Redistricting Washington with ten districts

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Comments welcome.

You're freaking crazy.

Totally awesome.

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So what would be the ratio of Republican vs. Democrat congressmen with this map?  3 to 7? 

Blue and brown will obviously retain their respective Republican representatives.

The orange and purple incumbents will both be lumped into orange.  I imagine Rick Larsen (purple) would be forced to move.  Purple is Dem-leaning enough that Larsen would retain, although the district could normally be competitive.  Orange would be an extremely solidly Democratic district, so it doesn't matter what happens there.

Norm Dicks might move to get his light green district back, which he'd retain.  Pink would be competitive as an open seat but Adam Smith would be fine.  Brian Baird loses Olympia from his district, but also Lewis County, and the areas of eastern Washington added are pretty moderate.  He'd be fine.

That leaves Dave Reichert with a much more unfriendly cyan district (he'd have to move a bit to run too).  Yellow would be an open seat.  That would be pretty interesting.  Without Pierce, Kerry won the district by about 10,000 of 260,000 votes.  Assuming that Pierce had about 50,000 votes, that means its yellow contribution would have to be 60% GOP to flip the entire CD, and it wouldn't be.  Slight Dem lean, there.

Dicks might run in that district instead, leaving an open seat in the somewhat safer, Tacoma/Bremerton-based light green, but then he'd lose out on his old constituency, and I think he'd object.

So: 2 Republican retains, 1 Dem-leaning toss-up (light green), 1 pure toss-up with maybe a very slight GOP lean (cyan), 6 Dem retains.

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Larsen should be OK.  Northern Snohomish isn't all that unfriendly.  He broke 60% in Skagit in 2006.  I think it would be a problem for the Dems as an open seat, though; Bush definitely won it.

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Haha, wow.

Kudos on creating a district that includes both Olympia and part of the Grand Coulee Dam.

Would this put Reichert in the same district as Inslee, though?

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This is an interesting idea, but I need to understand some of your non-connections.

He has too many connections, not too few. The two more northerly transcascadian links need to go, and I think the Jefferson-Island link needs to go as well.

Why should the Port Townsend/Keystone link be discarded?

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The second is the nice, but I take issue with the Lewis-Skamania link in the first.

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The second is the nice, but I take issue with the Lewis-Skamania link in the first.

But would mappers in WA ever consider the northern link across the Cascades?

I honestly don't know.  I was incorrect about the Skamania link, though; I guess Wind River Road goes from Cougar to Carson.  It's still probably not realistic, though.  Northern Skamania County is virtually unpopulated, and most of it is federally protected forestland.  There is a town (Stabler) up there, if I recall correctly (Google Maps won't load) but it's tiny.

I'm not sure that the idea of a major trans-Cascadian link has ever been debated, but I get the impression a southern link would be heavily favored.

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Most of the population of Jefferson County is in the northeastern part of the county.  There are only 500 in the western half, and I suspect that the most of the people in the eastern half of the southern part live right on the Hood Canal.  The highway on the west side of the ferry maintains the route number of Washington 20 which continues to the east across the entire state to Newport on the Idaho state line.

Yes, most people live either right on the 101/20 corridor or they live on small nests of roads right off of it.  Other than that, there's a few hundred on the Toanados Peninsula (Coyle), but any areas to the west are generally protected land.

The west (along the Pacific Ocean) has a few hundred residents, most of them Indians or spill-over rural livers who probably would self-identify as "rural residents" of Forks.