US House Redistricting: Colorado

[muon2]

My guess is they'll probably throw DeGette or Perlmutter under the bus to satisfy the VRA, and keep the status quo everywhere else.

VRA doesn't have to toss either DeGette or Perlmutter. Unlocking the Hispanic vote may actually help the Democrats, as it forces the split of Denver, and white Denver is as Democratic as Hispanic Denver.

Colorado isn't covered by the VRA.

All states are covered by section 2 of the VRA, they just are not subject to section 5 preclearance by the DOJ. If there has been a pattern of bloc voting by whites and Hispanics and there is a possible district with over 50% voting age population, then CO would have to make that district. However, it's not clear that it could be shown that there is bloc voting where Hispanics tend to prefer one candidate and the white majority prefers a different one.

[muon2]

Is it even possible to create a majority Hispanic Denver district? I went into Weld county and still got stuck in the 40s.

Well, you do have to go into Weld County, and be rather selective of what precincts you put in, but it is possible. The district in the picture below is 51.14% Hispanic, and I'm certain there's room for improvement.

I posted a similar district sometime ago. In IL the Hispanic voting age population percent in a district is considerably smaller than the overall population percentage. It may be the case that the VAP doesn't support a Hispanic district once the census is released.

[muon2]

I am reading that the legislative leaders have reached some sort of agreement to create a bipartisan committee. There is a recognition that if there is no agreement the court will intervene, and as CO learned in the last cycle, the legislature cannot have a mid-decade remap after a court-drawn one. The impact of the governor elect's statement on competitiveness is also interesting, and it remains to be seen if he insists on that as part of any bill he signs.

[muon2]

Hickenlooper as a former mayor of Denver who styles himself as an outsider rather than a political hack probably would veto a plan that split Denver.

If true, that would eliminate the possibility of a Hispanic-majority district, assuming that the census data supports one. Such a district relies on a Denver split, and based on the discussion in the thread it's not clear which party, if either, would benefit. However, if it isn't forced by the VRA, then a veto threat would take it off the table.

I think it would be difficult to force such a plan under the VRA, since that requires evidence that the majority votes against Hispanic candidates when there is a non-Hispanic choice. Given the success of the Salazars in the state, there would have to be specific instances of bloc voting in the Denver area to justify a mandated district.

There's also some doubt as to whether a Hispanic-majority district could exist. The best I've done with Dave's App is 51.8%, and Hispanic VAP is usually 6-8% less than in the population as a whole. In that case the best district for the Hispanic population would be a 40-45% influence district, but those are not mandated and would also require a Denver split. So I assume Hickenlooper would take that off the table as well.

[muon2]

It looks like some of the map will be predicated on how to enhance minority opportunities while keeping Denver intact.

My look at the 2010 data on Dave's App leads to believe that a compact district with over 50% Hispanic VAP is not possible at the precinct level. I get only to within about 140K of the right size before running out of precincts. I suspect that one can do somewhat better at the block level, but it seems unlikely that even that would be enough to get to a full Hispanic-majority district.

That should clear the way for Denver to remain intact as the core of CO-1.

[muon2]

It doesn't make sense to split the mountain counties, Garfield, Grand, Chaffee.

So instead have CD-4 come down in the lower Arkansas, let CO-7 go up into Weld County which is commuter suburbs.  There is no justification for a 3-way split of Arapahoe County, so CO-1 should switch entirely to the north (and Holly Hills and Glendale decreed to be contiguous and placed in CD-7).

This makes CD-7 more of an Aurora/east metro district like it should be.

Some splits are necessary for population equality.  I could give the rest of Grand to CD-3 and give CD-2 more of Garfield to get rid of one of them, I suppose.  

For the Denver district, I just kept its current territory (which happened to be on the Arapahoe side) and then added what made most geographic sense (which happened to be on the Adams side).  Incidentally I realize now that I got these two names mixed up in my previous post. 

@krazen: I wasn't trying, honest!  

If you are going to convince a court to reduce the number of split counties, there is no reason to 3-way split Arapahoe Count, just because it already is.

When it comes to splits for the court, I'm not sure that keeping Denver intact should have any special preference.

Consider that the four big counties Adams, Arapahoe, Denver, and Jefferson are all between 60% and 85% of a CD, so none are substantially larger all smaller than the others. Next, consider that the four counties together are just barely less than the population needed for 3 CDs - in fact at 99.67% of the total they could fall within the 0.5% limit that the court has permitted when a state makes a compelling case to have some population deviation. Otherwise a small amount of population from either Bloomfield or Douglas would make up the difference.

If the big four are to make up 3 CDs, then either one county must be split three ways, or two counties must be each split two ways. I'll assume the goal is to have no county split between more than two districts, since that appears in the GOP plan, and The Dems only show a three-way split of Jefferson for connectivity between Park and Douglas.

If Denver is intact then Arapahoe must be split, since discontiguous parts are surrounded by Denver. If Denver combines with parts of Arapahoe, the natural combination of the remainder is with Adams which becomes the other split county.

A majority HVAP district is not possible at the precinct-level, and probably not at the block level without long tendrils up and down the Front Range. However, a strong influence district is possible, and even if not required it might be a desirable goal given the large Hispanic population in the state. If one is created, Denver must be a part of it. If the Arapahoe inclusions are ignored for the purposes of counting splits, and Denver is kept intact, the best HVAP comes from a combination of Denver and parts of Adams. That would be about 30% HVAP.

So, why not recognize that Denver is no more special than the other big counties, and could be split. If Adams is kept intact, and combined with the most Hispanic areas of Denver a district with a 39% HVAP can be achieved. That would be a substantially better influence district than what could be made by keeping Denver intact. The remainder of Denver would then combine with Aurora and most of Arapahoe, leaving some southwestern parts of Arapahoe to combine with Jefferson.

[muon2]

Muon, the problem with that seems to be that Douglas County gets stranded in between the 3 Denver districts that you've drawn and the Colorado Springs district and has nowhere to go.  There's really no reason to draw a stark dividing line between Denver/Adams/Arapahoe/Jefferson and Douglas just because the first four happen to add up to 3 districts. 

With the four-county grouping I described, there are really only two choices. Douglas can go with the city of Colorado Springs, while the rest of El Paso goes with eastern CO. Otherwise Douglas can go with eastern CO.

It is interesting to note that if one puts Boulder and Larimer counties together one can get some interesting plans. For instance that combination along with the Douglas + Colorado Springs district allows CD 3 to stay entirely in the west without needing Pueblo. Alternatively one can construct a whole counties (except the big four) plan that stays within 0.5%.

[muon2]

Here are the two maps I mentioned yesterday. Both are based on dividing the big four counties into three CDs and making CD 7 a Hispanic influence district at 39%. Both plans could easily swap the Denver split for an Adams split.


This plan keeps all counties except Denver and Arapahoe intact and has a maximum deviation of 0.5%.



This plan has a maximum deviation of 9 persons (pretty good for precinct-level manipulation). It minimizes county splits and no county is split between more than two districts. It unites all the counties west of the Rockies as CD3, leaving Pueblo to the east (as is should be). That puts Boulder and Larimer together as well as Douglas with Colorado Springs.

[muon2]

Those maps are a pretty radical re-shifting of the deck chairs, Muon2. Do you really think Judge Hoyer will go there?  By the way, he apparently is a highly respected judge and not a hack, which is good.

I particularly liked my second map. From a non-partisan perspective, I don't understand linking Boulder with the ski counties across the Front Range. I own in Vail and have been in Vail and Aspen and surrounding areas many times. Other than the pockets of Dems in the ski towns, I find little in common between them and Boulder.

So I thought, the better community of interest was to hold the Front Range as a line. That way I could link all the counties west of that line with a slight spill into Huerfano for population equality. Pueblo is a city of the high Plains, not the mountains so I kept it there.

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And I should know better having taken my 4WD vehicle up into the mining camps east of Leadville. In any case you can swap Lake and Clear Creek and remain within 0.5% of the ideal population.

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After all the noise about keeping Denver whole, you've split the airport and neighboring areas of the city out of CD 1. If you are going to split that, why not go all the way and split Denver as I did?

[muon2]

Well the rationale is that the bit of Denver chopped is a jut because of the new airport, and has some empty land in-between, so if one is hyped up about upping the Hispanic percentage, and given the 8 Hispanic majority precincts in that little square in Aurora right next to Denver, that seemed like something a judge might do. I wouldn't, but Hoyer might.

There's a substantial neighborhood of over 28K people that you chopped out with the airport. It's also a very diverse neighborhood with roughly equal numbers of whites, blacks and Latinos.

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I understand that the connection exists today, but I can't find a rational basis to maintain it other than Pueblo is currently in CD 3 and constituent services would be disrupted by a shift.

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Where the folks in Boulder ski shouldn't matter since they don't permanently reside or vote there. There's not even a road connection from Boulder County west over the mountains, so I don't see why a judge thought they should be connected other than politics and historical precedent. The current district only connects Boulder to the I70 pass over rugged terrain through tiny Gilpin County.

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I just checked my CD 3 again with a blank map and I got my previous result, the net should be -9 people compared to ideal. Unless you have little discontiguous areas that didn't get included in your CD 3, I'm not sure what causes the difference you see.

[muon2]

My CO-03 is contiguous. So the software tells me, as well as my eye. I think you are using an earlier version of the DRA, and it must have different population numbers. That is the only explanation I can think of.

I checked my numbers by downloading the county counts directly from the Census into a spreadsheet. If I take the counties in my map's CD 3 without Huerfano I get 714,345. If I put Huerfano in I get 721,056. That's consistent with my map where I get 718,448 with half of Huerfano.

You say you checked contiguity for CD 3, but did you check it for the other CDs? I have found that a fragment of an old CD on a tiny parcel can be missed sometimes.

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Given the shape of Adams and Arapahoe I didn't worry about compactness so much in my equal population map. However, in my whole county version I chose to make CD 1 compact as the non-Hispanic district and let the 39% HVAP CD 7 extend east. It would be straightforward to adopt that design onto my equal population map as well. My sense is that if one Denver district is going to be compact, it shouldn't matter which one it is.

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I like a clean community of interest.

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[muon2]

Having done the contiguous check thing for all CD's, again and again, we are very close now - down to a couple of thousand folks maybe, if that. I actually do that for my final serious maps, but well, whatever. You're pretty clever Muon2.  

Actually, by this - an 842 population difference:

There's an 842 person precinct in Walsenburg. That's the difference here.

[muon2]

Sure you protected the mountains, but at the cost of shifting Pueblo out of CO-03 which is a big population transfer (and thus a negative - see below). Indeed, given the number of mountain counties that you appended to CO-03, that adds another 70,000 folks or so transferred.

I understand that the connection exists today, but I can't find a rational basis to maintain it other than Pueblo is currently in CD 3 and constituent services would be disrupted by a shift.

When Colorado created 4 congressional districts (it never had 3), CO-4 was created on the Western Slope, CO-1 was Denver, CO-2 was northern Colorado (it was always a doughnut), and CO-3 was southern Colorado, which included Pueblo, El Paso, the lower Arkansas, the upper Arkansas, the San Luis Valley and the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

You're seeing the front range as the natural dividing line rather than the Continental Divide.

CO-4 was created underpopulated, and by the time OMOV came around, it was severely so.  CO-1 and CO-3 were about right, and CO-2 which had grown because of the suburbs, was overpopulated.  So they added CO-4 to CO-3, and dropped Colorado Springs and some of the High Plains.

Maybe you should create a southern Colorado district Holly-Pueblo-Leadville-Gunnison-Grand Junction, and put NW Colorado with Boulder.

Interesting ... and it explains how Pueblo and Grand Junction got united. How did Boulder end up linking across the Divide?

[muon2]

Sure you protected the mountains, but at the cost of shifting Pueblo out of CO-03 which is a big population transfer (and thus a negative - see below). Indeed, given the number of mountain counties that you appended to CO-03, that adds another 70,000 folks or so transferred.

I understand that the connection exists today, but I can't find a rational basis to maintain it other than Pueblo is currently in CD 3 and constituent services would be disrupted by a shift.

When Colorado created 4 congressional districts (it never had 3), CO-4 was created on the Western Slope, CO-1 was Denver, CO-2 was northern Colorado (it was always a doughnut), and CO-3 was southern Colorado, which included Pueblo, El Paso, the lower Arkansas, the upper Arkansas, the San Luis Valley and the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

You're seeing the front range as the natural dividing line rather than the Continental Divide.

CO-4 was created underpopulated, and by the time OMOV came around, it was severely so.  CO-1 and CO-3 were about right, and CO-2 which had grown because of the suburbs, was overpopulated.  So they added CO-4 to CO-3, and dropped Colorado Springs and some of the High Plains.

Maybe you should create a southern Colorado district Holly-Pueblo-Leadville-Gunnison-Grand Junction, and put NW Colorado with Boulder.

Interesting ... and it explains how Pueblo and Grand Junction got united. How did Boulder end up linking across the Divide?

Since you didn't ask, in 1900 the 1st district was Arapahoe, Washington, Yuma, Phillips, Sedgwick, Logan, Morgan, Weld, Larimer, Boulder, Jefferson, Park, Lake.

Arapahoe is the original county in Colorado when it was in Kansas Territory (east of the Rockies, south of Nebraska.  As a territory, Arapahoe County included what is now Adams and Arapahoe from their western boundary to the Kansas line, including Denver which was the county seat.  Washington and Yuma were originally north of that area.  When Denver was created as a city and county around 1900, Adams and Arapahoe were split, and the east parts were truncated (I'd have to check the order of events).  Part of the reason for the unequal split between Adams and Arapahoe is that Colfax is just south of Downtown Denver, but also that Adams is 3 townships wide (18 miles) and Arapahoe is 2 (12 miles).

The interesting part of the split is that Gilpin and Clear Creek were in District 2, but Lake was in District 1, connected by Park County over Mosquito Pass (there is never anything new under the sun).

Beginning in 1902, Colorado's 3rd representative was elected at large, and in 1912, two representatives were elected at large.  4 districts were first used in 1914.

In 1960, CO-4 was Jackson, Grand, Summit, Park, Chaffee, Gunnison, Hinsdale, Archuleta and points west, so it was not quite the Continental Divide.  CO-2 was Douglas, Elbert, Lincoln, and Cheyenne and points north.  This was based on the 1921 apportionment.

The original 4 district plan had Gilpin, Clear Creek, Jefferson and Park in CO-3, and El Paso in CO-2.  So CO-3 had more of a Front Range (mountains) flavor and CO-2 was more plains.

In 1920, the district relative share of the population was:

CO-1 1.09
CO-2 1.22
CO-3 1.10
CO-4 0.59

By 1960 it was:

CO-1 1.13
CO-2 1.49
CO-3 0.94
CO-4 0.45

In April 1964, a special session was called to do congressional reapportionment (this was only two months after Wesberry v Sanders, so I don't know if there was any litigation involved or not.  There was with regard to legislative redistricting, and there was a 2nd special session in July for the legislature.

The goal of the legislature was to keep districts within 15% and not split any counties or cities (which appears to translate to: we can keep Denver whole if we set our standard at 15%, and it just so happens that the 4-county suburban ring plus Gilpin and Clear Creek is almost perfect, and we can make the other two districts almost perfect).

I had misremembered the original modification to 4 districts.

The San Luis Valley (minus Costilla for some unknown reason) was switched to CO-4 along with Larimer, Weld, Morgan, Logan, Phillips, Sedgwick in the Lower Platte Valley.  CO-3 went north to include Douglas, Elbert, Washington, Yuma.

CO-1  1.13
CO-2  1.001
CO-3  0.95
CO-4  0.93

So the change was to shift the northern area to the CO-4.  This make sense from a simple population balancing (move area of excess to area of deficit).  There could have been political reasons.  CO-1 and CO-4 had long time Democrats who had worked themselves up in the committee structure.

Democrats took all 4 seats in 1964, though that was more to do with LBJ-Goldwater than redistricting (the Democrats would later knock them both in primaries over the Viet Nam war, in 1970 in CO-1, and in 1972 in CO-4).

I found some historical maps.

http://coloradopols.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=15525

Colorado got its 5th district after the 1970 census.   The districts are rotated clockwise to make room for the 5th district south of Denver and including Colorado Springs.  This pushes CO-3 to the west and brings more of CO-4 to northern Colorado.  Ir was this shift that would have helped defeat Aspinall in the primary.

CO-2 may have included a bit of Denver - by that time more exact population requirement meant splitting counties.  The longtime Republican Congressman was from Boulder and would have felt relatively safe.  He lost in 1974, in the Watergate election, plus the 18 YO vote and ease of registering based on campus residence.

After 1980 Colorado got its 6th representative.  You almost are forced to put new districts in the Denver area because there is more population to contribute to a new district.  But adding CO-6 forced CO-5 to move south and southwest, and also up into Jefferson which forced CO-2 more into Adams, which meant that CO-4 would need some population in eastern plains, and CO-3 rotates up to the NW corner of the state.

With no new representative in 1990, CO-3 needed to creep back to the east.

After 2000, the 7the district was added, centered in Adams that is still more of a connector.  CO-4 took Longmont, and so CO-2 was forced to pick up some population which put it over the divide.  CO-5 moved back to look more like 1980 but completely out of the Denver area. and CO-3 then took a bit more of its old territory south of Pueblo.

Pueblo is the only real industrial city in Colorado because of its former steel industry.  Denver had more industry but it was a smaller portion of the economy.  So it would have links to the south in the Walsenburg and Trinidad areas where the coal for the steel was mined (I'm not sure where the iron ore came from - perhaps this is why there is no steel mill anymore).  Pueblo is also further east than any city, at a lower elevation, further south, and along a river which made it more suitable for agriculture (irrigated and a longer growing season).  So like Greeley it was more of an agricultural center.  These would attract Hispanic farm workers and also in the steel mill, so that Pueblo has a significant Hispanic population plus ties to southern Colorado.

Thanks, especially for the link. What I see in my plan is somewhat a return the 1990's plan, but with a seventh district. That is what would allow CD 3 to retreat west from Pueblo. I also note that my El Paso-Douglas link shows up in the 70's-90's as well.