), so I suppose I prefer the arrangement that puts it in the 16th.

Seems I wasn't too clear by what I meant by trichop of San Jose. Oh well. If noone else can even see my issue with the 14th as drawn, then it probably isn't that important. Consider that objection withdrawn.

I always figured Morgan Hill was named after the prominent hill next to the town, but apparently that's called El Toro, not Morgan Hill. Now I know.


Ideally a chop of Cupertino wouldn't be necessary, but if it is, that's where it should be. I like sbane's idea of putting Mountain View in with the 15th in exchange for Cupertino and Almaden. That knob in the westernmost part of San Jose that juts out south of Cupertino and north of Saratoga is where I live; if all of Cupertino and Saratoga are to be in one district, that part of San Jose should be there also.

It's interesting that sbane's suggestion would essentially make one district running along 280 and 85 and another more generally aligned with 101. I think that makes sense.

This is a section 5 decision and would be applicable to districts that impact Kings, Merced, Monterey, and Yuba.

A big part of the decision distinguishes between ability districts under section 5 and opportunity districts under section 2. I read this as saying coalitions and crossover voting can be considered in preclearance jurisdictions, though they are not generally applicable for section 2. It also implies that if there is evidence of polarized voting there, one would need a host of statistics to determine if the existing district is an ability district and to determine if the new district retrogresses it in any way.

The balance of the CA map is done!  I got screen shots of Nocal, and the Bay-Sacto area before I hit the save-as button, and that caused my software to freeze. It does that often now when I try to save the data, presumably because the file is so big. Fortunately, except for a couple of minor things (including the CA-01 label sitting somewhere in Socal :)).  

Comments as always are welcome. I have no real idea what the partisan numbers are. I can't see them unless I go to full screen, which causes crashes more often. It is probably best that way, anyway. We will look at the partisan numbers after we agree on a map, or agree to disagree. I have shown some flexibility, and thank Sbane, Muon2, and Lewis for their comments so far. They have been quite helpful. Keep them coming!

The constraints are very, very tight. It took a lot of work to avoid ugly chops - a lot of work. CA-01 and CA-02 are drawn the way they are, because I wanted to keep CA-01 out of the Central Valley. I wanted but one mountain-coastal CD to chop into the Central Valley, and that has to be CA-02 (more actually it chops into the mountain region, to round out its population). Contra Costa County was just a terrible headache to manage. I did the best I could.

All of the City of Sacramento is in CA-05 by the way. And the cut of CA-04 into Sacto County, is based on that cut almost perfectly taking but one town, the city of Citrus. Then I had CA-05 take the territory to the west of Citrus, and CA-03 take the territory to the east. One thing led to another.

I am using CD labels, which most closely match the old map CD numbers. I won't correct them until my charts are all done, so I know I am comparing apples to apples, as to what changed, even if the applies are of different varieties, as it were, because the lines changed of course.

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OK, here are more zoom shots, showing the cuts. I did switch out couple of precincts involving CA-11, because I noticed that there was no road leading from San Joaquin to east Contra Coasta across the Sacto River estuary swamp, so I fixed it. That river delta region by the way that creates the barrier between San Joaquin and Contra Costa is great house boating country. You rent a house boat, turn on the motor, and chug along, with next to nobody around. You get a lot of peace and quiet and privacy, and nobody, but nobody, knows what you are doing on the house boast.  :P. That is my kind of vacation. :)

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I see you still have precincts in Antioch in the 10th. I would exchange them for the extreme western parts of the 11th. Did you do it because those precincts are relatively white for the area? Does this help you make a Hispanic influence district. What are the racial stats for the 11th?

Otherwise where you really need more robust Hispanic districts is in the Central Valley. What are the racial stats for the 20th, 21st and the 22nd?

Yes, it is a race thing, and no, it does not create an Hispanic influence CD, as it turns out. It just unites middle class whites in Contra Costa, at the cost of some erosity, and "unites" the Sacto estuary as it were a bit more. I don't feel strongly about it. Do you want me to switch it out? It will make CA-11a bit  more Pubbie (I deliberately have no idea if CA-11 as I drew it is in partisan play in any event - I suspect not).  :P

Good luck with that Sbane. CA-20 is the Hispanic CD, drawn to the max (about 60% VAP Hispanic). The other two are lower, but I don't know the exact figures, because my software crashed again.  Geography is a cruel mistress. I would be amazed if you can find an alternative which might actually be required by the VRA, and/or, is otherwise remotely desirable. Hispanics don't vote much in the Central Valley by the way. That is why Kern is 60% McCain, even though it is about 45% Hispanic or something. Tulare is the same story.

You can draw a more Hispanic district I think. You certainly are stranding Bakersfield Hispanics and they are being outvoted. What you need to do is have CA-19 get rid of Merced County (or at least the Hispanic parts) and put that in the 20th, freeing up more Hispanic precincts in Fresno County for another Hispanic district. Say we use CA-21 for that purpose, we can add the rural Hispanics in Fresno, Kings and Tulare with Bakersfield to create another Hispanic district. The map will get uglier, but if there is one area in California where the VRA actually serves a purpose, it's the central valley.

Go ahead and draw the map Sbane, exchanging precincts between  CA-22 and CA-21.  We will see what it looks like. If the VRA does not require it however, because it will be an erose mess, it won't be in my map. The VRA in my view, should be limited to what a court would actually require, when it otherwise trashes communities of interest. All the Hispanics in Fresno ( I racially chopped Fresno) have been used (Hispanics in Fresno actually vote more of course) to create the 60% Hispanic CA-20 CD. So they are not available for your little plan. They can't vote twice. :)  I might add that my modest little Tulare chop into Fresno in the Coalinga area is not all that Hispanic. That was deliberate, as part of my draw of Hispanic CA-20. Add that area to CA-20, and the Hispanic percentage will go down there.

And when you cut the Hispanics in Bakersfield out of CA-22, where will CA-22 get its precincts in exchange I wonder? Are you going to chop Tulare to shreds too? Draw the map, so that I can trash it!  :P

I'm not sbane, but with Kings and Merced on the section 5 list I put together my version of a split. It turns out there are some very nice county groupings in the southern Central Valley that each equal 2 CDs. I've even used your Kern SE split. :)

I recognize that there is an ugly bit at the northern part of Tulare into Visalia. I figure you have to shift lines northward anyway to compensate for the cut into LA county from Ventura which I did not assume in my map.

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Much better, I think. This is an area where not drawing two Hispanic-electing districts again is going to be considered illegal. And yes, drawing them does require quite a bit of seeming erosity. The communities of interest are clear anyways.

Agree with sbane on Antioch.

What would it look like to get Redding in the second and that district's southwestern parts into the first instead? Sounds like that might be better, but also might not, depending on just how far you need to go. (Or you go into the populated parts of Yolo again and redraw the 7th, 5th, 3rd and 4th as a result. That is also an option.)

Santa Barbara and western Ventura is nowhere to be seen in your screens. Is the district line the county line all the way through?

Little as I know about the finer points of LA County geography, that 33rd is butt ugly. What would be the consequences of exchanging its northwestern part with the southern part of the 35th?

I remain deeply unconvinced of the whole SD map. If it's fine with muon and sbane then it shall stand, of course, but to me the pairing of SD's Hispanic southern suburbs with Imperial, while better than all the alternatives, is bad enough and the Hispanic parts of central SD don't belong in the district unless that were necessary to make a solid HCVAP majority district. Which I'm quite confident it is not, Bob Filner's race notwithstanding. I'd put Coronado and the rest of Chula Vista and the empty parts of SD County in there instead, probably desert Riverside (and its huge penitentiary...) as well even though that is an additional county split. And yeah, I'm aware this has partisan consequences.

Everything else, I'd vote to approve right now as a backbench commission member from the Democratic pool.

I tried loading California an hour ago to resolve those questions of mine... it froze on me. :(

I've been thinking about this same issue for a while. I would think that the Imperial Valley and Coachella Valley are a natural pair (minus Palm Springs) and by following I-10 west and then cutting south to Perris one should get a solid Hispanic majority district. That leaves the Chula Vista area as a coalition district with less than 50% HCVAP but less than 20% white.

I'll defer to Torie's expertise on SoCal as to why this wouldn't work to fix the ugly CA-51.

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Coachella and (only to an extent) Indio do fit, but I'm not convinced of anything further west. I'd really need the app to load here. :(

Thank you for your comments Gentlemen.

1. CA-33 is an Hispanic CD (61% Hispanic), and has to drawn that way to get that Hispanic percentage.

2.  I way back when resisted tying Imperial to Hispanic San Diego, but if you excise it, 1) the San Diego Hispanic CD is only 56%-57% Hispanic (not enough really), and 2) the second Coachella Valley-Moreno Valley CD is butt ugly, and only 60% Hispanic, also not enough in that part of the world just packed with illegals to elect an Hispanic. So, I accepted what the Commission did here (I know more about what the commission did in this part of the state, and was wondering just how much the Pubbie pocket was picked, and thus this exercise).

Moreover, by going the way of the Commission on this, the remaining options become more similar. If you do a 150,000 person clockwise twist of the map, it is a whole new ballgame, and will make it harder to compare the choices made between "our" map, and the Commission's map.  We want to see just where the Dem operatives got their pound of flesh, through their front person shills, and just how egregious it was, if at all. Doing that big twist, will make that more difficult to assess, defeating the point of the exercise.

3. My shape of the South central valley CD's collectively is just about exactly the same as Muon2's. What Muon2 did is effect Sbane's desire to exchange precincts between Tulare and Kern to create another "Hispanic" CD. I will draw it, and we can further discuss if the VRA really requires it. If it doesn't, I just don't see why it should be done myself. It is not as if, one is cherry picking precincts to get the Hispanic percentage up was within a county or something also Fresno, but rather splitting two otherwise basically whole counties, taking on a lot of miles. I don't like it, and then the issue is if the Hispanic percentage is enough to elect a candidate of "their" choice, whatever that means. With Fresno, and a higher Hispanic voting incidence there, plus getting up to 60% Hispanic, that probably is enough to elect a candidate of their choice.

4. As I noted above, if CA-01 does not take Redding, it must go into the Central Valley, and that is a no-no. In fact, in 10 more years, there will probably be a great northern CA CD just like there will be in Minnesota. The population growth up in the far north is tepid. As it was, CA-01 needed to take all of Napa, to avoid going all the way to Lake Tahoe.

5. Muon2 didn't vote, but I will do the Antioch thing that you guys want. I really am ambivalent myself.

6.  CA-23 takes the northwest quadrant of Ventura County (Ventura and Ojai basically, all of SB County, and the southern half of SLO County). I will put up a zoom of it, along with Fresno (I meant to do the latter, but screwed up, and then my software crashed; to get it back up I have to reboot my whole computer, reload the DRA software for some reason, and then wait 10 minutes at least for my data to load if it does not freeze during the process, all of which takes time).

7. Lewis, if you ever get the map up, I urge you, like myself, not to look at the partisan numbers, until you have already made a firm decision as to where the lines should be. We both are just too partisan really to be "trusted" with such data as it were, and too clever not to think up rationalizations furthering our little partisan agendas, yes we are. :P

There is of course the question whether black vs latino block voting is anywhere as prevalent as white vs latino block voting in the Central Valley - where it is very much an issue, and no, there is no question that it should take prevalence over county lines (if necessary, and as long as you're staying in the Valley).
The 2007 by-election in the current 37th was won by the Black candidate over the initially favored Hispanic candidate (talking of the primary of course) thanks in part to low turnout... but the relevant bit is she wasn't challenged again. Richardson's two primary challengers in 2008 not only were both jokes that didn't get any votes, but were also both Black as well. (Yeah, I dug back into the thread to see that the 35th is a Black Pack.)

I notice you only comment on Muon's map, not on my suggestion. :P

What suggestion of yours did I fail to comment upon Lewis?  I didn't mean to ignore you.  :)

You edited that post while I was replying to it. Not that your reply on that point is particularly helpful. :)

Why is it a big no-no that the Napa Valley be in the same CD as the areas to its immediate east? I don't get it. Obviously getting the district go all the way to say Yuba City would be a lot worse than drawing Redding into it (this is from the point of view of Yuba City or Redding, really) - hence the question of how far it would have to go. I guess I could probably answer that myself without the DRA... and yeah, the big northern district, with Napa and Lake placed with Solano, might also be an alternative.

Because without Napa being in CA-01, then CA-01 has to go into the Central Valley, or go all the way to Lake Tahoe. I wanted to avoid that. You can call the southern salient of CA-01 the wine and cannabis CD if you like. Both the grapes and the bud up there are just excellent. :)

Having looked it up, Shasta County is not all that much smaller than Yolo, and obviously Solano also needs to pick up population. So, you know what? I drop that objection.

Here is the Antioch fix.

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And here are zooms of CA-23 and CA-20.

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The more significant part appears to be the DOJ rejecting any sort of percentage test, and instead demanding districts based on the election outcomes.  In Texas, this may mean that you add more Blacks to Hispanic districts since they are more likely to vote for the Hispanic candidate of choice (ie Democrat) than Hispanic voters, so long as there are not so many Blacks as to control the primary.

However, they weren't rejecting it for section 2 cases, only section 5. A percentage test could be OK in and of itself for establishing a section2 district. Even for section 5 the court said that a percentage test was a starting point for considering the outcome, but other factors must be included as well.

That distinction makes a state like CA more complicated since there are only four counties with section 5 coverage, but all with section 2.

Section 5 is the pre clearance, and Section 2 is what the courts go by, is that correct?  Suppose per Section 5, the DOJ demands a minority CD, but it is not required under Section 2, where it is a percentage rather than an outcomes game apparently. Will the court reverse the DOJ, or does Section 5 take precedence over Section 2, and what we have are two different legal standards, with potentially different final legal outcomes?  Can someone help me with this? What are the 4 Section 5 counties in CA?

Can someone help a confused old man me with this? :)

This exact issue will be resolved today.

Travis County plaintiffs acknowledge that TX-25 is not a S2 district. Yet they are still claiming that it is a S5 district, thus making S5 a stronger standard than S2.


John Roberts will certainly be irate with that interpretation.

Here (http://txredistricting.org/post/15561146468/a-viewers-guide-to-the-supreme-court-case) is a pretty good summary of what SCOTUS is facing in the Perez case. I don't see anything though about the differing legal standards between Section 2 and Section 5,and what the end game is. It seems more to involve procedural stuff.

Kings
Merced
Yuba
Monterey

The confused old men (and women) of the SCOTUS will explain it (the most confused of all, Justice Kennedy will provide the definitive explanation).

This is the CATO Institute amicus brief which addresses the conflict between the two sections

http://tinyurl.com/d9uuh8t

This is the exact line from the DC court.



In a ruling critical for Travis County - and Lloyd Doggett - the panel distinguished section 2 cases, holding that states are not obligated to draw crossover districts, with protection of existing crossover districts under section 5:



[F]reedom from an obligation to create a crossover district under Section 2 does not equate to freedom to ignore the reality of an existing crossover district in which minority citizens are able to elect their chosen candidates under Section 5.

And the San Antonio court.

Further, under the more stringent
requirements of Section 5, the presence of such districts is relevant for the Section 5
retrogression analysis. See id. at 1249 (citing LULAC v. Perry, 548 U.S. 399, 446 (2006)
(Kennedy, J.) (noting that the presence of districts “where minority voters may not be able to
elect a candidate of choice but can play a substantial, if not decisive, role in the electoral
process” is relevant to the Section 5 analysis). In keeping with the goals of maintaining the
status quo and complying with Section 5 in drawing this map, the Court has preserved district
25 as a crossover district.




The concept of crossover districts was dissolved for the purposes of S2. It should now be dissolved for the purposes of S5.

All four of these had military bases.  In the case of Monterey (Fort Ord) and Merced (Castle AFB) the military bases were BRAC'ed a decade ago.

California had a literacy test.  At the time the test for Section 5 coverage was made, the California Supreme Court had enjoined use of the literacy test since it was in English only, and California repealed the law soon after.

Because most of the soldiers were young and temporarily resident they did not vote in those counties, if at all, nor bother with the goofy procedure of faxing to the Census Bureau proof that they had voted elsewhere.  The four counties failed the participation test (based on turnout vs. CVAP).  This didn't happen in San Diego and Orange County, since while the military bases are quite large, they are not as relatively large to the overall population.

Merced County may have missed meeting the threshold because the census bureau overestimated the CVAP (by assuming that all migration was by citizens).

Twenty years later, Monterey County was considering deliberately including Fort Ord and Soledad Prison in a Salinas Valley commissioners district, because the soldiers still did not vote and those in the prison could not vote, but they would pump up the total population and also make the minority population share higher.

Now Section 5 is used as a cudgel to derail other elections, including the 2005 special statewide election, and the special election to replace Abel Maldonado - in that case there was a deliberate attempt to deny the Central Coast senate representation during passage of the budget.  So much for voting rights.

Section 5 is based on:

(1) Presumption of guilt - covered States and entities must prove their innocence;
(2) Corruption of blood - covered States and entities are designated based on elections nearly 50 years ago (while in hellholes like Hawaii, Washington, and Minnesota relative voter participation by minorities is much worse than for Anglos)
(3) Infringement of State sovereignty.

In oral arguments (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/us/texas-voting-rights-case-goes-before-supreme-court.html?_r=1&hpw) on Perez, Kennedy does not like Section 5, and Roberts complained about the Hobson's choice presented in a law, that frankly is just a mess at this point. The article really gives no clue as to how the conservative 5 plan to drain the swamp, or whether they will drain it at all.  They clearly hate this case.  I sympathize.

The fun part was when Roberts asked when the DC district court would issue its ruling on preclearance, and then asked when the Supreme Court would rule on the appeal of that order.

The commission map's Hispanic district from Imperial to SD is 50%HCVAP so it really should be drawn. The other option is to go into exurban Riverside County which is just as bad and probably doesn't even get you to 50%HCVAP in any case. So I think this is the right way to go.

I drew two Hispanic districts in the central valley, one that extends from Merced to Fresno at 59% HVAP and another with Bakersfield, all of Kings County and parts of rural Fresno as well as Tulare. That one is at 64%HVAP and probably 48-49%HCVAP. That can be boosted up to 50%HCVAP but at the expense of the other Hispanic district. This is not the same as the one I posted on page 5 though, and I would post it here but the app crashed before I could save it. Oh well.

I agree about the 1st having to take Redding and not going into the Central Valley. It's not ideal, but it's the best choice. Sort of like the Imperial-SD district.

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Here is what I drew in the Central Valley. The 20th is 65%HVAP and the 18th is 59%HVAP.

Sbane, you think a court would require that the southern Central Valley Hispanic CD be drawn, which isn't going to elect an Hispanic anyway? 

Well, it's close to 50%HCVAP. It doesn't matter if it's going to elect an Hispanic, but whether a candidate of their choice is elected. The commission did draw this map, and you would have to do the same to avoid a legal challenge. What the ultimate result of that legal challenge would be I cannot say. But it is clear that there is racially polarized voting in the Central Valley, most especially in the Bakersfield area, so if a district can be drawn that is 50%HCVAP or close to it, I would go ahead and do it.

Is there any evidence that Hispanics vote at a lower rate in the Central Valley, as opposed to just being more illegal or recent immigrants than the California average? It takes a 70% Hispanic district to get to 50%HCVAP here, whereas in most of Socal all you need is about 65-66%, and in the SGV just 62% suffices. That might be why you think Hispanics don't vote here. But if a 50%HCVAP district can be drawn, and being relatively compact like the one I have drawn, I see no reason not to draw it.

It deserves study.  I doubt your Kern based Hispanic CD is anyway near 50% HCVAP, and yes, the turnout levels are lower I strongly suspect. Or is your Kern CD the one that is 65% Hispanic VAP?  Maybe Muon2 has an opinion of the degree of legal risk. If he makes a reasonable case on that that the legal risk is more than remote, then you have your Pub vote anyway, and I guess "our" commission will end up drawing something (although hopefully not as ugly as your map).  :)

Yes, the Kern CD is 65%HVAP and probably about 48% HCVAP. The commission map is 66%HVAP and 49%HCVAP. They contain roughly the same sort of areas, Bakersfield and rural areas but not Fresno proper. BTW, didn't Muon already draw something that is roughly similar to what I drew?

Yes, but that does not necessarily mean that he thinks it is legally necessary, or that he would draw it as a Pub on the Commission. Muon2 just gets his rocks off drawing these erose little racial gerrys.  Some of them have been just awe inspiring. :)

You cheated by looking at what the Commission did by the way. :P I have avoided doing that outside the LA ring, way back when.

Nah I drew it then I looked. And of course I look to see just how Hispanic a district needs to be made to get it up to 50%HCVAP. Again I really don't see why this is more erose than that U shaped monstrosity you drew in LA County. If my district was going all the way into Salinas, then you could say it is erose. A Hispanic district based in the southern Central Valley is not what I would consider to be erose. Considering the level of racially polarized voting in the area, I don't see how you can justify not drawing two Hispanic districts here.

Central Valley Hispanics have a heavy farm worker (and thus illegal) component to them.

Indeed, which is why to get to a 50% HCVAP district, you need a 70%+ Hispanic district. In most of California it is closer to about 64-65%

Most of them probably don't even know about non-Presidential elections.

Inside a city, erosity bothers me less, and that particular CD's erosity (CA-33) was driven by the black pack CD in any event. CA-33 I think is mandated in fact by the VRA, even if the black pack CD might not. I could play with Carson, to make it look prettier (that is the key to the erosity), but that would hurt both the ethnic packs for both CD's if I did so. I tried to play with it, due to the matter to which you refer, and was forced to abandon the exercise. Plus we know that the black pack CD would continue to wane, while the Hispanic pack CD will continue to wax over the coming decade.

I finally have the 2010 CA data working on my computer! :D

I don't have CVAP data, but I can use MALDEF's plan to estimate the ratio between HVAP and HCVAP in the Central Valley. The draw two districts with over 50% CVAP. The Fresno district was 61.6% HVAP to get 50.1% HCVAP, and the Kings/Kern district was 65.2% HVAP to get 50.0% HCVAP. Their map is proof of principle that they can be drawn.

Kings and Merced are both section 5 so they will have preclearance hurdles for any districts that overlap them. In addition the commission found evidence of racially polarized voting and determined that the VRA would apply there. I think there must be two Central Valley districts that have the opportunity to elect candidates of choice for Hispanics.

I'll update my earlier offerings for that area with new data soon.

This isn't going very well for me is it?  :P  And then the issue is given the HVAP CD's can be drawn, are they legally mandated? What are the legal risks? Can this excrescence be described an hewing together "compact" communities of interest? And suppose given my map design (I am not saying this is the case), we can't reach the 50% HVAP percentage? Do we then redraw the whole state to create one extra 50% HVAP CD? Even that percentage may well not be enough to actually elect an Hispanic. It may still elect an Anglo Pubbie. 

I don't have anything to add (the southwestern part of Santa Clara County is the only part of the world that I know particularly well), but it amuses me that "erose" is a word that everyone uses now.

Anyone know the new PVI of CA-25?

It's been studied. That's what we were trying to get through to you all along. Any other setup - except possibly upping the Hispanic percentage by splitting up Modesto as well - is DOA. Quite. Honestly so, even.

Here's my version of a Kings/Kern/Tulare district. It has 65.3% HVAP and should exceed 50% HCVAP based on MALDEF's calculations. As drawn it should withstand any section 2 or 5 challenge. I think ant HVAP over 65% in this area is likely to survive, and the commission recognized that. Less than 65% HVAP and there is significant legal risk IMO.

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OK, I will draw the district. I have been beaten up enough!  :)

Well, the dirty deed is done, and like Lady Macbeth, I have nightmares even while awake that I many never be able to cleanse the noisome stain from my sanguinary deed off of my hands. I really hated to do this. The map of Kern and Tulare is truly disgusting. CA-21 is 66.2% HVAP, and I got CA-20 up to 60.0% HVAP by nipping it into Merced County (to grab Dos Palos), while CA-21 in turn nips into Fresno County to pick up a few rather Anglo precincts (in lieu of Coalinga).  

Is everyone "happy" with the map now? Any more comments? If not, we shall commence to prepare the matrix grid charts.


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I'm afraid I'm still worried about the CV. Merced is one of the section 5 counties and it seems like you've put all of it in an Anglo district. I think you'll have to link Merced to the Hispanic portion of Fresno to solve both Merced's section 5 issues as well as Fresno's section 2 situation. 61.5% HVAP gets it to a safe legal status. The commission thinks you'd be fine with anything over 50% HVAP, but MALDEF disagrees.

The best plan with the least splits is to take Merced and link it to Madera city and only split Fresno city. My version of that has 62.0% HVAP.

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Why in this context is 61.5% HVAP "safe?" You are deleting from the Fresno Hispanic CD a bunch of Hispanic precincts, and then going to Merced County to make them up. Under Section 5 (which may not be long for this world, having read the transcript of the Perez oral arguments, but I digress), Merced Hispanics need to be represented by Hispanics, even at the cost of Fresno Hispanics being represented by an Anglo, and no additional Hispanic CD is created?  For what it is worth, the old Merced based CD per the Almanac of American Politics was 46.7% Hispanic population, so not remotely in an Hispanic CD.

In looking at the Commission numbers, where in their map Merced is appended to Fresno Hispanics like you did, I see that their Fresno Hispanic based CD, it is 58.01% Hispanic population, while my Fresno based Hispanic CD, which goes south rather than north, is 64.6% Hispanic population. (The numbers in the southern valley Hispanic CD are almost the same as mine (my CA-21), 70.6% Hispanic population, versus 71.3% Hispanic population for mine.) So are we supposed to substantially dilute an Hispanic CD so that it takes in Merced per Section 5, or chop Merced along with everything else (which the Commission didn't really do), shoving some Fresno Hispanics into an Anglo CD?

Addendum:  I "see" that there are but a handful of "trapped" Hispanic precincts in Merced in any event. It is just not all that Hispanic really.

The idea that it might be legally safe was by using the HVAP to HCVAP numbers from the MALDEF plan. I concluded that 61.5% HVAP results in 50.0% HCVAP. That's going to be fine for the polarized voting in Fresno under section 2.

Merced is now in a district that is 47.2% HVAP according to the 2010 Census. Reducing that number would be a red flag for section 5. The commission chose to up it to 52.9%, but also placed the Hispanics in southern Fresno county in the Kings district with a 65.9% HVAP. It follows the similar pattern as the current districts and I presume is intended to avoid any vote dilution claims.

MALDEF advocated for a more aggressive plan which put Merced with central Modesto and Stockton at 48.5% HVAP. That covers section 5 there, and left room for two additional CV districts that exceeded 50% HCVAP - one with Madera and Fresno and one with Kings and Bakersfield.

You see that both plans decided to increase the HVAP for Merced to meet section 5 and both got an opportunity district for at least part of the Fresno Hispanic population to meet section 2. Given the shape of you map, I thought your easiest out was to meet both standards in a single district that represents an improvement on the 2000 map for the populations concerned.

I see a similar type of thinking has gone into section 5 concerns in Monterey. The current district is 44.2% HVAP and the commission made sure to exceed that in their district. Their commentary makes clear that they even took a slice of Gilroy, splitting the community, just to make the new district 44.4% HVAP.

Thank you for your comments, Mike. They were quite helpful.

Does this map make you happier Mike?  CA-20 is now 63.2% HVAP, with the Hispanic Merced folks now "liberated."  I strongly doubt that in exchange for eschewing  an extra 3 Hispanic points, that keeping Merced whole and not shoving a bunch of Fresno Hispanics into an Anglo CD in Fresno, and making a further hash of the map (including slashing municipalities here, there and everywhere), is required under Section 5 (or that the DOJ would demand it), but I understand, it is not the Commission's job to take a legal risk that is more than remote. I am also reasonably confident that SCOTUS will rule that at the end of the day, Section 5 does not trump Section 2, and whether the map is ultimately found legal, will turn on Section 2, with the role of the DOJ considerably more truncated procedurally. The conservative 5 seem to be going in that direction. But that remains to be seen.

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I'm with you on section 5. I'm watching the TX case as that may put it to bed. But, until then, ...

Now that I have the software running, it seems only fair that I put an offering out for criticism as well. As you may have noted I think that commissions need constraints, and that a generic community of interest is not sufficient. I also think that the rules should be out before the map. So here's what I would use.

Districts must have equal population which means that they must be within 500 on the DRA.
The VRA must be followed as currently construed.
County splits should be minimized.
    -Counties larger than a district should have as many whole districts as possible.
    -Split counties should have no more than two districts not counting districts entirely within the county.
    -Smaller split counties should preserve the majority of the county in one district.
    -County splits should minimize municipal splits.
    -County splits should not reduce compactness of districts, nor create bizarrely shaped districts.

I have an algorithm that furthers the above goals.
    -Divide the state into regions of whole counties that are each within 0.5% of a whole number of districts.
    -Divide regions into subregions of whole counties that are each within 5% of a whole number of counties.
    -Divide each subregion into districts.

You are going to draw an entirely new map of CA Mike?  Man, that will be a project, but I salute you!

Please use screen shots, with municipal lines, and voting districts not hidden, so I can read and evaluate your maps more easily. I sometimes have trouble with that.

One other thing. In CA, geography/topography/water matters as much as county lines, and I suspect that if you follow your algorithm religiously, that your map will be flawed, and not really hew to communities of interest. Subjectivity cannot be entirely exorcised from this exercise. So a computer will not be able to draw your map after your input your constraints as it were. I would also keep Imperial appended to Hispanic San Diego, so we can get a better comparison with the Commission's map. Where it made a major decision, affecting the whole map, that is reasonable, I think it should be followed.

And yes, the south Central Valley part of my map sucks (it is not as if I spent hours refining it - I was just trying to "fulfill" your "demands" for purposes of discussion. :)). The Commission's version is probably better, although you don't like the lower Hispanic percentage in the Fresno Hispanic CD.

As to Fresno Hispanic percentage thing, has the DOJ signed off on the Commission's map, and is there any litigation pending? If with hindsight, it did not generate litigation, I think the lower percentage all other things being equal or actually in favor of doing so, should be accepted. The Commission's assessment of the legal risks proved correct in this instance.

Incredible what a difference in appearance one precinct can make sometimes. This is entirely superficial, but using the more southerly connector precinct looks so much worse.

That's part of why I drew it the way I did. Once I had achieved my goal for the VRA, I didn't push it. For example I didn't cut into Visalia, because it wasn't needed to create the ability district.

I overlooked my rules for contiguity which addresses some of the mountain and water issues.

Whole counties at the regional and subregional stages are considered contiguous if their county seats are connected by numbered state and federal roads without crossing into another county. Split county pieces are contiguous if the census block groups are contiguous by local roads and not point contiguous. A road that makes a border of a block district can provide contiguity for areas on either side of the road.


According to the commission the maps are still under DOJ review. After the DOJ issues an opinion groups will decide if they want to file VRA litigation. Until then I as a mapper remain cautious.

Are you using the block group DRA data base or the voting district data base? If the former, our maps will not "match."  What per your criteria prevents the north coastal CD from zipping into the Central Valley, which if you do, will just not fly no matter what other constraints you are using. That is an example of my skepticism that such an approach will prove workable. And sometimes doing an extra chop or two serves the greater good (beyond feeding the VRA monster).

Presumably the requirement that the map get votes from both parties constrains play partisan games, assuming the members are not flying under false partisan flags, and are reasonably competent (the charge here being that the Pub members were not).

Oh, and don't forget the class warfare angle, ala what evolved in my map in Silicon Valley, and how I drew the lines of the OC Gold Coast and LA westside CD's. Money is indeed a community of interest in California. :)

Are you also going to trash all my LA County CD's?  :P

I'm using the block groups, in part because that was what you originally had sent me for socal. They also tend to be smaller units than voting districts.

The northern end is an interesting problem. Reading the debate here and looking at past maps and public submissions leaves me with multiple opinions. If the Coast Range must be crossed the Humboldt to Shasta link seems as valid as one from Mendocino to Colusa. I can find advocates for both among Californians, and the commission didn't make the crossing. I'm trying to find proxies for communities of interest and taking sides on that one is not where I want to go in advance.

That same thinking applies to the cut of SF. I'm not going to preclude a link across the Golden Gate if that's where the path leads. In LA I have the advantage of the aforementioned districts from your file, and since they are generally within one county, made of whole municipalities and not bizarrely shaped, I expect that I will find myself drawing them in a similar way.

How did you manage to get the CA DRA software to start working for you?  I was never able to load the block group data myself.  Hey, there is one Hispanic voting district in San Jose with 70,000 people. :P

You must have had it working at one time, since the file you sent just after Christmas for SoCal loaded as a block group file. In any case, I found that part of the problem is finding the right wifi location. Once I found one where it would load, it's been fine at other locations that previously wouldn't load. I assume that it has to do with the files that go onto the specific computer. Of course I still save frequently as the map will freeze at inopportune times forcing a reload. :P

So here's the first step in my algorithm.

This first map creates four regions where each is within 1000 persons of a whole number of districts.
Northern: 10 districts (+940)
North Coast: 4 districts (-274)
Southern: 18 districts (-408)
South Coast: 21 districts (-257)

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Very small shifts between regions in a single county are all that are needed to achieve exact equality. But, looking at this map, I fear a section 5 problem in Monterey. It would be largely combined with SLO which would almost exactly be a whole district, but the Hispanic percentage would drop compared with the current district. Courts might rule that its OK, but the commission map suggests that legal advice is to not diminish the Hispanic percentage. As pretty as the numbers are for this split, I'm going to head for a second plan.

As with the first plan I start with LA because it is the largest county. Picking up the southern counties leads to a 3-way split. The deviations are a bit larger, but still within the 0.5% rule. Monterey is in the same region as the other counties currently used to satisfy section 5, so there's good reason to believe that it will hold up through the rest of algorithm. I'm sure that Torie won't like the crossing into the northern CV, but given my rule about use of the VRA leads me to this plan. Of course if someone else has another region split to suggest I'd be happy to consider it.

Northern: 8 districts (-3178)
Coastal: 14 districts (+2158)
South Coast: 31 districts (-1019)

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I don't think you are going to get any vote but yours for a plan that sets up that cut into the north central valley from the coast. You might rethink that. As I said, your constraints are just too tight.

The other regional map seems to allow Inyo and Mono to be appended to some central valley CD. That isn't going to happen either. They could be appended to the Anglo portion of a Kern based CD, but only in a pinch, and there had better be a damn good reason. That resort area is tied to the hip to Socal, not the Bakersfield dump, via that twisty road over the Tehachapis. Granted, we are only talking about 17,000 folks. Alpine's population is mostly centered on the west slope of of the mountains, but then it has almost no people. You could chop that county however, since no roads unite it, assuming it has more than one precinct. :)

As to your idea to remain flexible about crossing the Golden Gate, you will have an uphill battle convincing anyone to chop SF in half or something like that. It isn't going to happen. Now if SF were smaller than one CD, then going either north or south to pick up population would be OK.

Are all scientists as stubborn as you?  :)

In any event, the idea is to evaluate whether the Commission's choices were reasonable, and in particular whether the Pubs on it were really silly buggered by the Dems' gamesmanship, not if it met some Mike test about minimizing chops. The Commission is not a court subject to implementing some kind of Michigan law.

Good luck!  I have this vision, that if we were both Pubs on the Commission, we would be doing most of the talking, and fighting all the time, while the rest just sat back and enjoyed it all. :P

The South Carolina GOP has hired Paul Clement to take down Section 5 for good.

As to this bit, I have no quarrel at all. It is entirely appropriate. As I said, I drew that part of the map on the fly, without refining it.

The commission didn't go for a Humboldt to Shasta crossing and links from Lake to Colusa do exist in their version. As I noted other public submissions made the link all the way across Lake. I'm not convinced your plan gets more votes, but you can keep trying. ;)


I could shift Alpine and stay within my 0.5% rule. I just couldn't resist the near equality it gave in that location. And shouldn't I try for more equality? :) I haven't gone the next step to see where the Owen's valley would attach in that plan. Remember, I'm a lot less concerned with arbitrarily defined communities of interest, since I think they can be played by either side. Any given decade we'll one side or the other try to take advantage, why not reduce the chance?


Clearly one of the problems with the 4-region split is that it would prevent whole districts from being in either SF or San Mateo, and that would also lead me away from that plan. However my VRA constraint takes me to the 3-region plan, so it's not an issue. If I keep one CD in SF then we chop the same amount, so it's just a question of where.


Hypothesis, experiment, analysis, refine and repeat. :)

One other thing occurs to me. LA gets the bulk of its water from the Owens Valley. To append Owens to water competing Kern, is just totally unacceptable for that reason alone.

I don't think the Commission map impinged on the north central valley from the coast. In any event, the Commission eschewing that seems entirely reasonable to me, and to criticize them for not crossing the mountains to an area with which the north coast has nothing in common, seems entirely reasonable to me. The Central Valley has its own unique little issues and problems. So giving them demerits for taking that approach is just strange.

And chopping SF in half is just a cardinal sin. A chop in one place, just isn't the same as another. Frisco is a state of mind. They have a right to elect their own zany congressperson, without dilution from more prosaic types. Ditto Oakland and Berkeley. Just don't mess with them. Nobody in Sonoma
 will really mind if they are chopped (at least the way I did it), just because that is the way the map flowed. They don't give a damn. Really.

As to the matter, that we use these rigid tests to protect ourselves from a just go wild AZ type Commission, which while OK maybe for Iowa, certainly are not for CA, the answer to that, is that the law requires that any map be approved by at least one vote from each party. That is the check. Please respect it. I might add, from what I have seen, that with two or three potential exceptions, the Commission did in fact do a reasonable job, and that any partisan games were rather minor (and that due to the Pub establishment, I think (rather than a Pub Commission member flying under false colors), because they are dysfunctional and useless in general, and in this case just not being interested in what the Commission was doing until it was too late, maybe). That however is a tentative impression.

I'm not criticizing them, I'm just trying to establish a consistent reason to prefer one route over the Coast Range over the other. Failing that I leave both options equally open.

The 2011 commission map does not provide much guidance to answer my query, though they do extend west from the Valley to Lake. The 2001 Congressional plan links Humboldt to Yolo, while the 2001 Senate plan attaches Del Norte and Shasta to the Valley as far south as Sutter. That leads me to the conclusion that some Californians are not opposed to a link from the coast to the Valley. Therefore both options remain on the table for me.

No, the Central Valley that is otherwise whole slipping into the mountains (heck I did that in a minor way), is entirely different than a coastal based CD poaching into the Central Valley. The mountains themselves can go either way really. But the way I drew the map, the north coast CD was desperate for population, so it took all of the mountains (plus the Napa Valley), except those in the NE corner of the state.

I'm not objecting to the choice you made. Your justification for it is completely rational and it makes for a reasonable map. I'm saying there are other bases to make a choice and I don't see a neutral way of distinguishing them.

Let me again cite the current map. Someone drew CA-1 for some reason, and it is a coastal district that poaches the Central Valley around Davis. I'll concede that partisan considerations probably drove that choice, but it's a reason. The point is that the mountains are not the kind of psychological barrier that say the York-Lancaster line is in PA, preserved despite overt partisanship.

Another example is the submitted MALDEF plan (https://www.dropbox.com/s/17w14biaf2ucka1/MALDEF/MALDEF%20Congress/06282011_MALDEF_CD_Statewide.pdf) which I've studied to understand their take on the VRA. The VRA doesn't generally figure into Norcal, but it's included as part of the statewide plan. In that plan county lines are generally followed throughout Norcal, but they expand the current reach from the coast into the CV for CA-1. The adherence to county lines for them was rational, but led to a different choice linking the coast and CV.

To me this a lot like the debate on this site a year ago about WA. The problem was the new WA seat and the subsequent need for a crossing to pick up the excess population east of the Cascades. Most argued against the type of crossing eventually adopted for various community of interest reasons, yet that's what their commission drew.

I'm not sure that Yolo fully counts as Central Valley for these considerations. And Torie poached it for a North Bay district, which really was functionally the same thing as what happened in 2000 but made for a nicer-looking map. (He also shifted all the Sacramento area districts westwards compared to the current map, as a consequence of using Redding - of using all of Redding, that is - which also enabled him to use the Solano-Napa county line. I don't know if this was the process by which he arrived at the map, but that is one purely rational reasonable way in which I might have come to draw the same map that he did.)
The counties to the north, especially without the areas in between on paths that people actually use, are a different matter.

If there is more than one reasonable choice as to how the draw the map, where it is a reasonably close decision, and particularly if it does not affect whether a CD is in real partisan play or not, then if the Commission made one choice, and I made another, the Commission (and the Pubs on it in particular), cannot really be criticized. That is the purpose of this exercise for me. If Mike wants to draw a map following his own metrics, and see what happens, fine, but that is a different exercise, and I am not quite sure what its relevance is, other than to see what a law incorporating his metrics would cause a map to look like.

If you don't chop SF, and you follow the class warfare theme (which I actually think is kind of appropriate), then you draw the Contra Costa CD the way I drew it, appending the NW corner to Solano. Solano is a transitional county between SF and the Central Valley. If the Contra Costa CD goes all the way to the Bay to take the downmarket precincts there, then the San Joaquin CD will cut more deeply into Contra Costa (not desirable), or you do the silly chop of Martinez (white middle class with no bridge, that the Commission did I see). And then the Solano CD needed more population,  and the only way to get it was to go into Yolo, with which Solano has a lot of common, and no mountains are crossed (with only Woodland really being agricultural, and Davis of course an academic node). So that is where the "poach" should be I think, to the extent it is a poach.

Finally, Napa has a lot in common with Sonoma, although it could be appended to Marin or Solano as well, but then you are back to a poach crossing the mountains into the Central Valley, and CA-01 gets ever larger, or you get a nasty chop of Santa Rosa, and that dog won't hunt. I tried hard, very hard, to avoid nasty chops of significant municipalities.

So as a Pub I would insist on this approach, if alternative approaches that I consider less desirable, hurt my party's chances. That is my job on the Commission, and should have been the job of the Pubs on it. Did the Pubs do their job on the Commission or not?  And where they didn't, we should find out why. Was it due to shill testimony, or incompetence, or did they have a rationale that seems reasonable, that we shall know better, when we compare the two maps and the data, or even better yet, their explanation.

And whatever happened to the concept of competitive districts?  Isn't that supposed to be desirable too, all other things being reasonable equal, particularly if it will make some members of both parties have to work a bit harder?

I will clean up the south central valley, now that I "know" the percentage HVAP benchmark percentages, as to which I take Mike's word are accurate. Not taking on Section 5, and the glacially slow DOJ (what the F is it doing?), is reasonable, and I accept that. Then I will put up my matrix chart, and Mike if he wants can use it as well for his map. The only sensitive CD's I suspect in Norcal, are CA-11, and maybe CA-03, using my CD numbers. We shall see. In Socal, we have in  potential play, CA-24, CA-23, CA-43, maybe CA-42, and CA-50.  And oh yes, the red Asian tiger CD, CA-32, which is barely in reach of the Pubs someday, maybe, if Chu retires, but certainly isn't in the Commission's map.

Make sense?

It sounds reasonable to me. I'll proceed apace to explore what my constraints would do to the map.

The competitiveness question is highly dependent on getting the right mix of elections. There's also the parallel question of fairness. I'd like to apply my partisan bias factor to test the maps, but DRA only has 2008 data, not 2004. In a state like CA it's hard to estimate within the big counties. I'm hoping Torie's matrix will provide a useful conversion to estimate PVIs.

In any case, I can move on to my subregional plan. Here the three regions are further subdivided into whole counties where each subregion is a whole number of districts to within 5% of a district (about 35,000). The idea is that there should only be one county line crossing between regions and subregions, except where required by the VRA.

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NORTH REGION
Upper Sacramento (2) -15,869
Lower Sacramento (4) +7,777
Central Valley (2) +4,914

COAST REGION
North Coast (3) +11,821
Central Coast (11) -9,662

SOUTH REGION
Bakersfield (2) +28,982
Los Angeles (14) -22,065
Socal (15) -5,900

The central coast is technically two subregions, since San Mateo is 2.2% over population for one district and the remainder is then 3.6% under, but it was easier to see the map without that single district county.

Here are my cleanups of CA-20 and CA-21, minimizing muni chops (for CA-21 only Tulare and Bakersfield, and CA-20, only Fresno and Merced, which I consider quite an achievement), and where possible - erosity. CA-21 is 64.9% HVAP, and CA-20 is 61.6% HVAP. It took a fair amount of trial and error to get there.

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Here's my map for the north region. Due to performance issues with DRA, I'll just show one region at a time. Given that, it's a big help to me when the numbers are grouped by region.

Let me describe my numbering system, since I didn't try to match all the districts with existing ones. First the regions are oriented from north to south, and then subregions within each region, then the districts in each subregion. Numbering is based on the center of population for the area. Here are the number groups:

NORTH REGION
Upper Sacramento (CD 1-2)
Lower Sacramento (CD 3-6)
Central Valley (CD 7-8)

COAST REGION
North Coast (CD 9-11)
San Mateo (CD 12)
Central Coast (CD 13-22)

SOUTH REGION
Bakersfield (CD 23-24)
Los Angeles (CD 25-38)
Socal (CD 39-53)

This is the north region map using just the whole counties. CD 1 needs 2158 people and would add the two eastern block groups from Tehama. CD 7 needs 1019 people and would add one block group from Kings.

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Here is the detail for Sacramento county. Two whole districts are within the county and municipalities are preserved to the extent block groups permit.

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CD 7 is identical to the view I previously showed for the Merced/Madera/Fresno with 62.0% HVAP. I kept Merced together consistent with minimizing county splits.

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Well, as I said, we just have different mapping philosophies, assuming you think following your metrics should actually be done in real life by the Commission. In this case, I would put West Sacramento with Sacramento even though it crosses a county line, and get rid of that erosity to boot.

Anyway, here are the trend percentages for the old CD's (where I pretend that the Fiorina-Boxer Senate race was another Presidential election), and my map does try to match the new CD numbers with the old ones. It turns out that the McCain percentages are a pretty good baseline (in other words, 46.3%). There are exceptions, but except for the CD's that I have yellowed, which appear to require adjustment, they are either heavily Dem Hispanic CD's where the McCain percentage overstates GOP strength (more Hispanics are voting probably), and some of the Bay area, maybe, but maybe not (Boxer's home turf, and maybe Oakland and SF just had a particular hatred of Bush), but again, these CD's are not in play.

CD's that do require some special attention have been highlighted in yellow, which is mostly snapback country, although in a couple of instances, again maybe McCain's numbers overstate current GOP strength, and the CD's at least are potentially in play, maybe, someday.

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So if I have Pres 2008 and Gov 2010 from DRA, how should I convert it to PVI?

Eh, really don't like the San Joaquin to Yolo district. If we can't have the San Joaquin district going into Contra Costa, then it should go into Sacramento County. This does create problems of course since either Sacramento is going to be split, or the 3rd is going to have to take in Yolo using the area just to north of Sacramento to connect the two areas. In return the San Joaquin district takes in the southern part of Sacramento County. If you insist on sticking with these subregions, that is probably the best option as I see it.

That district is an eyesore.

So, can we get this discussion back on track? A California map that the Commission might have drawn, if we were the Commissioners. I'm not signing off on Torie's map until my concerns regarding CA-33/37 and San Diego are adressed, or it's been proven to me they cannot be. If the map is fine with muon and sbane, I consider myself outvoted. I have no further objections to anywhere else, and am ready to help outvote anybody who raises objections anywhere else.

I'd like to stick to subregions, replacing them if only they clearly violate other rules. OTOH I could modify my rule to place as many whole districts within a county with one that prefers compactness once at least one district is entirely within the county. I can still require no more than two county fragments, and then I would get this map.

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I would just use the 2008 race, with the PVI based on the 46.3% McCain baseline, except that I would  with the yellow highlighted CD's potentially adjust it, particularly if the CD is in potential play. Please don't use the governor's race.  Gubernatorial races are idiosyncratic (and Brown and Whitman were themselves idiosyncratic), and the Fiorina-Boxer race was a much better measure I think of real partisan strength. Boxer and Fiorina were a pretty good generic match - both rather weak candidates. So I used the Senate race as a check on whether CA had so much Obama love, that he overstated Dem strength beyond the generic swing. It turned out, not really, in general, with some exceptions (hey I contributed with my voting pattern to that little trend snapback in CA-48 :P ). The Senate race is particularly good, because the swing from Obama to Fiorina of about 7 points, almost precisely matched the national swing from Obama to the share of the House vote the Pubs got nationally in 2010.  

I explained CA-33 to you Lewis (it's a 61.5% Hispanic VAP CD), and you seemed satisfied when you realized that CA-35 was a black pack CD. I don't recall what your issue was with CA-37, or with San Diego - some chatter about making CA-53 more of an erose pencil, and moving out of San Diego City to take Escondido or something? What was it? CA-37 is safely Dem anyway (more-so than in the Commission's map), so perhaps there is no reason for you to fret too much. :)

Yah, I meant 35.

I don't particularly like how Torie has drawn the 33rd either. I don't know if it's necessary to make the district so Latino or whether you can create a more compact district that would still have a high Hispanic population with a black influence. If the 33rd doesn't legally need to be drawn like that, it should not. I am fine with the SD map though, since a 50%+ hcvap district can be drawn, though it does lead to some city splits. I don't know if Torie has imperial beach in that Hispanic district. If he does he could try switching it out and putting in the rest of Chula Vista. But I don't think it's such a big deal.

That is much better, and Sacramento isn't split like I feared it would be with a map like that.

I thought the issue in SD was whether or not to link to Imperial (correct me if I'm wrong Lewis). I put up a concept plan and you convinced me at the time that the percentages didn't warrant the split below.

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As I plow through the minority group submittals, I'm a bit worried. They were OK with a CD from SD to Imperial, but expected the Perris area to be in a section 2 district. They did that with a nasty looking CD from Perris to SanB. The commission found "strong evidence of racially polarized voting" in Riverside and that the Gingles conditions were met there. Curiously they only made a 50.1% HVAP district in Riverside, but comments from minority groups lead me to think that a section 2 challenge is not impossible there. I have conversion factors for CVAP from ADs in the various Socal areas, so I'm going to take a fresh look with real data.

Hey, my Riverside CD is over 50% HVAP - now - too, materially increasing the odds the it will elect an Anglo Dem in lieu of an Anglo Pub. :P  It won't be electing an Hispanic. God bless the VRA!  If Maldef wants more, they will have to go to court. When they lose, hopefully this sort of thing won't "have" to be done in the future.

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Imperial Beach is in the Hispanic CD, just like it is in the Commission's map. If you switch it out, for the rest of Chula Vista, the Hispanic % goes down.

If a 50% HVAP CD in Riverside needs to be drawn, than a 61.9% HVAP CA-33 needs to be drawn. If you play with Carson, the Hispanic percentage goes down, as well as the black percentage in CA-35. So no, that makes no sense. You could chop Carson, but the map will still be ugly, and still dilute, with CA-33 also getting more Anglos. Oh, the horror, the horror! We could substantially play with the map, and get a more contiguous Hispanic CD, with a materially lower percentage, but that would shove the Beach Cities CD into a more competitive status. Do you want to go there?  :P

You mess with me anymore, and I will sic Maldef on you!

Are we done now?

Using my concept districts with real 2010 data I can conclude the following. An Imperial-Perris district with over 50% HCVAP is possible, but an SD only 50% district is not. The best I could get there was about 45% HCVAP (56% HVAP).

The commission's legal analysis did not consider the Imperial-SD district a section 2 district, I presume due to the LULAC v Perry analysis that the communities are too widely separated to count as compact. SD is section 2 for the AD but not for a CD because the population doesn't reach 50% HCVAP. They might have drawn the same conclusion about an Imperial-Perris district. If that's true, then either of the links is equally valid from the VRA.

The commission recognized section 2, but drew a 50.1% HVAP district, implying a lack of population in a compact area to draw something more. The minority groups certainly wanted more, but Torie's district matches the commission numbers so its legal status should be no worse. I suspect MALDEF will go to court to contest a number of areas, so we'll see what the judges say.

Yes, if I were not such a "responsible" Commission member, we would be litigating a lot of things with Maldef. I want to go to court. I want CA to be before SCOTUS. Bring it on!

My CA-42 is 50.3% HVAP by the way, 20 basis points "better."  Given that, plus my masterwork with CA-33, I'm Maldef's best friend come to think of it - at least until such time as I gut them in court. :)

Never mind on the Imperial Beach thing. It should be put in the Hispanic district and I have done that as well. As for CA-33 (which is CA-35 in my map), I drew a district that is about 54%HVAP and 21%BVAP. And the 33rd I drew is about 38.9%BVAP, which may be enough to get to 50%BCVAP, as most of the rest of the people in that district are latino. And I ended up with a much nicer looking map. Take a look.
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You are going to cut an "Hispanic" CD down from 61.9% HVAP (close to if not at 50.0% HCVAP) to 54% HVAP? And cut the black CD to 38.9% BVAP down from 44.6% BVAP (percentages destined as to the blacks to continue to decline over time)? I don't think so. And get a bodyguard sbane, because Maxine Waters will be looking for you.

But hey, I can preserve the black CD at my percentages, and draw a more contiguous CD off to the west with a materially higher HVAP than your anemic number, while making the Beach CD materially more Pubbie. Interested? Pity that the legal risk seems rather high.

My issue is/was with which nearby nonwhite areas I want included in the National City - Imperial district and which ones not, actually (as it can't take all of them), and with the character of the 53rd which in its current form is at least arguably a minority influence district. Two things are happening here -
one is an old pet peeve of mine carried over from the last map that the desert parts of Riverside, and definitely Coachella town and I guess Indio as well though it seems to be changing to the suburban, ought to have been in the Imperial district from the start. (And Blythe in the High Desert district really - though it's barely majority Hispanic now, one of the many things I've finally looked at just now, as well as once again failing to get Calif. to work for me.) It helps that a huge part of the Riverside high desert's population is a prison, of course. Such places belong in the low turnout neighboring district, if available. Basically none of these people are represented at all at current - they don't share much interest with the areas they're paired with. (The Hispanic minorities that exist in those areas never crossed my mind, really. Certainly I wasn't aware that there's a serious issue with Perris.) And because of my Native American fetish, I can't help of thinking of those little reservations that dot desert San Diego. Though I think they're outnumbered by the Whites in the area no matter how widely you define the eastern suburbs (which I certainly don't want the district to impede on.) That last is a very minor point though.

-and the other was my impression, which after studying maps and all was only to, shall we say a clearly under 50% degree, correct, that Torie's map there was more aimed at whitewashing the 53rd (and, I suspected, trying hard to put it into play) than at improving Hispanic chances in the 51st. But actually, while he made the boundary there more erose in SD, it's not by all that much - the current district extends further north than I recollected. (The 51st's prong down the eastern edge of the 53rd's SD portion is new, though, and I suppose grabs some Whites.) And Coronado - I vaguely thought so but wasn't sure - and Imperial Beach - I never would have guessed. Actually, I didn't even know it was mostly White, or that Coronado is so unHispanic - were in the 51st til now. (So why did Torie move Imperial Beach in now? Reducing erosity? Ran out of easily grabbable Hispanic sections of downtown SD? No, this is not a rhetorical question, just a mix of a real question and, well, just a musing.)
Yes, I knew the 51st' current retiring Congressman is actually White. No, I didn't know nearly enough about his primary challenges, and might have been less certain then. (Fascinating. Though the conclusions they offer are rather mixed. Fun fact: in the 2006 grudgematch against Juan Vargas, Filner easily won Imperial, the county providing a sizable portion of his margin of victory, despite the spoiler third man in the race Danny Ramirez being from Calexico. But in 2008, when Ramirez was the only challenger, Filner crushed him in SD but actually lost Imperial. Juan Vargas is the early front runner for the seat now that Filner is running for mayor of SD, and appears to be an individual that should be kept as far from any legislative body as possible, though that's neither here nor there.)
It should be pointed out here that the 51st is 58.odd% Hispanic VAP as is, so probably not far off majority CVAP and definitely plurality CVAP by a comfortable margin, and actually needs to lose population, not gain. It needs to lose right about as much as the 53rd needs to gain, actually, 40oddK people. And the 53rd is not majority White total population now, though it was in 2000 and Torie's version seems to be, and is actually not so far off ceasing to be majority White in VAP, where Torie drove it all the way back up to 60%. A lot of the action in that respect must be on the borders with the other SD CD's, actually. I haven't looked at the Commission's maps of the area since just after they were created, but I remember being not impressed either.
So what I felt should happen, but knew I would need the app to see if it's really possible, is add those heavily Hispanic areas that exist outside the rural parts of the district (and Coachella is 97% Hispanic. There's really no excuse whatsoever for leaving it lie just outside a VRA district one part of it it has clear ties to), and whatever of the southern suburbs it can absorb - not Coronado, as I know now - and retreat as far as possible out of the central sections of SD, and create a still safely Hispanic 51st and an unequivocally minority influence, under 50% Anglo VAP, 53rd. And if that means Susan Davis safe forever and some other Hispanic than Vargas taking over from Filner, so much the better.

Meh. This whole post is an erose mess. And while I was typing five new replies have been posted.

To hug and kiss him. As, in practice, he preserved the additional Black opportunity CD you're gutting. (In favor of a Hispanic, of course, which makes the whole thing's VRA merits much more complicated.) No one (no Black politician) wants a 40%+ Black CD in California. They didn't want anything of the kind when they could pretty much draw their own district 10 years ago, anyway.

Yes, it is unreadable Lewis, and no, I did not look at partisan percentages, or have them in mind at all, as I drew the map. In fact, it broke my heart when I realized that the CA-33 thing put the Beach Cities CD out of reach for the Pubs (I already knew almost by heart the partisan lay of the land there). The obsession with Imperial Beach is just strange - really.  Anyway, I did what the commission did. I was looking at their map when I drew that the SD Hispanic CD. It seemed reasonable to me.

The Commission only gave the blacks one CD too, and given how fast the black percentages are eroding, I really doubt they want to dilute themselves down like that. If they do, they're foolish.

Why are we arguing over this black v brown thing again?  It doesn't mean a damn from a partisan standpoint.

I added all those words there just to make it clear I'm not obsessed with it in any way. I'm obsessed with Coachella and with downtown SD, actually. I wanna have my cake and eat it too, or have it shown that it can't be done. :P

You are not getting Coachella - period.

I still don't understand your issue with downtown San Diego. What partisan objective are you after in San Diego, just so I know what it is to reject. Thanks in advance.

Because the district is ugly. Unequivocally unnecessarily ugly if the issue can be solved without diluting the Hispanic CD too far, unnecessarily from the point of view of its Black neighbor district no matter what. Certainly not for partisan reasons.Probably none, though I'm not entirely certain of that.Why not?

I recognize it would probably require wrenches to all of outer SoCal... is that the only reason?

If you take Imperial, eastern Riverside, and the Hispanic block groups in the Coachella Valley you get about 400K and that's what the commission used to make a 466K AD (AD 56 with 66.1% HVAP and 50.4% HCVAP). You need 240K more to make a CD. The choices are to head along the border to Chula Vista and SD or along I-10 to Moreno Valley and Perris. If you go to SD, you would want to lose half the population currently in the district there. That'll make it even more erose in all likelihood.

You are not getting Coachella because 1) the Commission didn't do it, 2) it creates only a 56% HVAP CD in San Diego, and 3)  the Coachella CD will not hit 50.0% HCVAP.  What the commission did was reasonable, and the purpose of this exercise is not to reject their reasonable choices, but rather whether the Pubs were F'ed over. It appears that a fair amount of whatever F over happened however, is due to the VRA - as interpreted. That is becoming more and more apparent. There is still some remaining mischief to assess, but less than I initially thought, due to Mike's hard work on this.

I think I understand what your game is now however. You want the Hispanic CD to go into Coachella, in exchange for losing some, but not all of San Diego, in order to push everything else south, presumably making CA-50 and CA-53 more Dem. Why didn't you just say that nice and pithy like, like I just did?  Brevity is good the soul. Anyway, I think I finally got it. LOL.  No, sorry. 

You can draw your own map on the premise that the Commission gave the Pubs too much or something. :)

'kay then, I suggest we're tossing the entirety of your map on the strength of that argument. :P

No, despite my best efforts, you just don't understand the purpose of my exercise, which is whether the Pub Commissioners were silly-buggered or not.  One reason I did what the Commission did, as I said many times before, was to better assess the balance of their map, and the choices made, without having a substantial twist of the clock, that made comparisons much more difficult. Granted, I was not creative enough, to fathom some avaricous Dem would want to go both into Coachella and San Diego, all in one CD! :)

As I guess you don't recall, way back when, I drew a 56% HVAP CD in San Diego, plus the 60.0% HVAP or so Hispanic CD in the Imperial Valley and Coachella, and Moreno Valley.  Then when I saw that the Commission did not do that, and better understood (although not as well as I do now), the Hispanic VRA thing, and retrogression, and all that horrible stuff, and decided a reasonable choice was made, I did what I did for the reasons outlined above.

Well, if you're starting with a blank assumption that must not ever be tested that they can't, possibly, in even any one area, have been the silly buggerers themselves (and that does seem to follow from your post, though not necessarily from the map you drew)... then that renders the exercise not worth 10% of the effort you put into it, I'm sorry to say. :( Because then, if your map shows a somewhat better outcome for Republicans than the Commission's, all that proves is that devious crafty Republicans didn't get the possible maximum out of their dumbwit Dem counterparts, not that they dumbwit Republicans were shafted in any way or form by devious crafty Democrats, which is what you said you want to prove. Right? It's a... damn, what's the scientific jargon word I'm looking for here? Somebody help me out.

Here's the next piece of my geographically constrained map. I've used the rule revision suggested by sbane in Sacramento and it shows up here in Santa Clara and Alameda counties where only one district is wholly within those counties.

I also anticipate that I will work on matching numbers to other plans, but only after I'm complete. It's much easier for me to work with a set of consecutive numbers in a region in DRA. It occurs to me that since this has a substantially different concept than Torie's map it will give two independent views of the partisanship in the commission's plan. Torie, for that reason, shouldn't we both try to match the approved commission district numbers at the comparison stage?

This is the big picture map of CDs 9-22 for the coast region. 2158 people from eastern Tehama would shift to the north region, but the rest of the county lines are intact.

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Here's the SF enlargement:

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And the Silicon Valley enlargement:

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Santa Clara has three partial districts instead of two in order to bring CD 20 up to 46% HVAP and comply with section 5. CD 17 is 52% Asian VAP.

I recall the district, though not that the Hispanic CD in San Diego was that low. It was a lot like Muon's draft he keeps repeating here, though I recall it as more erose. I didn't like that idea then, and I do not now. And yeah, I guess there may actually be (at least if Republicans get a very good lawyer and a very friendly court) a retrogression issue with my proposal, seeing as most of that SD area was included in the district so far. Yeah, I had that thought for a fleeting moment while making the long rant post, too. In which case I guess it is not possible. A commission is required to follow the law. Including the case law. It can't, not possibly, play "let'em sue" games. (Of course, it can be sued anyways, and lose anyways. Such is the nature of case law.)

I think the Commissioners followed their lawyers' advice actually. One of the things they noted, is that they tried to achieve all of their other worthy non-partisan goals, subject only to meeting the VRA.  Your little scheme, which I think I helped refine in your mind actually, of a Coachella, Imperial, and smaller bit of San Diego, CD, is not consistent with that. It won't help you (as in white Dems), as much as you hope anyway, but that is letting the cat out of the bag.  :)

You do know that the Commissioners all promise not to be partisan hacks don't you?  It is right there in the statute! And I don't think they were. If there was an issue, it was the Dem shills testimony via front persons, that the Pubs were too stupid or lazy to know for what it was, that was probably the problem, and it was the newspaper story to that very effect, which inspired my exercise. You, I don't think, would be a suitable Commissioner.  :P

Any more comments?  Mike?

At the comparison stage, I will use the Commissions numbers, noting what the old CD number was in parentheses on the matrix chart. In the meantime, I am ignoring their numbers, and using the old numbers, so I don't get confused as to which new CD best matches the old CD, for purposes of comparing how the partisan numbers changed.

At this point, for much of the state, I have only a vague understanding of what the Commission did - which was deliberate. I wanted to start fresh - after looking at what the Commission did with the Hispanic SD CD, which was a major issue and decision in my mind. 

I think I have worn Lewis out, and don't have much interest in spending more time on the black v brown thing in LA County. So let me know Mike, if you see any other issues with my map, which might cause it to be subject to "valid" non partisan criticism.

I'm convinced that Imperial + SD is as good as it gets for the VRA, though I don't like the shape either. I'm still looking at western Riverside as part of my plan, but I can't find fault with your choice at this point.

OK, I will commence with the matrix chart then, but not today.

I see as your map evolves, that so far the Dems are not going to like it much. They will like mine better. :P

For all their acclaim at being such brutally aggressive redistricters, Republicans really aren't that good at it. They haven't done the work that has occurred on the left to form an intellectual movement for ah I guess you could call it "progressivism" in redistricting. Most of that seems to have occured in the last decade in response to PA-TX-MI. The Republicans on the other hand, are good at legislative redistricting and manipulating the rules in MI to suit there purposes, but they aren't at a level in which they could compete toe to toe intellectually in CA or understand the implications of what choice of partisan data to use in AZ. Washington is one notable exception, primarily because of Gorton. Florida will be interesting to see both at the legislature and in the courts.


Now can anyone link me to a numbered map of the districts as adopted by the commission somewhere on the forum? Preferably one that I can actually load, so if it is on a page with 10 others maps, that won't work. :P I can't load the commission site.

Try this (http://c365736.r36.cf2.rackcdn.com/maps_congress_20110815_all.pdf). I found it yesterday. Unlike the map available on the Commission's site, it shows the county lines, without which the map is hard to read - and evaluate.

Mike, the class warfare concept seems to have got lost in the Silicon Valley in your map (although erosity certainly has not been eschewed :) ). Yes I know, you didn't list $$$$$ as part of your list of parameters, I understand. :)

You didn't do some ugly chop in Sonoma County did you? Or did you avoid a muni chop, but not a metro chop in Santa Rosa? Or are you trying to hide what you did there, since you didn't do a zoom, after which upon my beady little eyes feasting upon it,  I could say, hey, you see how well these little mechanistic rules are working out for you?  :P

Yes, I know, lawyers are aholes - almost all of them. Hey, that's why we're lawyers!

There is another parameter I will probably use in So Cal from VRA cases. The Census Bureau has a disclaimer about use of CVAP for 2010 data since it is from an average of 2005-2009 statistics. That disclaimer was recognized by the CA commission in their report. In other circuits there has been recognition that 65% VAP can provide a controlling majority for a minority, and SCOTUS has accepted that from those circuits. If SCOTUS rules that the statistical nature of CVAP can't be relied upon, they may return to the supermajority 65% threshold. To play it safe, in areas where 50% CVAP may not be reachable, I will look for 65% VAP as a backup. For instance Anaheim/Santa Ana is one area where it will come into play for me.

I am not sure your comment has any nexus with mine, but OK. My Hispanic OC CD is 62.4% HVAP, and to hit 65% will either 1) be impossible, or 2) make an erose muni-chopping mess, and this for a CD which elects an Hispanic with no problem, and has despite determined, and well financed, runs at her. It's only 20% white, with the balance black (1.9%) or Asian (19.6%), the latter, particularly in this area, being a lower turnout group. The Commission's Hispanic OC CD is 60.88% HVAP btw.  So many little rules, so little time. Is Maldef bitching about this too?  Just curious.

The commission drew two districts that were about 25% BVAP. I draw one which is more than that, thus protecting a Black district better than what the commission did, and one that is a bit less. And it looks just so nice and perfect, doesn't it? The real question is whether we need another Hispanic district or whether we need one that is a Black and Hispanic influence district. I am not pretending that my 35th is a bonafide Hispanic district. It is a district where they will have a lot of influence and so will Blacks. And to top it all off it won't look absolutely ridiculous like your district. I would only sign off on a ridiculous looking district if I knew there was legal risk in not drawing that. And even if we did draw that, Black groups would complain. You have it all wrong, Blacks would love my map and hate yours. Of course this does not have any partisan implications but that district is just damn ugly and reduces the number of districts Blacks have influence over.

Yes, I understand sbane. I take your word for it about the black attitude (probably the second black incumbent is looking for a lifeboat, and was accommodated), I think the blacks are being short sighted about what their future is, but that is their problem. The Commission said they drew but one black CD in their text, but maybe something got lost in translation. And maybe Maldef will sue over this one too, assuming you have the numbers right. They should. This is one instance where I think they may have a pretty good case.

In the meantime, I am not changing my map, because of my own point of view about the legal exposure (I don't really think the CD looks all that bad myself - I have seen far worse racial gerrymanders), and because it doesn't matter for the purpose of my exercise, as you acknowledge. I can defend what I did without any embarrassment, if someone calls me on it.

By the way, in oral argument in Perez, one of the Justices noted that this racial coalition stuff just doesn't hunt, as either legally required, or as a substitute for a majority, minority CD. In practicality, your numbers really result in a zero influence Hispanic CD.

You are correct. I followed Santa Rosa's lines, but neighboring towns were separated. My map is an open book, and reasonable suggestions are welcome.

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And see, here's Ventura as a bonus. :)

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Oh dear. You "solve" your little Santa Rosa thing, by chopping into Frisco from the south rather than the north of course, but you just love too much crossing that beautiful bridge I guess.

And you solve the Ojai reach (beautiful road to drive connecting Ojai to the balance of the CD that you drew by the way, nice and twisty (very twisty, with some frightening drops, so drive it while sober), and scenic), by going into Westlake in LA County of course. But given you don't have a chop there, but somewhere else presumably which I probably won't like, you did the best you could I guess, given that we want to avoid muni chops.

I don't suspect any MALDEF issue there. They suggested a 63% HVAP district so you are in better shape than the commission. It's an area I will look at, but since I tend to look at compactness from the Roeck view, I'm probably more tolerant of erosity than you.

Your Ventura County is nicer than I feared looking at the earlier map you posted. Good job not splitting Santa Rosa as well. It would have been nice if you could have kept Windsor with Santa Rosa though, but it's not possible with your constraints.

It seems to me that poor San Mateo is left as a the Rodney Dangerfield of counties. It's the one county larger than a district that everyone is willing to split. I just chose to defend it if I could. OTOH, someone could chop SF across the Bay Bridge (and I saw at least one plan formally submitted that did). You wouldn't want that, would you?

I don't know what "the Roeck view" means, but I assume it means, break every piece of china in the kitchen if it gets to the right number, based on some rogue court's "scrivinings" (I assume that you will enlighten me), but yes, as to erosity, definitely. :) You can hit 63% no doubt with an extra or two muni chop. You might sever the north end of Santa Ana (that is where the OC gentry used to live once upon a time), and then do two more mini-muni chops - a net of three more muni chops, although maybe just two, if there is enough Hispanic action left in Fullerton, which I chopped, to suck up a couple of very heavily Hispanic, low hanging fruit precincts, albeit kind of large ones, so you don't have to chop into both Tustin and Costa Mesa, or Placentia or something. And no, it won't happen in my map.

Since San Mateo is larger than a CD, of course it has to be chopped. You must mean that you don't want it tri-chopped. You see, your obsession with county chops leads you to those "poor choices." County chops don't mean much in areas where you have a sea of appended suburbs - one right next to the other, where what are really the best communities of interest involve an extra chop. Do you really think the good folks of Menlo Park, who are tied to the hip to Palo Alto, and shop there, and recreate there, and would live there, if there were any housing there much under a million dollars, where they can only afford $700,000, would be upset by being appended to Santa Clara County, rather than the more down market stuff to the north? And then there is well, gated Atherton (yes the whole town is gated, so you can't drive in to view the its splendid mansions), where the folks who own the the venture capital firms on Sandhill Road in Palo Alto live (unless they like horses, in which case they live in Woodside - also in San Mateo County as it happens, and where you can view the ranch houses on an acre or two lots, because it is not gated). Yes, I am sure they would be upset being severed from the balance of their county. Save the county obsession thing for states far less complex than CA is my best suggestion, but carry on with your exercise for a map that would get no votes on the Commission I suspect, unless you were on it, in which case it would get one vote. :)

By the way, how long do you think it takes to drive that connecting road you have to Ojai from Santa Paula? :)

There are about 50 different measures of compactness used by mappers. Roeck is one of the most common. It compares the area of the district to the area of the smallest circle that contains the district. It is used in the MI statutes and by the recent Ohio Competition. It disfavors districts with long protrusions, but doesn't mind wiggly lines.

You'd probably like Polsby Popper which compares the area of a district to the area of a circle with the same length perimeter as the district. I think AZ uses this measure. Wiggly boundaries take a big hit with this measure, but it can't distinguish between wiggly lines in urban areas and natural wiggles like rivers and mountain ranges.

Erosity is like pornography - you know it when you see it. That is from SCOTUS (the comment being about porn). :)

No doubt. The problem is differentiating between use of man-made lines to gerry a result and natures own ragged edges. We know the difference, but it is hard, bordering on impossible, to establish a legal case based around compactness.

That 17th district is an interesting exercise, but it's remarkably ugly, and it doesn't need to exist. The Chinese in Cupertino and the Vietnamese in East San Jose have very little in common.

Do they tend to vote the same way?

You're reading me all wrong... but that's fine, really. Because I was doing the same with you, at least as a nagging suspicion (and you know where that originally came from? Good.)

Of course, at an initial point, before looking at a few data more closely, I thought something *somewhat like* what I would want could have been achieved even without the cut into Riverside, which I know now is clearly incorrect.
I still hold it makes a lot of sense on several levels (perhaps the biggest being: right now the district is rural hispanic farmworkers attached to an essentially urban district to bring it up to population. A more equitable split between the two related, but not identical, communities of interest is definitely positive. And the urbanization south of SD proper to the Mexican border, National City etc, has farmworking hispanic roots. And the other being, of course, the plight of poor rural Riverside subsumed into that district. Which I happen to care more about than Hispanics in the middle of suburbia. Which is a form of bias, actually, but not one that correlates well with the current American party system.), but I understand there's decent arguments against it as well. I'll let it pass.

What might help here is a Hispanic percentage map with your district's boundary overlayed with it. Just how Hispanic is that northwest extension, exactly?

So this is my offering for Anaheim/Santa Ana. The block groups are imprecise, but the intent is to use all of Santa Ana and Stanton and use none of Orange, Buena Park or Costa Mesa. The Tustin piece will be my only muni chop into the Irvine district from the west and is needed for population equality. Anaheim has to be split due to its long eastern leg, but all parts are either in this district or an Orange-based district which wraps around the north. Likewise, the Fullerton split will be shared between this district and the Orange one. I confess to a Placentia split, but at least the part included in this district decreases erosity. :)

The HVAP is 65.0%.

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Not more than they vote the same way as their non-Asian neighbors. Asian legislators certainly have no difficulty being elected in Asian-minority districts.

I would lose the Tustin chop and take the rest of west Anaheim, even if it reduces your HVAP percentage by a bit (it should not be that much).  Otherwise not bad from a chop standpoint. My CD did that, and went into Orange rather than Stanton and Placentia. You might be causing the Asian percentage in the north OC CD to drop some (my CA-40), as well as make CA-40 more erose of course. 

Garden Grove and Anaheim for this CD are "auto-chops" and really don't count as chops, so I consider that I did but one chop (Orange), plus the heist of those two precincts in Fullerton that were right next by and just so irresistible.

This is how I fit that district into my plan version of OC. As we've all agreed Imperial stays with SD so that defines the population need at the south end of OC. The main feature of this plan is that it preserves the LA/OC line. My algorithm drove me this way, but there was a lot of testimony before the commission to preserve that separation, too.

Hopefully my justification of the chop of Tustin becomes clear. My CD 48 stops before it reaches Orange, Santa Ana, or Costa Mesa, with population to spare. To bring CD 48 back into line I would have to cut into Tustin, Tustin Foothills, Irvine, or Newport Beach. If I have to chop, why not go where it helps a neighboring district, to wit CD 46.

It may be hard to see, but Cypress and La Palma are supposed to all be in CD 47 while Buena Park and all those pieces of Anaheim and Fullerton are in CD 45. You may notice that CD 45 takes the road less traveled to reach Los Serranos by way of Carbon Canyon Rd. I'll explain that more when I get to the Inland Empire.

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OK. I am not in love which your cuts in OC. Tustin and Tustin foothills should be in your CA-45, and CA-45 should take Costa Mesa, with CA-47 moving up into Buena Park. In other words, twist the clock, clockwise around the Hispanic CD. I could explain why if you want, but I assume that you trust me that I know the lay of the land in OC at least. :)

And of course, my OC cuts are the best. Really. :P And Irvine is a good city to split, both from a geographical, and demographic, standpoint. The way, you get the wealthy beach zone, the Asian tinged zone, and the white inland more socially conservative zone, more cleanly defined.

Addendum: Oh, and I would also cut Dana Point from CA-49 in exchange for taking more of Mission Viejo, for the reason stated in the above paragraph, and also because Laguna Niguel and Dana Point are so intertwined.

I absolutely trust that you know OC better than I. However, it does us little good to draw maps from the same set of assumptions if we want to test the politics of the districts at the end. So, I'm letting myself be driven by geography more than sociology. That's what led to my version. My 48-49 line requires very little spillover across municipal lines and I can form nice compact districts for 47 and 48 that have very little in the may of split munis. CD 45 gets the leftovers.

As always if there are geographic items I've missed or other things that stay away from the squishy subject of communities of interest, I'm always game to refine my methods. Note that sbane's comments in Sacramento that led to a refinement have played out here as well. Mathematically there could be four districts entirely within OC, but my revised rule lets me back down from that to three as I keep the non-whole split pieces to two.

The rule also applies to SD county since it could have four districts, too. However, we want to link up Imperial and that leaves messy choices without the revision. This plan keeps three CDs entirely within the county. But my geographical treatment makes some changes.

In order to minimize municipal splits, CD 53 keeps Chula Vista whole (or would if I had block level controls) at the expense of the neighborhoods east of Balboa Park. That reduces the HVAP to 63.4 which is about 52.4% HCVAP, so it should be fine. I also let CD 50 follow the natural corridor from Escondido east to the Imperial line. That cuts CD 52 off on the east, which works well as it moves west to take up the parts of SD dropped by CD 53.

I had a choice for Encinitas vs Bonsall and Fallbrook. Either one could go with Escondido in CD 50 and the other would go with the coastal CD 49 into OC. You see my choice below based on my eyeballing the roads, but a reasonable argument could sway me the other way.

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I'm somewhat averse to decisions based on the types of zones as they are usually proxies for specific political outcomes. I watched the Dems do that in IL last spring as they justified a whole host of gerrymanders on that type of logic. I recognize that VRA-based decisions also have political consequences, but that's in a different category for me.

To your addendum, it would work geographically to put Emerald Bay, Laguna Beach, and Laguna Niguel into CD 49 in exchange for the Rancho Santa Margarita area. It's nearly an even population swap and it doesn't impact the compactness of CD 48. Would that work for you?

I am not sure what the above means. You have chopped central city San Diego to bits. You have a few precincts in San Diego there next to the Harbor filled with high income whites in condo towers.  Those should be in the Coronado, Pt. Loma, Ocean Beach, Pacific Beach CD. Why did you dislike my version of San Diego County (other than perhaps the Chula Vista chop, where I followed the commission's lines)?  

Are you sure my OC suggestions result in more chops?  You have a couple of Laguna Niguel precincts in the wrong CD. When you see a precincts that cross a muni line, what I always do, is zoom in and see where the residential streets are. That usually gives me the answer as to what CD it should be in.

Yes, I know your map has a different purpose, but the Commission's job was to tie communities of interest together, even if it resulted in an extra chop or two. The issue was whether their choices were reasonable - and non partisan.

That sucks from a sociological standpoint, but is good from a geographic one, since there is an empty zone between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach.  In so much of CA freeways are the thing. They tend to define communities of interest. There is little reason for folks living inland from the 405 to cross it towards the beach, and visa versa.

I am sure that this communities of interest thing is abused for political purposes (of course it is!), but I assume that you believe me that I did not do that, and it is the commission's job to assess that, and evaluate the merits, and where a decision can reasonably go either way, probably go for the approach that makes for more competitive CD's. That is what I would do. Granted, I know some parts of the state better than others from an on the ground standpoint.

Anyway, in OC it makes no difference. All the CD's are safely GOP no matter how you draw them, after quarantining all those Hispanics in their little ghetto CD.

The software does not allow that, but what I will do when I get home, is draw a "CD" that is just the NW extension of CA-33, and it will reveal the Hispanic percentage of that part of the CD.

By the way, Mike's map is really f'ing the Dems so far it looks like.  :P

As I said earlier, I have no problem with your cuts, per se, and they do well for your goals. But one thing you mention in the comment above is competitiveness. In other states I have looked at, groupings primarily by socioeconomic and cultural factors tend to produce more homogeneous districts and hence less competitive ones. By using municipalities as substitutes for communities of interest, some research has found that more competitive districts can emerge. Certainly my application of that to MN on that thread recently ended up with a healthy blend of competitive and noncompetitive districts. But is CA like MN? I'm curious to see.

So back to OC. My hypothesis is that by following municipal lines I should get a natural balance of districts. Your plan split Mission Viejo right down the middle. I'd like to avoid splits entirely, but if needed just nibble a smaller piece of a town. That led me to try different arrangements like my map and the alternate I described. Sometimes that leaves flexibility, sometimes it works against it.

And I haven't even looked at the political data. :P I'll run my usual fairness test after the maps are done to see if it's so. I'll have your political matrix as a cross check.

Yes, Mike, CA is different. Higher income whites are much more Dem than in most places. But as in everything, it is a balancing test. Money is not the loadstar, nothing is the loadstar - you balance, and if you have smart persons of both parties on a Commission, acting in good faith, and having taken made a promise not to act in a partisan manner, not hewing to the appropriate metrics, you have the requisite checks and balances. If they get greedy and unreasonable, and can't compromise, or act in good faith, it goes to the Courts. I like that system. Fair point about chopping a bigger town in half, like Mission Viejo. That was a negative in my map, and I knew it at the time. It had its compensating virtues however. :)

And Lewis here are the stats for the NW quadrant of my CA-33 - 54% HVAP - with 210,658 people. And notice I minimized muni chops to boot, which I always try to do, absent a good reason not to. With more chops, I could have got it higher.

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I spent some time looking at testimony about neighborhoods in central SD. I kept the neighborhoods together, but just attached them differently. After your comments I looked at MALDEF's border district, and saw that they also kept Chula Vista together and split the waterfront from areas east of I-805, so I assume they wouldn't sue over my map.

I noted your condo precinct in the file you sent, but it was boxed in by Hispanic areas and there was no bridge to connect to Coronado. I dislike water connections without bridges (or ferries) just like mountain connections without roads. I had to either lose the Hispanic areas by the bridge or add the condos to the border district.

On the east side of the county I look quite different, but I think that's because I didn't assume the historical district divide. The main east-west corridors are I-8 and CA-78. So I let CD-52 follow and I-8 until it ran into is the border district, and I let CD-50 follow CA-78. I won't object to a connection from El Cajon to Borrego Springs on someone's map, but getting there from Escondido looks much more natural.

I am sincere about advice for Encinitas. It's either part of a coastal district or it attaches to Escondido. I can make a case either way. It mirrors my choices at the other end of CD-49 in OC where I can hug the coast or shoot inland.

No, Encinitas is a beach town, and belongs in a coastal CD. On that much, we agree. In both of our maps, it is.

Yes, the trapping Hispanic precinct of 2,200 people needs to be redrawn, or excised from the Hispanic CD, because it traps the condo precinct of 6,500 people. Can you image the difference between the two precincts in actual voters?  I suspect I drew it the way I did, because the Commission did. Absent that, I would have excised the precinct, but what should really happen is that it should be redrawn.

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You may have kept neighborhoods together in central San Diego, but you tri-chopped central San Diego, appending part of it to the suburbs. I don't get that bit at all. What was wrong with my map in that respect? Just what about my CA-53 offends you, putting aside the trapping Hispanic precinct issue? Notice that I used the Miramar Marine Air Station as a natural barrier on its northern end.

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Your map is fine, but I need to start with my assumption that Chula Vista stays together. That means that the area north of MLK and all of Bonita need to leave the Chula Vista district. If just move them in the natural way the downtown SD district is way too big and the El Cajon district is too small.

I noticed that you had chopped a piece of far northern SD onto CD 52 in what seemed like an unusual split. I had already determined that I wanted to try the CA-78 run east, so assembling all the areas between Escondido and Poway into the same district made sense. That meant shifting the CD-52 cut into SD from the northeastern part of the city down to the southeastern part of the city. I found that CD-52 became more compact as well with that shift.

That left the the downtown CD light on population. I didn't want to carve up the Mira Mesa neighborhood north of the base so I took that CD up the coast to Solana Beach. I could let the downtown CD pick up the area just east of Balboa Park and then drop the northerly boundary back to where you had it with the Escondido CD picking up the coastal communities. I do think it's worth thinking about the Escondido CD as an inland district, however.

Torie, I have an LA question on your CD 31 and 34. In the early copy you sent 31 had an HVAP of about 57% and 34 had over 75%. It looks like 31 will have to get over 60 or 61% HVAP to break 50% HCVAP. Did you look at a swap between 31 and 34 at any point?

So not that Hispanic really. Population very much on the upper end of the range into which I'd have cautiously guessed though, which may be a problem in trying to cautiously reduce the erosity.
If I were trying to defend your map, I'd say that the extra Hispanic CD packed high enough to elect an Hispanic, being possible, was necessary and the Black pack just happened naturally.

Okay, I have to ask even though I think the answer is likely "no". (And if the reply seems to be an unsweated flat "no, I don't wanna try", you get the old problems of me not fully believing you!) Is there any way this district can be semi-reasonably connected with East Riverside - basically the old Imperial & Coachella & random points west concept, but without Imperial?

Is there some grouping of communities now in your CD 37 that have at least 54% HVAP. If so, the district could violate Shaw, since a significantly more compact version would also exist that could elect a candidate of choice.

I got it up to 58.2% HVAP.  You could do a swap, but it would make the map a lot uglier, and violate natural lines and communities of interest. Is this HCVP 50% thing an absolute law, even if it is clear the CD will elect an Hispanic of their choice?  And the latter is only a Section 5 standard, not a Section 2 standard, correct, and Section 5 does not obtain here, or am I still confused on that one?

I doubt that CA-33 can get 210,000 54% HVAP out of the far north end of CA-37, but it deserves study. I took a look at it briefly the other day. Frankly it won't make it much less erose, since then it goes rather north from Long Beach, rather than doing an L thing.  It is the Carson thing that makes it look erose. I am not sure at the end of the day, it will fit any better into a circle with the same diameter, and all of that fun stuff.

God, no. Would be a bit silly given that no truly dependable data on the question even exist.
muon's looking at benchmarks for what no one could possibly sue against. But how can you know what figure that is if you can't even legally take incumbents / likely candidates into consideration? (Since clearly whether MALDEF would sue does depend on whether they think it's clear the CD will be dependably carried on Hispanic votes... and they can and do take potential candidates into account.) So if you think you can't take any risk and can't go against any of the internally inconsistent body of case law, you raise the threshold higher and higher, though only as long as it's possible to draw such a version that is reasonably compact, and this is as high as it's currently gone. (Cause I can totally see the SC raising it again and again, all to keep from either striking down the VRA or effectively court-ordering the retirements of three Texas Republican congressmen.)

An HCVAP of 50% is what the 9th circuit has established to satisfy the first Gingles condition for a majority Latino population for section 2. That usually works out to from 60-65% HVAP depending on the part of LAC. I would guess that as the income goes up, the needed percent comes down.

I looked at the CA-33 neighbors, and I see a solution. CD-38 is overpacked, and it can give up the South Gate side in exchange for Norwalk and La Mirada and still exceed 73% HVAP. If you add South Gate, Bellflower and the part of Carson south of I-405 you can get a 68% HVAP district. It does force CD-37 west of the Harbor, but the result is two VRA-compliant districts.

Similarly, a swap between CDs 31 and 34 will be needed as well. CD 31 only needs to get to 60% if it picks up East LA.

Edit:

Here's a version that has a 73.8% HVAP district on the west and 68.3% HVAP on the east. That keeps Bellflower and Norwalk together if it makes more sense that way.

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It should come down as a) the non-Hispanic non-citizen percentage comes up b) the residence duration of the Hispanics there comes up - poor Hispanic pockets on the affluent outer edges of suburbia tend to have just about the lowest citizenship rates of all. Those are the people building those new houses.

Here's an updated map with all four south LAC Latino districts safely in compliance with section 2. I've drawn them for compactness, but Torie or sbane can say what pieces should be swapped.

East LA/Koreatown (yellow; goes up to the edge of Glendale and Pasadena): 64.5% HVAP
Downtown/South LA (green): 68.5% HVAP
South Gate/Paramount (peach): 75.3% HVAP
Downey/Norwalk (magenta): 67.5% HVAP.

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Is that 50% 9th circuit requirement an absolute one, or a safe harbor under Section 2?  What is the 9th Circuit case?   I guess I had better read it. I planned to review my map in this area anyway.

Here's what the commission cited in their report:

So under the 9th Circuit, if you can't get to a compact 50% HCVAP CD, you don't have to draw one at all? 

That's what I was trying to say when Lewis was pushing for the Imperial-Coachella district. The commission did not cite section 2 compliance for CD 51 in their narrative. I assume it was because it is not compact enough at 50% HCVAP under the LULAC standards for common interests. They drew it based on common interests due to lying along the border.

I think that's also why they didn't do anything in Riverside even though they found racially polarized voting there. To link Perris or Riverside to SanB or Indio was not compact in the commission's analysis, so no action was required.

I'll put the San Jose connection to Salinas in that category, too. In other jurisdictions that might be required, but the commission is interpreting the ninth circuit to say it is not.

If a section 2 suit comes out of this, I think it will be in part because the commission has taken such a narrow view of both the 50% CVAP rule along with the compactness standards. SCOTUS has not had to rule on HCVAP, so it's ripe for litigation.

But in LAC there are plenty of ways to get to 50% HCVAP. I have 6 districts that meet that threshold, and MALDEF drew six as well in their official submission. However, the commission only drew 5, leaving a sixth at 49% while an adjacent district has HCVAP over 73%. In one part of their report they claim the 49% district is to satisfy section 2, but later they do not mention it as a reason for that district. I would not have left that 1% on the table in their position.

They also drew no Asian majority district in LAC, though it's clearly possible. They identified an AD for the San Gabriel Valley, but weren't inclined to link it over the hills to the east to make a CD. That seems to be another example of what the commission thinks compact means for section 2. There are courts that would not accept that view when the minority group shares the same media market and are in the same county (cf IL-04).

The more I look at their work the more I think this will find it's way to SCOTUS.

What is the HVAP percentage again for the San Diego-Imperial and OC districts that translates into 50% HCVAP again?  And I take it, under the 9th Circuit, there is no need to draw a 50% HVAP CD in Riverside. Is that correct? 

The commission CD 51 has 63.9% HVAP and they get 51.0% HCVAP. The MALDEF district is very similar except for the Chula Vista addition and they have 63.5% HVAP and get 52.5% HCVAP. How can that be, you may ask, since they are virtually the same district? I suspect this goes to the heart of the estimation aspect of CVAP, which are not part of the Census but estimated from prior years' data. The Circuits don't agree on its applicability, and I suspect that SCOTUS may not like using a number that is so imprecise on a hard and fast benchmark like the 50% rule. Any way, I would say that 63% HVAP would get you over 50% HCVAP in either case.

I don't think I've seen a specific ruling by the 9th Circuit that would indicate no district need be drawn in Riverside. The commission has said it would use CVAP instead of VAP for the 50% rule because the 9th Circuit says to. The commission is also making a judgement about what type of area is compact enough so as to apply the 50% rule, and I don't see that coming from the 9th. I can't find where the commission defines what constitutes a compact area, but based on their actions it's more compact than I would choose.

In my map I'll split the difference in Riverside and make a CD at 50% HVAP to satisfy the narrow reading of Bartlett. But I'll consider it an opportunity district, recognizing that it lacks the higher standard of 50% CVAP. I won't make the link to Indio because I think that would be two communities too far apart like in the TX LULAC case. I won't link Riverside to SanB because I've used SanB in a different section 2 district that I created because of other consistently applied redistricting principles, though I would consider them to be close enough to be in a compact area.

Returning to my plan, I want to talk numbers in the south region. It was divided into three subregions: Bakersfield with Kern. Kings, and Tulare counties; LA county; and Socal with Mono, Inyo, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, San Diego, and Imperial. The Bakersfield region has about 28K too many people, LA county is short 22K, and Socal is short 6K. If I use eastern Kern to give up population to both subregions that are short I end up with a four-way split of Kern and no CD entirely within the county due to the VRA district.

That means I either put 28K into LA or into Socal from Kern. I wanted to add population to LA from the Chino Hills so it makes more sense to shift the 28K into Socal from Kern. That chop perfectly covers Ridgecrest in the NE corner, and results in the following map for the Bakersfield subregion. The VRA district is the one I generated earlier and is 65.4% HVAP.

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The next part of the numbers saga of my algorithm brings me to the population shift between LA and San B counties. I need to have a net 22 K go to LA, which can be done with a fragment that size, or with a larger fragment and a piece of LA county attaching to SanB in return.

The natural piece to go to LA is the Chino Hills. It fits well with the Asian majority district stretching from the San Gabriel valley, and it's cut off from the rest of the county by the necessary VRA district based in Ontario. The total cut off fragment is about 75 K population so if I use all of it in LAC, then I need to swing 53 K from LAC back to San B. I found three choices for that 53 K: in the north, at Claremont, or at Pomona. The north option required an ugly chop into Lancaster/Palmdale and could be ruled out. Using Pomona left Claremont and its neighbors isolated by the Covina VRA district and could only be connected by the mountains or by chopping a bunch of towns to follow a road along the foothills. It turns out that without the Chino Hills fragment there is the exact population for 2 CDs south of the San Bernardino mountains, and if 53 K is added by jutting into Claremont, then 53 K from south of the mountains has to added to the Cd on the north side, and that isn't particularly attrractive if there s another alternative.

However OC needed 46 K to complete its CDs and that's not very different from 55 K. So the Chino Hills are split into two with one part going to LAC and the other to OC. :( But I don't have to link Victorville to a piece of San Bernardino. :)

An Ontario to San B district has 65.5% HVAP, leaving the foothills in the other district. The only thing left in San B is to complete the high desert district. Here I can use Blythe linked to Needles, plus Desert Hot Springs and nearby areas north of I-10 with a good link to Yucca Valley.

In Riverside it would be nice to make a district that exceeds 50% HCVAP, but I've used the likely areas in San B to link, and the Coachella Valley is too far with low HVAP areas in between. Instead I've made CD 42 an opportunity district with 54.7% HVAP. The connection to Corona is not pretty, but was needed to get over 50%. If there is another way to get 50% HVAP there, I'm open to suggestions. The other two districts also fit entirely within Riverside county.

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Wait, and what happens to the corridor here?

It has to be divided up between the other districts. In this map the Long Beach district is way short of population and could move west to pick up the corridor, or it could be given to the Torrance district and have the Long beach district encroach on the Palos Verdes area. Since it's not a VRA area, the mapper has choices.

In general the VRA will force a densely populated minority area (say 80-90%) to spread in multiple directions when multiple districts are required. There are other possibilities for those directions than in my map, such as going into OC and running east to the Anaheim district. The only direction off the table is northeast since that goes into the Asian majority district.

The Long Beach district is the only undersized district?

Wait a minute.  The 50% HVAP rule that is an interpretation of Bartlett, rejected by the 9th circuit, which rejection the Commission sometimes followed, but not in Riverside.  Isn't that inconsistent?  Is there some case law, that you have to draw a 50% HVAP CD if it is compact enough, or a 50% HCVAP CD, if it is compact enough, whichever is greater?  One of course can speculate that the 9th Circuit is wrong, but for the moment it is governing law in CA.

The reason I ask, is that getting Riverside up to 50% HVAP violates other appropriate rules of redistricting in my view (at least in my map), and therefore, if no governing case law really supports the whichever is greater test, in my opinion, it is the Pubs job on the Commission to vote against a 50% HVAP CD in Riverside, if it creates more erosity, and hurts their cause, which it does here.

Yes, Lewis, if the Hispanic CD in LA County is to be moved west, that old CA-33 NW prong needs to go if at all possible. That is one of my goals. Hey, maybe it will bring the Beach Cities CD back into play - albeit remotely. :P

Mike, did you draw one more Hispanic CD in LA County now than I did (keeping CA-33 albeit elsewhere, and then drawing yet another from the northern part of CA-37?  Did you draw one more than the Commission did? If you drew two more, are they both 50% HCVAP - using the 63% HVAP proxy? What was the case again where you said it was 61.5% HVAP? Was that just in Fresno? Why was Fresno special again? 

I don't know that the 50% HVAP rule has been considered by the 9th Circuit since Bartlett came down in 2009. Bartlett says VAP, but declined to say if CVAP is needed, because they didn't need to to decide the NC case. If I was a minority group that could have a 50% VAP district, but didn't get one, I'd be in court claiming Bartlett gives me standing to sue under section 2. I'd say that CVAP is fine to see how likely it is that the minority group could control the election (as in LULAC), but I should get an opportunity district in any case, even if below 50% CVAP. Bartlett says that the state may create of crossover district where some of the white majority join with the minority, and such districts may enhance minority voting rights.

The Black-plurality district was also slightly undersized in that map. Here's my embedding of those districts in a complete LA county map. This follows from my algorithm that placed 13 whole districts in the county, then tried to minimize municipal splits after satisfying the VRA. A 14th CD (32) adds only 22K from outside the county.

Here are the stats for the districts that would have a majority minority CVAP:
The VAPs for minority districts are as follows:
CD 26: 63.3% H
CD 29: 61.3% H
CD 31: 64.5% H
CD 32: 52.0% A
CD 33: 68.5% H
CD 34: 46.9% B
CD 35: 67.5% H
CD 36: 75.3% H
I note that one legal vulnerability is that the Black groups that testified did not want a majority-minority district and preferred to be split to maintain their opportunity for two districts, and the commission agreed with them. Despite their threats that a packed district could be a section 2 violation, I could find no basis for that claim, and preferred to keep the neighboring Latino districts comfortably above 50% CVAP where they could elect candidates of choice.

Here is a big picture map (CD 32 crosses into SanB but it doesn't show), and an enlargement with municipal lines (where CD 32 shows correctly).

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"May" is not the same as "shall."  Sorry to keep bothering you Mike. I really need to read both cases myself. Does enhancing "minority voting rights" mean electing a white Democrat, because in Riverside, it is not going to be that white Dems help to elect a Dem Hispanic.

Lots of chops there with your Asian CD Mike. :)

Here is the operative quote from Bartlett, it also appears in the commission report.


In my plan, I would note the creation of a >50% HVAP Riverside district as a mitigating factor that I did not make a majority CVAP district in Riverside, due to other rational redistricting principles. That may be the commission's thinking as well. In fact If you like the shape of their CD-41 better than my CD-42 I can swap to that shape.

I think that same language can be used to defend not splitting the Black population between two districts. It's clearly discretionary, and there is no other section 2 challenge related to that minority group.


I wasn't particularly pleased with that part of the map, but I can shave the AVAP down in 32 somewhat and perhaps remove a chop, if you like.

After I read the cases, if I am satisfied that a 50% HVAP Riverside CD need not be drawn as a legal imperative, then if to draw it involves as it appears more erosity, it is my opinion that the GOP members should have vetoed it, and that is how I would vote. In other words, in my mind, Riverside is back in play. I might withdraw my gift to the Dems here. :)  You do the minimum to satisfy the VRA if it otherwise violates appropriate redistricting principles, if it hurts your party.  To me that is rather basic.


My Asian tiger CD has no muni chops at all. :P

What is the HVAP number for that 40th district? I think putting Yucaipa into that district really lowers the Hispanic %, but I could be wrong. I think splitting the SBD-Riverside line in the exurban areas is probably a better idea than in the desert. That way you can avoid chopping into LA county and deliver two 50% HVAP districts in SBD and Riverside in addition to the 65% HVAP. Might be worth playing with. I of course hold that the choice I made in including Pomona in the really Hispanic district is the correct one, but not feasible with your algorithm.

The HVAP for CD-40 is only 36.6% so the HCVAP is probably around 30%. Moving Yucaipa isn't going to get it anywhere near 50%. I already have a fully compliant section 2 district in the county as CD-41, so there is no obligation to try to form CD-40 into an opportunity district.

The problem for me wasn't where to split the SBD-Riverside line, but how to cross the SBD mountains from the north. I don't like crossing them just to grab some population and the piece I grab seems out of place compared to the rest of the high desert district. Keeping more of the eastern desert together seems like a much better fit. My move makes CD-43 more compact as well without changing CD-39 compactness much.

... except for Montebello. :P

In the meantime I'll see how smooth I can make a Riverside district. I'm still concerned that Riverside meets the Gingles test and something will have to be done there to answer to the VRA.

Yes, one precinct. I forgot that one. :)  "Answering the VRA" means a current legal mandate, and it appears that there is none for a mere 50% HVAP CD based on our chat. Moreover, since the 9th Circuit decision interpreted Gingles, it is the law, unless Bartlett changed it. Did Bartlett change it? I suggest not, although Kennedy as is sometimes his wont, when not grandiloquent, can be vague and imprecise. For example from Bartlett we have this schizophrenic gem. Given the policy thrust of the prose, as to whether at least theoretically, a minority if unanimous can elect they own candidate without anyone else's help, I see nothing that reverses the 9th circuit decision, and indeed it kind of goes there itself.  

"Unlike any of the standards proposed to allow crossover-district claims, the majority-minority rule relies on an objective, numerical test: Do minorities make up more than 50 percent of the voting-age population in the relevant geographic area? That rule provides straightforward guidance to courts and to those officials charged with drawing district lines to comply with § 2. See LULAC, supra, at 485 (opinion of SOUTER, J.) (recognizing need for "clear-edged rule"). Where an election district could be drawn in which minority voters form a majority but such a district is not drawn, or where a majority-minority district is cracked by assigning some voters elsewhere, then — assuming the other Gingles factors are also satisfied — denial of the opportunity to elect a candidate of choice is a present and discernible wrong that is not subject to the high degree of speculation and prediction attendant upon the analysis of crossover claims. Not an arbitrary invention, the majority-minority rule has its foundation in principles of democratic governance. The special significance, in the democratic process, of a majority means it is a special wrong when a minority group has 50 percent or more of the voting population AND could constitute a compact voting majority but, despite racially polarized bloc voting, that group is not put into a district. [*1246]" (emphasis added)

You see, the thrust here is 50% VAP, that is also 50% voting VAP, or at least eligible to vote, to wit, CVAP. Kennedy while  bouncing erratically in his prose  from population to voters, when he gets down to brass tacks refers to a "compact voting majority." "Voting majority" means "voting majority." not voting age population majority. In other words, folks not eligible to vote don't count. They ain't voters. How can you have a "voting majority," if it is illegal for you to vote?

Kennedy is just a mess isn't it - and in more ways than one. :(

The 50% HVAP CD in Riverside is dead in my map, unless you think I missed something Mike. The Romero 9th circuit decision is still the governing law, interpreting Gingles, without dilution. Sure drawing a 50% HVAP CD would be legal, but given that it violates other redistricting principles, e.g. going down to Perris, and f's the Pubbies, it needs to be vetoed. Why on earth would the Pubs vote for it? And doesn't it violate your own good redistricting principles, which are while more mechanistic than mine, similar to mine, which is that you do erosity and chops to and only to the extent the VRA demands it? And surely it is not appropriate to alter the shape of CD's on the assumption that  Romero will be reversed (highly unlikely it appears from Kennedy's Bartlett prose) is it?

I've sat through a number of panels listening to legal minds debate this very point. The first part of the citation makes a clear standard as to when Gingles applies. It's 50% VAP, and he says it's to provide "guidance to the courts". The later part is almost a moral statement that decries a "special wrong" that occurs when a district is not formed for the voting population. It doesn't seem to me that that's the clear direction part, and he knew the difference because it's noted elsewhere.

Interestingly, I found that the Pubs on the panels generally argued for the strict VAP definition, while the Dems argued for a CVAP view. Both sides agreed that this question is going back to SCOTUS.

In any case, I again note that the commission did put a 50% VAP district there after citing the Gingles factors at work in Riverside county. I think they actually drew a pretty good district without chops. I missed it due to the mismatch between block group and muni lines. I think I can rework mine to look nice and meet my reading that the first part is the directive. I can't fault you if you read the other part as controlling, you are in good company.

My map in Riverside is actually what we drew earlier. When did you decide to change it and go towards the commission's version? I drew two districts in the IE which were 50% Hispanic for the total population and of course the VRA district. And both those were with minimal muni chops, and the Riverside district just looked so perfect. I think what I have drawn in the IE (and what you drew before as well) is the right way to go.

Here's my revision for the IE. CD 42 has dropped to 51.2% HVAP, but all the chops are gone except a small part of Riverside city by Woodcrest (at least as far as block groups permit). Torie may note that Laguna Niguel is now apart from Irvine. ;)

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Laguna Niguel may be part of Irvine, but separated from Dana Point? LOL. No.

And Kennedy's bloviating is just some unnecessary moral statement in a paragraph setting for the legal standard? No, I think he is telling us that minority voter means voter, not some illegal minority of voting age who isn't a voter. So LOL again really. No, just no. And I don't think the Commission interprets Bartlett as undermining Romero, which has interpreted Gingles for us. So I don't think the Commission itself thinks a 50% VAP Riverside CD is legally necessary. They just did it, to do it, to appease interests hostile to Pub interests, or whatever, with the Pubs asleep at the wheel.

In any event, if giving the Hispanics a 50% VAP pound of flesh (well actually the pound of flesh goes to white Dems, but I digress) does not hurt the Pubs cause by more than a few basis points, and the CD looks as good as yours does (which isn't bad, but still chops the Riverside metro area more in order to race down to distinctly non metro Perris, which is down a canyon and over a hill), I am open to it - provided I get something else in return. I don't give away freebies.

Sbane a fire fight broke out, as to whether a 50% HVAP CD was legally required in Riverside per the VRA. Mike and I went back and forth. I have now decided that it most probably isn't. It really makes no sense. To take an extreme example, just what is the point of drawing a 50% HVAP CD, if all the Hispanics are illegals?  It would be like drawing a CD for convicted felons serving their time who can't vote. That's ludicrous.

No it's apart from Irvine, but with Dana Point, Laguna Beach and Oceanside. Did I read the map on the app wrong?

OK, so I peeked at the answers, ie the PVIs using your metric. Here's the question, do you want all three Riverside seats? The county as a whole is R+5 by the usual 2008 and 2004 average, but it's only R+2.5 by your metric. Trying to hold all a three district split is a dangerous game. In my map with your metric I get the districts at D+7, R+3 and R+9. I'm curious what your plan gives - does it still split 2-1 or do you get three R+2 or 3 districts?

Count me as skeptical. The commission district is 50.21% HVAP. They put Lake Matthews with a split in the Riverside CD and left Woodcrest out, even though it has no good connection to the rest of the district. Had they flipped those two communities the HVAP drops below 50%. Hmm, a coincidence? You tell me.

No, I think it was done deliberately, but it is not legally necessary, and the Pubs should not have agreed to it. They fumbled the ball.  As to your point above, you having peeked at the PVI's, and I not, as I told you, all things being equal, and here they are more than equal in favor of it, competitive districts are good - not bad. Riverside is snapback country by the way. It is one of the yellow CD's in my chart. The more I learn, the more I think a 50% HVAP CD there is just wrong - from every perspective.

How did you get the Bush numbers by the way? I got them by using the old CD's of course, not the new ones.  Did you manually calculate the actual Bush percentages for the new CD's?

I will not have time to put up my matrix chart until this weekend, and I need to revisit LA county, although I doubt that will change anything much, as a partisan matter.

Using the McCain-Bush averages is just a bad idea for CA, after looking at the 2010 Senate race. In much of CA there is a real trend to the Dems as I noted above, and in other places, not.

And no, I don't like the north LA county CD chopping into the City of Los Angeles, moving down a canyon with no people, and over some hills. It doesn't even save a county chop does it (which in your metric trumps muni chops, even grotesque ones, apparently)?

However, it is all good. You have your map, and I have mine, and we can compare both in a matrix chart to the Commission's product, and decide what happened in sensitive areas, and maybe even secure an interview with one of the Pub Commissioners. Hopefully however, we can get a bit closer, but it doesn't look like that is going to happen much.   At the end of the day, I will list the areas where I disagree with you, and why in one place, for you to largely ignore, which has been the pattern so far. :P I feel just so inadequate as a lawyer here. It is as if I can't even persuade my dog to let me pet him. :(

Here is my LA County fix. It's sad that my home turf of Silverlake had "Baja Silverlake" (yes, that is what it is called south of Sunset) severed from it along with its SE corner, but such is life. It could not be helped after CA-30 had to recede a bit to take indirectly some of the territory lost to my old CA-33 on the Westside, and sadly the Asians around Koreatown, got chopped too (but at least it was between rich and poor mostly, despite my best efforts), but yes, it is a better map. Hey, San Pedro is totally united now - isn't that grand? :) I will revisit Merced, and see if I can unite it, by having the Hispanic CD lose more of Fresno, and then I think I am close to done (well after looking at San Diego one more time, and seeing what the implications are of getting rid of the Chula Vista chop - and no I am not going to chop inner city San Diego to bits either - that is not an option). Oh, and I need to restore my Riverside CD to its former compact metro Riverside "wholeness." Thanks guys. Cheers.

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That looks so much better! What is the Black and Latino VAP for the 33rd? You did the right thing putting all of San Pedro into the 33rd and getting it out of the 36th. You also didn't Santa Monica or Culver City. Gardena (I think it's Gardena?) seems to be split but that is probably due to racial reasons.

I see you  chopped the BIG city of San Bernadino in half Mike. Nice Pub gerry!  :)

Yes, I much prefer our version of the IE (once you fix your Riverside district back to it's original glory). It makes for two Hispanic influence districts in the IE, and the Riverside district becomes more logical.

I am at the office now, and  don't have access to my data base, but  CA-33 is something like 67% or 69% HVAP, and 15% BVAP I think.

Yes I write that off in the same category as the splits of Fresno and Bakersfield - the VRA made me do it. :) And I've checked that my Chino Hills split really does reduce county chops by one. I also need advice to get a better handle on Riverside PVI's. What would you suggest if all I have in the app are 2008 Pres and 2010 Gov?

BTW, this is area is my counterexample to your distaste for my passage from Santa Clarita into north LA. Why is that bad, when you so willingly make what my eyes see as the same sort of passage across the SBD mountains to get the Yucaipa area? I make the former hop but it lets me avoid the latter hop. Isn't that an even trade?

Speaking of LAC, I have taken your advice to reduce some muni splits on the Asian district. My split of Chino Hills required the addition of parts of West Covina. But I noticed that you had a chop of El Monte that I could eliminate by increasing my West Covina chop. We both have a Pomona chop, so I think that puts me with only one additional chop (Chino Hills) compared to your plan. The whole shift only costs me 0.1% so the AVAP is 51.9%.

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Oh, I got rid of my El Monte chop long ago. The only chop for the red tiger is that one precinct in Montebello to equalize population. I also don't like the Chino Hills chop or an OC district going there. That is just too cute by half. Don't worry. The balance of Chino Hills has construction activity going on again, and you know who whom it is designed, with fancy mother-in-laws quarters with its own entrance and separate small kitchen? You guessed it - Asians!

Yucaipa v Chatsworth?  First, two wrongs don't make a right. Second going down the connector road from Big Bear to the valley to nip off a couple of whole towns, to which they often go to shop and stuff not available up on the mountain, is not the same thing as chopping San Bernadino in half.  Surely you know there is zero chance any commission would ever agree to that. I also doubt you would get much support for moving into LA City to an area unconnected with Santa Clarita. No my CA-25 should go north precisely where I sent it. It is by far superior, and the only sensible chop. The rest all suck really. This is a case where you need to throw your computer program out of the window, and that little parameter that putting aside the VRA, county chops are always worse than an extra muni chop, or a county chop to put together munis that belong together (our little Silicon Valley disagreement).

For that matter, when I get finished (well when I think I am finished, until the next complaint comes along :P), I will send you my data file, and perhaps you can do the same for me, although I can't seem to reopen anything with a block data base, after I do my first save of it.

I see from my map, that I may have to play with my northern end of CA-33 a tad. I think I see an extra muni chop there that is unnecessary. A couple of three of the  munis up there have these odd little shapes, which is kind of irritating.  So I need to pay with it a little bit, while minimizing erosity.

I can respect your priorities to go with what some of the public see as communities of interest and use that to place muni integrity ahead of county lines. My more detached view is to look at factors that are harder to be manipulated. We can agree to disagree here.

It's interesting looking at the commission's maps, and what they were willing to vote for. For instance they did come into LA from Santa Clarita with what seems a far worse chop than I used, and that solely so they could hop to Simi Valley. So that kind of LA chop has received votes from commissioners.

Likewise, putting Chino Hills with northern OC is what the commission did as part of a larger tri-county district. Of course they didn't split it, but made a split of Upland that seems inconsistent with so many other borders they carefully followed. I'm not convinced it was the only way out, but they certainly voted for it.

We should swap files at some point, I was going off your old work when I thought El Monte was still cut, and my screen resolution didn't reveal the change. My bad. Meanwhile, I've done a major cleanup on my south LA area. I reduced the chops into Long Beach, kept the Torrance district out of the LA city corridor, and kept Gardena whole so only Hawthorne is split in that area.

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Sorry I'm coming late to this thread (and this post)..but since I live in the same general area as Xahar, I thought I'd respond.

If I were redistricting this particular area, I'd try to get as much of northern Mountain View and Sunnyvale running along 101 with Santa Clara as possible, but would include Downtown and much of East San Jose in that district, too. Then, I would connect Evergreen in the East with much of South San Jose (similar demographics) and Los Gatos, maybe some of West San Jose and Campbell in there too. Finally, I would put Saratoga, Cupertino, and the southern half of Sunnyvale in the same district as Los Altos and southern Mountain View.

Those are my (very rough) thoughts right now, feel free to comment.

Not very familiar with the LA area, but...what are the demographics of that area in the San Fernando Valley (or approximately) where a bunch of districts "meet"?

Oh my bad, I was thinking of Monterey Park where I got rid of a chop, and forgot the one into El Monte. That one is a population equalizer too. I suppose there is a way to try to figure out how to get it down to one, by CA-32 taking two precincts in Montebello, and losing the one in El Monte, if the chock can be slightly turned without creating another chop.

OK, all fixed now. I got lucky. I found a crossover precinct, this one, (), to make up the shortfall (and should have been in CA-32 anyway, because more of the population lives in its southern portion), and that made it easy.  :) Otherwise it's tough, because so many of the lines are hard, that the clock cannot be turned really. Just for full disclosure, my CA-32 to 50.3% AVAP. Oh the horror, the horror, Mike beat me - yet again, in the racial spoils game!  :P

I also fixed up the northern end of CA-33.

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Here's a reworked south side of LAC. There are no muni splits except for LA, Long Beach, and Commerce (and the Montebello nibble). All these districts are within 100 of the ideal population! If this looks at least as reasonable as my previous work, I could be convinced to switch. The BVAP in 34 should still equate to a CVAP over 50%. Here are the VAPs for groups over 10%.

CD 33 Downtown/South LA: 68.5% HVAP, 15.9% BVAP
CD 34 Inglewood/Compton: 44.9% HVAP, 43.3% BVAP
CD 35: Downey/Norwalk: 67.5% HVAP, 19.7% WVAP
CD 36: South Gate/Carson: 72.1% HVAP
CD 37: Torrance/Santa Monica: 55.4% HVAP, 20.7% HVAP, 16.5% AVAP
CD 38: Long Beach: 40.4% WVAP, 29.1% HVAP, 19.0% AVAP

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I think that would lead to too many municipal splits. I understand why you want to split the cities, but it probably won't fly with a fair map unless there are VRA requirements. I would keep Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara together, and instead of going into East San Jose (lower income than these areas) I would go pick up Milpitas and the parts of Fremont as required. Not sure if that would create a whole district. Evergreen does get stuck in a East San Jose district, where it doesn't belong, but trying to connect it to another CD might make the map too erose, and force the East San Jose district to pick up neighborhoods with similar incomes to Evergreen which defeats the whole purpose of excluding Evergreen. Worth drawing and seeing how it works out.

Better map, but again, not so good in places from a COI standpoint: La Mirada being in an Hispanic CD, Palos Verdes not being in the beach CD, and the like. I like its compactness though.  I guess chops of unincorporated islands don't count as chops (e.g. the one there near Culver City).  :) Some of the cuts in of the beach CD are also kind of ugly, and again really not a good COI mix. But then, I know, you don't like the COI metric. :P

Do we like this version of a Silicon Valley cut better?  It is the white/Asian v. Hispanic chop. :)

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Interesting. What I would have done is got rid of the Hispanic parts of the 15th basically east of CA-87 in exchange for the areas of the 16th northwest of Campbell, Campbell itself, and the areas to the east of it as much is needed. I think that would create a nice east side district.

That map is rather uglier than the other one, but it does make sense.

I don't see the COI in the east side extension of CD 15. Overall it looks like one Asian tiger (my preference) gives way to two Asian plurality districts. It's also hard to judge CD 16 without seeing the southern end. It looks like you'll be chopping Gilroy.

sbane's suggestion would leave neither district with an Asian plurality from what I see.

Is there any way to make a reasonable map that only splits SJ two ways?

Are we going to have a race-class based division of the Silicon Valley, or a geography based division?  You can't have both. Sure I can knock out CA-14 from San Jose, but then Mountain View goes back into CA-14, along with Campbell, and it will still be tight. CA-14 might have to go down to Morgan Hill over some crummy little mountain road to make it happen.

I am open here. I don't know the this part of CA very well at all (south of Palo Alto, and north of Los Gatos). How are we going to resolve this? I am getting "stereophonic" advice. :)

And yes, I try to balance geography and the minimize chops thing, and race and class where I can. And I focus more on communities, so the net Asian percentage in a CD is not the key, for example, but rather within a community that needs to be chopped. I mean Miltpitas and Fremont are heavily Asian, but have been chopped from now more Asian designed CA-16 from just a San Jose standpoint. Hispanics have been shoved into CA-15 in SJ, yet because Morgan Hill and stuff has to be in CA-16, the Hispanic percentage between the two CD's does not vary too much.

In sum, one cannot minimize chops of SJ, and do the class and race based metric here at the same time. One must choose. My prior map focused more on geography, but not entirely, since I still tri-chopped SJ, just more modestly. And that little jut of SJ to the west south of Cupertino, which looks to be a similar demographic, I am inclined to leave in CA-14, even if it represents a third CD moving into SJ. And CA-14 taking Campbell, which would also be necessary to keep it out of SJ, creates its own erosity (while taking those handful of SJ precincts south of Cupertino, reduces erosity).

So again, how will we resolve this?

Oh, the southern end of CA-16 is unchanged. Gilroy was chopped long ago. We have already had that discussion. And the east-side extension of CA-15 in this version is Hispanic, uniting SJ Hispanics.

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Anyway, here is another version, which makes CA-16 40.5% AVAP.

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I agree that it is a conundrum. Geography and demography are working at cross purposes in the SV. I was willing to go with a northern Asian tiger and let geography dictate the rest. Even so, in this edition I was left with a bit of SJ between Saratoga and Campbell that I couldn't help but put in a tri-chop. I didn't get a lot of support this year, though I would note that when I floated this concept in 2008 on the forum it got better reviews. I suspect we've gotten more sophisticated as we've watched the last year unfold. This was my original offering.

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Here is how I would draw it. First of all I kept the chops in Fremont and Gilroy as Torie has it. Then I kept Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara together and traveled down CA-237 to pick up Milpitas and the Fremont chop. I kept all of the east side of SJ together in CA-16. And CA-15 goes down to pick up Campbell and the areas to the east of it. I kept all of the parts of San Jose near Cupertino in the 14th west of Saratoga Avenue.

This is a class map, with no regard for racial stats. In fact for the total population, each of the districts ends up about 33% Asian. And I am fine with that unless you can show me evidence of racially polarized voting in the Silicon Valley. Did the commission find that? You have the 14th as the upper class district hugging the hills, the 15th picking up the middle of the road places in the valley and the 16th picking up the more working class east side. And yes, Asians here are working class as well with the exception of the Evergreen area. I guess I could have picked that area up with the 15th but it would have made the map more erose and it would have ended up being swapped for similar income areas in any case. BTW can anyone tell me how the area east of Campbell is? It's not a high income area is it? I have a feeling it's middle class but I don't know that area too well.

Looks OK to me sbane (no sorry, Mike I don't like your map), but you chop the Hispanics in SJ - and the Asians north of SJ, from those to the south. I am looking for some consensus here, pretending we are all commissioners negotiating. There is no right or wrong answer here.

All I know about the area east of Campbell in SJ is that it is lily white. I would assume it is middle class too. I have absolutely no reason to believe it has much of a upper middle class component, but like you, I have zero idea as to the "truth."

No, I made sure to pick up most of the Hispanic areas in SJ and put it in the 16th. Which area are you talking about specifically? As for Asians, I do split Milpitas and Fremont from east SJ Asians. Like I said only the evergreen area really goes with the middle class theme. The Vietnamese areas, which kind of overlap with the Hispanic areas, are not that high income. It is possible to substitute Evergreen for the areas east of Campbell and that will make the 15th more Asian and erose, but is it really necessary? Do Asians vote differently than other groups? Is there group voting in primaries? The commission found evidence of racially polarized voting in many parts of California, but was the Silicon Valley one of those areas?

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Here's another option. I picked up the Asian areas right adjacent to Milpitas for the 15th. I can go down and pick up Evergreen too and get rid of Campbell and areas adjacent to it..... It's up to 40% AVAP BTW.

This rectangle is solidly Hispanic. Surprising - but true.

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This maps "unites" bourgeoisie whites/Asians, with dirt poor Hispanics it looks like in CA-16. Where or where shall the SJ Hispanics go?

Would not it be better to "dump" them into CA-15, and have CA-16 pick up some more middle class white areas in the Campbell and farther east areas, at least to the extent necessary, with Campbell going either way?

The solution? I think Mountain View needs to go back into CA-14. This maximizes the CA-15 ACVAP to boot, combining lower income Asians with Hispanics.

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The south and southeast parts where there is a high Asian population isn't really that bourgeoisie. That would be Cupertino and adjacent parts of SJ. I guess they are middle class though, but with some working class elements for sure, especially south of I-680 and along US-101. You wouldn't say Garden Grove is bourgeoisie, would you? I think it would be best to keep the east side together, which is why I like my first map, rather than this second one which is a bit of a compromise trying to up the Asian % in the 15th.

Here's a version that avoids the tri-chop of SJ and keeps the east side Asian district together at 50.4% AVAP. The SJ Hispanic core areas are kept intact as well (Alum Rock is in though the muni lines make it hard to see. The west side corridor along Ca-85 is maintained. Muni boundaries are respected elsewhere.

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School leaves me without time at the moment to try a map of my own, but here are my priorities, listed in order:

1. Class
2. Eroseness
3. Race
4. Political boundaries

Communities of interest are primarily class-based, as I've mentioned before, to the extent that aesthetic appeal is more important than race. As for political boundaries, the county lines were drawn long before most of the Santa Clara Valley was settled, rendering them rather useless, and municipal boundaries are completely useless; thanks to the rabid pro-growth policy that San Jose followed until Norm Mineta was elected Mayor, San Jose is a leviathan that encompasses whatever it was able to grab, without regard to geographical location. Splitting San Jose is not undesirable in the slightest.

I put up another map in my post above, and then three more posts intervened. Assuming we do a SJ tri-chop (I just can't get off on Mike's maps here, they are too damned erose for starters, and of course are based on his overall CA map design (in this case I think due to the SF chop coming from the north rather than the south), which varies from mine as we all know to boot, and that circle simply cannot be squared), is that a reasonable "chop" of the Gordian knot?

The challenge for erosity is dealing with the shape of the Latino core of SJ. Here's a more compact version that has the SJ tri-chop. How compact do you want?

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I think you need to work with my map, and the CA-14, 15 and 16 merry-go-round Mike, or we will be talking past one another. I am not going to trash my entire NoCal map design. Given the outer perimeters of those three districts as drawn, how do you divvy up the spoils? That is the question with my map. But yes, that aside, we are getting closer.

I will happy to do the same working with your map design, although given your very tight metrics, there really aren't many choices out there, are there? The computer drives your map, with mere humans having relatively few choices. Am I wrong about that?

What happens if you move Los Altos, Palo Alto, Stamford to the orange so that brown spills into the bay (as opposed to ocean) side of things exclusively through Los Gatos Canyon, trichopping SJ hard? (Am I talking about the area exchanged for Campbell or about a counterclockwise shift? Why, I've no idea. Whichever makes more sense.)

Your challenge is fair and I accept. I'll do analysis of your map to see if there are a reasonable set of options to choose among.

I have constructed the following map to illustrate my analysis. I begins by following the 48 K chop out of Alameda, so it should be compatible with the Torie plan.

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The lime green area is what seems to be the consensus core of CD 15. The only variable might be how far south to extend from Milpitas. I used the natural division that occurs where the Hispanic population dominates, and without breaking Alum Rock or East Foothills. This core area has a pop of 450 k with 48.8% AVAP. Adding the 48 K from Alameda gives a population that requires an additional 205 K to complete the district.

I can identify three basic choices to complete CD 15, two of which are shown in the map. The purple area is downtown and the Hispanic core of SJ including Alum Rock which wraps around some of those core blocks. This area is 56.7% HVAP and seems like it should stay together in a single district. The yellow areas sit between the CD 15 core and the CD 14 core shown in red. The third option would be to extend south from East Foothills into the heavily Asian areas, but that is a non-starter in Torie's plan.

Either the purple or yellow option would work with the CD 15 core, and both choices have AVAPs in the low to mid 20's. That means that CD 15 would be at best an Asian plurality district, and it brings up the issue of how to chop into Alameda. The Fremont chop in blue has a high Asian pop, but that doesn't seem relevant given the direction of the district as a whole. It is an erose peninsula, and the Asians in Fremont get split no matter how one cuts it. I would suggest consideration of the green chop instead. It has a lower AVAP, but make a less erose match to the rest of CD 15.

I think that resolving the shape of CD 15 first will lead more naturaly into the best division between CD 14 and 16.

Excellent idea on the alternate chop in Fremont assuming the green part has the same population as the blue district. The green chop of Fremont and the city of Newark are distinctly middle class. The blue parts are completely upper middle class to upper class with a median income around 120-130k easily. If we are going with a class map, the green chop of the Fremont area is better.I also think the 15th should pick up the yellow areas instead of the purple Hispanic areas. I think the Hispanic areas go better with the areas to its south. The Asian areas to its south, especially north and west of Capitol expressway around US 101 are fairly working class.

That would be my inclination as well, but I thought I'd lay out the case both ways. If Torie concurs, I'll proceed to my analysis of the division CD 14 and 16.

Newark instead of southeast Fremont looks reasonable and from sbane's description sounds reasonable. Can we hear why Torie drew it the wayhe did (and why nobody raised it before seeing as SJ was discussed before)?

Thanks Mike. It appears that your CA-15 core plus the purple zone (designed to try to unite Hispanics), is close to my last map, a modified version of which I post below. More will be added to this post in 15 minutes or so, so hang on.

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Well I rather keeping working on this, rather than focus on the SC primary. The Pubs seem to have a death wish there. :(

On the class warfare theme, as we balance race and class and jurisdictional lines, and eroseness, I have concluded one bit of SJ has that "I know it when I see it" upper middle class feel to it, in its own little Shangra La little valley separated by a mini mountain from the SJ masses:

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However this little salient of SJ does not.  It is just not up to Cupertino standards. It has more of the feel of Campbell.

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To be continued.  There is a method to my madness.

I'm with you on your pics Torie. I saw the same thing in my analysis.

I'm confused on the extension SW of 87. There's a little pocket of Hispanics, sure, but it goes through so many Anglo areas the sum is only about 45% HVAP, and a significant piece of one of those chops into residents of Burbank. In exchange you could keep the Milpitas foothills intact as well as Alum Rock, since my satellite images of roads make me think those areas really do belong with the valley rather than a long link along the foothills to the south.

I also take it that you weren't interested in my Newark alternative, even with sbane's glowing endorsement.

I will eviscerate your most creative Newark option soon, very soon, but I need to cook the steaks for my guests now. :P

In the meantime, putting aside the 87 thing which I don't understand, and maybe the map below "solves" it, I think we are down to the class warfare theme, and the race warfare theme. I assume the class one gets the nod, since the chop of Sunnyvale is rather vicious, even though it gets rid of the SJ trichop. The class warfare map still takes in the SJ western salient, but that is because there are no upper middle class areas left to take, and that is the cut which reduces erosity.

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Yes, that's better, particularly in the foothills, but the part of 15 in the area bordered by 87/880/280 is only 45.9% HVAP. Is it worth the type of erosity I'm usually accused of for such low gains and an extra split?

Also, are we now just working on a socio-ethnic map? I thought we still wanted to reduce splits and erosity as much as play with classes. :(

I assume you mean the first map, and that little green jut there. Collectively it is only 49.5% Hispanic?  If so, I will find my Hispanics elsewhere. :)

Try looking along the east side of the 101 just south of your district. (wrong version of your map) It would help if I knew the ground rules for this map. ???

How does this map look?  

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Oh, I am aware of the SJ eastern foothills issue running north, both inside and outside of SJ, but it is just too white and rich to fit into the CA-15 theme. To append it would dilute the Hispanic and Asian percentages in CA-15, as heavily Hispanic or non-well-to-do Asian precincts down south would have to go in exchange. Race and class pushes it into CA-16 it seems to me. One can't have everything.

As to Newark v south Fremont, we have this:

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So Newark is an ethnic grab bag, and its median income is about 40K - lower middle class/higher end working class. The S. Fremont bit has considerably more distinguished looking housing stock, just like right next door Mipitas (it's the "bourgeoisie" part of Fremont, and the Asian contagion has really caught on there).  Beyond that, picking up more Hispanics, disparate from Santa Clara County/Milpitas along a highway through an industrial zone with no people on one side, and salt flats on the other (in other words crossing a natural barrier), is not really the goal here. It is to max the ACVAP, while trying to keep to the extent possible the SJ Hispanics together. Finally, the jut north into S. Fremont is via a seamless string of housing tracts running  from beautiful downtown Milpitas straight north so that you have no real idea where the county line is from an aerial shot, with no natural barrier. That is why I did it in the first place, but now we have both ethnic and class reasons to boot.  :)

I assume everywhere agrees that the Newark option should be interred. Right?  Or are you all conspiring to harass me?  :P

The neighborhood of SJ right next to Cupertino most certainly is upper middle class. Yes, the housing stock is older than the Almaden Valley, and it's not cornered of by hills, but the more relevant metric here would be the performance of the schools. Lynbrook high school is one of the highest scoring schools in all of California, and it's a desirable neighborhood that many people want to move to leading to high home prices.

As for Newark, it's median income is about 80k, about double what you said (is that statistic from the 80's census or something? I think Oakland and even Richmond have a higher median income ). It is similar to the income of Milpitas and Santa Clara, probably slightly lower than Sunnyvale and Mountain View, which I would include in that district. It does belong there. I don't exactly have a problem with the district crossing the industrial area to pick up Newark, but I don't have a huge problem with the Mission district chop either. This is the heavily Asian area in Fremont and is quite well off, very similar to the neighborhood around Lynbrook high school as it has Mission high school which is also one of the top schools in California. Now the thing here is that Newark may be a better fit for the 15th income wise, but where does the Mission district fit in then? One option might be if a wealthy inland east bay district was drawn and this area could be picked up by that. Otherwise putting this area into a district with Hayward makes just as much sense as putting it in the 15th. Basically this area has nowhere to go. So even though I don't have a problem with the 15th picking up Newark, I also don't care much if it picks up the Mission district. Muon's plan does reduce the erosity a bit, but the other cut increases the AVAP. In the end I don't feel that strongly about it since there is really no obvious district I would rather put the Mission district in.

So it would appear for Newark Sbane. Milpitas clocks in at 85K, and I suspect S. Fremont is about the same. The erosity thing is a function of ignoring the salt flats and water in-between. It creates "ersatz" compactness - which doesn't count in my book. Without that huge magnificent connecter precinct through Fremont covering vast acreages of salt flats and water and an industrial zone with no people living in it, the appearance of CA-15 would not look nearly so good. Newark just isn't part of the Santa Clara environment. It's more a proud member of the East Bay. I really think it is not a very good choice to go there.

Mike loved it because while it does not eliminate a muni chop, it chops just one connector precinct out of Fremont, and that to him is an irresistible loadstar - a veritable sun as to which he is hypnotically drawn inspired by Icarus's flight perhaps. I have a more complex game, which I know frustrates the heck out of him, but hey, I'm a mere human, and he's a computer genius. :)

As to the western SJ jut, I suspect its high test scores are more a function of its "Asianess"  than its wealth, but hey, it went into the "right" CD anyway, so it's all good no?  I don't dispute that it is solidly middle class.

So how do you think the people buy the houses? I wouldn't be surprised if it has an income equivalent to Cupertino, but perhaps not up to Saratoga standards. Houses cost much less in Campbell and the areas to the east of it. Those are solidly middle class areas, but I would say the Lynbrook area is upper middle class. I don't know the entire history of the area, but I am sure it always had good schools which probably attracted Asians there, further jacking up housing prices and thus income. Trust me that area has a higher income than Campbell and surroundings. Anyways, if it's in the Cupertino district it's fine. It's with that city where it belongs. Xahar lives there btw, maybe he can tell us more about it.

One thing to consider in Muon's map of the Fremont area is that he barely picks up any population in Fremont and keeps another city whole. Your map chops Fremont. It's not a huge deal though.

It looks to me like many of the Mission district folks in Fremont are the very same sort you are so willing to excise in the Milpitas foothills. I'm still with sbane, but I'll postpone further discussion about erosity definitions for now.

There is a place where we can perhaps have our cake and eat it, too. I looked at the minimum selected block groups in yellow to make Milpitas and Alum Rock whole and found they are only 21.7% WVAP which is lower than your district-wide average. I've shaded a pale silver area (including one block group way west that's not in Sunnyvale) that has WVAP of 37.1% which is much whiter than your district as a whole. Same pop, check it out.

edit: I see I inadvertently grabbed a block of East Foothills in yellow as well. Ignore that, and you can return a matching block elsewhere.

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What is the population of the huge Newark-surrounding precinct, and where do they presumably live - in its southeastern part? Maybe we could have our cake and eat it too in regards to issues of de facto and, as it were, de jure erosity as well? (Though the part angling around to beyond the bridge would always look ugly.)

The block group is population 3906 and is all located at the Milpitas border. Torie's plan would need about 6 K from Fremont in addition to Newark in CD 15. Any little pocket in addition to the aforementioned block group would do.

It seems they live in two very disparate nodes, one where you describe, and one north of Newark (the streets in the green zone). What a bizarre precinct.  Someone must have been on crack when they drew it.

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I see the two white plurality precincts you wanted to grab Mike in west downtown SJ, wading through some lightly populated Hispanic precincts to get them. :)  It is a reminder to look at precinct size. Anyway, I decided to just go for the whole hog. In for a penny, in for a pound. :P  Sorry boys, I just can't do Newark. It is just so wrong. I could not sleep at night having crossed that bridge too far. You don't want that do you?

Are we done with SJ now?  By the way, that county airport precinct east of Mountain View is not an American dream precinct. It is tiny 75K condos wedged between the freeway and the airport!  (Maybe those are pied a terre's, where the pilots "do" the stews, except that I suspect it is not the SJ commercial airport. I wonder what airport that is.) But the adjacent precinct already took a bite out it, the airport creates a natural barrier, so let the deed be done.  There is only one precinct CA-14 can lose in return, and only one, there on the east edge of the now famous west SJ jut of which we have spoken, and speculated so much, and it is too large. So that precinct will need to be chopped in half. In the meantime, CA-15 has 1,400 folks too many, and CA-14 1,400 residents too few.

Thanks guys, and particularly Mike for all your hard work on this. I appreciate it very much, and yes, it made the map better. :)

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Oh, and just for fun, I did a zillow of sales in east Cupertino versus the SJ west jut, and yes, Sbane was right. The housing prices are about the same. It is amazing how little a million bucks gets you in this neck of the woods, a 2,000 square foot cookie cutter house on a small lot, without a view. At least my a tad larger cookie cutter house of about the same value has a magnificent view. Those damn Asians are driving up housing prices! Deport them all!  :P

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Yeah, housing prices are still pretty ridiculous in certain parts of the Bay Area. But those areas also have a very high income. 100k in Laguna Niguel versus 130k here. And the Bay Area is very good at keeping supply low. Some parts of the Bay Area have seen prices drop a lot. Similar houses on the east side of San Jose go for about 300k, though incomes also drop proportionally. And if you are fine with living in the Hayward flats, down to about 250k.

Hey, sbane, don't put Laguna Niguel down like that!  :(  But yes, Cupertino > Laguna Niguel. This is kind of a fun chart - a ranking of cities by per capita income over 50,000 in population. Your town beats LN too!  :P

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Hasn't Prop 13 inflated home prices in the Bay Area (among other areas), since it gives people who bought houses ages ago a major incentive to stay in their homes, and a disincentive to sell, in a place where supply is already low, and demand is already high?

That is a factor, although mitigated by the housing price decline, which pushed more homes towards an assessment valuation that matched their real value. In some counties, you can sell one home and buy another, and carry over your prop 13 cap. We live in a crazy world.

Indeed. Of course, Prop 13 is toxic to me, for am I a young CA resident. ie I don't have much sympathy for the long-established businesses and older homeowners that Prop 13 subsidizes, at the expense of younger generations, renters, and the state's revenue. :P

A much better product, but I get 706,024 for the district when I draw one to match. Is there a block somewhere in yours which is actually assigned to another district? It would be 1695 in pop if that's the cause. Unfortunately that pushes it even higher and you may have to shed some off the SE corner.

I don't know if we're done, however. ;)


I had my original design with 52% AVAP.

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And my recent modification with 49.3% AVAP, and that should still have over 50% ACVAP.

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My initial parameters require a bigger chunk in Fremont/Newark, and I insist on a northern Asian tiger. There should be some options available, and I welcome advice.

Yes, well you are going for a max AVAP CD, within your little universe of constraints, and the rest of us are doing a balancing test. I suspect my CA-15, diluted as it may be for you, is 50% ACVAP, and even more likely, 50% AVPA (actually voted percentage Asian), since the Hispanics here hardly seem to vote at all. The turnout rates are just amazingly low in the Hispanic precincts. So on that one, we are on a parallel path.

As to CA-15, my numbers are my numbers (I switched the colors of my CA-34 lime CD just to see if some rogue precinct popped up in CA-15, which has a similar color, and none did). I will send you my data base.

I assume in your Asian purple tiger that if you chop south into SJ from Santa Clara, and lose the Evergreen jut, that that gets your Asian percentage down below your goals. The SV American dream CD (my CA-14), can pick up that upper middle class valley we agreed upon in south SJ to make up the population - to wit, twist the clock counterclockwise. You already have your tiger cutting into SJ anyway, and would even if you lost the Evergreen neighborhood. That Evergreen jut in east SJ is just not popular around here, and you made it butt ugly to boot.

In the meantime, here is the CA-20 cf which unites Merced. It's pretty awful. I notice the Commission's version has only a 53% HVAP in theirs (40.73% HCVAP). Did they assume that Madeira is not a community of interest with either Fresno or Merced, so there is no 50% HCVAP COI to draw?  I wonder what the legal risk is? If it is remote, I am inclined to go the way of the Commission.  The CD sucks.


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And here is a remap of the San Diego area which I assume will receive universal acclaim. If I had not just followed the Commission's Chula Vista chop, it is what I think I would have drawn in the first instance actually (even though it casts some Pub partisan shadows upon CA-50 potentially, but that is the nature of this exercise). 91,000 folks were involved in the Chula Vista chop. Surprising. It is a big town!

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I like it except for the Evergreen grab, especially when Mountain View is just sitting there, waiting to be picked up. There is no way I can accept that. Get rid of the Evergreen jut and pick up Mountain View, and then see how much population you either need to add or lose.

Torie, I don't really like you putting the Hispanic areas with the middle class district. Keep the east side together, except for the areas right south of Milpitas. You cut the working class community in East San Jose in half since the Vietnamese areas are in the 16th. And while Muon picks up the middle class neighborhood of Evergreen, he also proceeds to go and pick up the working class Asian neighborhoods. Especially in Muon's map with Newark in the mix, you can lose Evergreen and the erosity, and add Mountain View and not drastically drop the AVAP. I'm guessing it will be around 38-40%. There is really no need to get it anything above that.

I really like you SD map BTW. It seems you split Escondido a bit, maybe a precinct or two. Maybe lose a precinct or two in the mountains and pick all of it up? The 49th can pick that up and the 50th can pick up some more population in Carlsbad since it's already split. If the numbers work out without having to split any other city, I would do it. Otherwise it's not that big a deal.

I am not sure exactly what you are recommending sbane. Perhaps you could draw it. Most of the eastside father south put in CA-15 is majority Hispanic.

Right, you put the majority hispanic areas in the 15th, the middle class district. And you cut them off from the Asian areas right to its south which have similar incomes. I would keep that area together. In exchange you can pick up Mountain View and other more middle of the road areas like Campbell in the 15th. This plan works even better with how Muon has drawn his map by including Newark and a chunk of Fremont in the 15th. This allows us to keep the class theme going and making sure the asian VAP doesn't fall too much. And we keep the east side mostly together. A win-win-win. Anyways, even in your map there is no reason for including the Hispanic areas in the 15th. Keep the east side together.

Now you have me totally confused. CA-15 is the lower income Asian-Hispanic CD. CA-16 is the middle class CD. CA-14 is the upper middle class CD. So I stuffed as many Hispanics and Asians into CA-15 as possible while avoiding muni chops. The change from my prior map per Mike's comments, was to switch out 3 or 4 west-side Hispanic precincts for east-side Hispanic precincts, plus pick up the 2 or 3 foothill precincts (Asian), immediately south of Milpitas, as well as delete a couple of white plurality precincts for heavily Asian ones in its SW corner.

So if I follow sbane' comments, I think this is the plan of mine he likes for the Asian district. I've adjusted the boundary between the central SJ district and the western SV to put the Campbell in the former and the New Almaden valley in the latter as suggested by Torie. The most Hispanic areas of Evergreen stay with central SJ, and it's now a HVAP plurality district. Did I pick up the comments accurately?

All the pictured districts are within 200 of the ideal population.

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edit: I think I did misread sbane's comments, but I really don't want to put Mountain View in that district. I was trying to provide somewhat more separation between the Hispanic and Asian areas and that throws them together more.

Based on the Commission's data, the ACVAP is about 10% lower than the AVAP in that district. I also note that they connected Cupertino instead of Mountain View whihc is a big boost to AVAP, but that means that Los Altos only connects to Saratoga in the same district by way of the Pac coast and Santa Cruz.

You should keep the northeast Asian areas with Milpitas in CA-15 but move the Hispanic areas out and into the CA-16. So keep the east and southeast together. By moving the northeast Asian areas into CA-15 you are able to get it up to 40.5%VAP. And CA-16 is 37%HVAP. This is what I drew.
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I don't think sbane liked the Evergreen reach, which also creates erosity, which I don't like, along with the class confusion, which is not on your agenda if it reduces the Asian percentage clearly, unless it creates a chop, but then he drew this eastside thing (which seemed to chop the Hispanics in half), and then deleted his post, so I am confused about that too. :)

OK. No I want to keep the Hispanics in CA-15, not CA-14, due to class reasons, and to get the Asian share of the actual voters up. Basically I wanted a center city San Jose CD created, that excised whites - and richer Asians.  Xahar was for this, and it seemed a reasonable balancing test, and that other chap who dropped by, and nobody seemed to disagree. So it became more north south, than east west. I don't think I will change it now. One reason for that, is that it is entirely peripheral to the purpose of my exercise.

Here is what I would do with your cut in Fremont and Newark. It makes it easier to draw a rational Asian heavy mostly middle class district. The 15th is 44.3% AVAP and the 16th (Cyan) is 37% HVAP.
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No, the wealthy areas are in the west valley mostly with a small pocket around Evergreen and some other areas to the south of San Jose. That's CA-16 the Hispanics are in BTW, not the 14th. The 14th is the upper class district by the hills.

You are abandoning the class metric as between CA-16 and CA-15.  You have the well to do Asians with poor Hispanics. It certainly is a reasonable choice however. My Asian CD has almost as high a percentage of Asian voters however, and clearly higher among actual voters, since you need to mix the Hispanics with the Asians to get there - not separate them.

Yes, I was referring to Evergreen, and south SJ, not an insignificant chunk, and yes, I meant CA-16 rather than CA-14, but whatever, you have severed the Hispanics from the Asian CD.

I guess my order of priorities is:

1. VRA
2. Compactness, not crossing jurisdictional and/or topographical lines absent compelling COI reasons to do so.
3. Class
4. COI of a lessor order, be it race or whatever.
5. Partisan competitiveness, with a balance between formerly Dem and GOP CD's put in play.

No, most of those Asian areas are from working class to middle class with a few pockets of affluence near the hills.

You removed the area of Fremont I included north of Newark. I need that for population balance in Alameda county and it's heavily Asian as well. I assume that you would adjust your map to remove blocks in SJ south of Santa Clara.

It's about 15,000 people it looks like? Putting it in and taking out more of San Jose north of Campbell leads to it becoming 45.4%AVAP.

But, as Torie has implied the WCVAP would be significant higher than the ACVAP. WCVAP increases by about 4/3 compared to WVAP. The Latino citizen rates are higher than the Asian rates in that area.

That's fine with me. It's an influence district but really it's mostly a division based on class.