US House Redistricting: Colorado

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I actually have drawn such a map for Minnesota.

I think this Skill and Chance guy really doesn't understand the VRA (he's proven that in the previous posts too.) Colorado has no DOJ preclearance, so the only way it could end up with a requirement for a Hispanic majority drawn seat is for all the following to happen:

1-A map is drawn without a seat.
2-Some Hispanic advocacy group brings a lawsuit against a likely Democratic-drawn and Democratic-governor approved map.
3-A court rules that the Hispanic population of Colorado is "entitled" to such a seat and that the Hispanic populations' voting patterns are so different from the rest of the population that they can't be accurately represented in a non-Hispanic majority district. That's a tough sell in Denver.

Not likely. Now the second myth here is that drawing such a seat would hurt any incumbent Democrats. Drawing majority-minority seats only hurts the Democrats if the minorities are solidly Democratic and the white vote is solidly Republican. Since this is obviously true in the south where most such seats are, some people get the idea that's the case everywhere, but you are not throwing any Democrat under the bus by taking Hispanic areas out of their district and replacing them with white Denver liberals. It's not like the racially gerrymandered seats in New York City have resulted in any Republicans getting elected for example.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I agree with Sam. The current map is court-drawn already, so there's no reason to expect them to make any radical changes.

I never realized how inaccessible those ski counties are from Boulder before looking at a map. You'd have to take some very odd and obscure routes to get from Boulder to Eagle without crossing through another district. But they are similar demographically enough for this to not really offend anyone.