US House Redistricting: Indiana

[krazen1211]

Getting rid of Bloomington will remove any problems for the GOP in IN-9.  But what has been done about the bloody eighth?  The rest of the map is obviously very good.

Can't you throw Vigo into the 4th and compensate by throwing Tippecanoe into the 2nd?

[Torie]

Or you could just tell me how much rural territory the district would have to take in instead and what that would do to the partisan breakdowns.

OK, Lewis, the south Marion County salient of IN-05, plus its few connector precincts in Hancock County (IN-06 does not impinge at all into Marion County at present; my bad, I mixed up which row of townships was the boundary of Marion), has 111,976 people in it. Good luck Lewis!  

[dpmapper]

One of the worst declined cities that rarely if ever gets mentioned anywhere is Saint Joseph, Missouri, by the by.

Actually, it's not.  I realize that the 1900 census figure is 103K and it's now at 76K, but there is substantial evidence that city organizers duped the census takers into massively overestimating the 1900 figure.  

Unfortunately the original article that I read this in has disappeared from its original site.  Best copy you can get is here: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-21334536.html

[dpmapper]

Torie, where did you get precinct data for Indiana?  

[Torie]

Torie, where did you get precinct data for Indiana?  

I had to go to each county, and look at the precinct data, which in Indiana have all offices listed for each precinct, not in tabular form, so then I need to hit the find button a lot, to get the POTUS race data, and find the precincts or townships that were of interest to me, and then bold the precincts I wanted in or out on a spreadsheet, and then have a triple split screen, and go precinct by precinct, looking at a precinct map, the returns for that precinct, and the Dave Bradlee application all at once. And for Marion, the precinct numbers did not match, and some were combined, so I need to cross match by visual shape.  Sometimes, a whole township or most of it, or city, was mostly good or bad, and then I just shoved the whole darn thing into one CD or the other, unless there was one or two outlier precincts that I wanted in or out, and then I needed to find where they were exactly. Oh, and then I needed to convert my excel data into columns from rows in a couple of counties, after the copy and paste, and it took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to do that, using the sort data feature on excel and a couple of other strategic copy and pastes. I don't think you want to do that, do you?  

And that is why I try to avoid that if I can, if I have a good proxy, like black percentages in South Bend.

[MyRescueKittehRocks]

And why did you guys split Howard County? You center a district around Howard County not split it. In a GOP favored map you don't split a major GOP county as mine is. Put Granger in the new 1st but South Bend/Elkhart/Kokomo is the central population centers for a new second.

I do agree Donnelly is stick a fork in him he's done.

[Torie]

OK, here is the map that I think shifts one Pubbie point from IN-04 to IN-08, plus or minus maybe 40 basis points. I can't find any precinct data for Vigo County, other than the 2010 Coats-Ellsworth Senate race, so I had to use that to generate inferential data, and then I decided to not split Morgan County at all, and gave CD-08 close to half of Vigo County, and kind of assumed that the additional chunk was about even between Coats and Ellsworth, as the prior chunk was, and I still have not sorted out the data mess in Monroe County (its website is my next pit stop), and I saw what taking in most of Vigo did to IN-04 before dealing with the cut out of Morgan, and with Monroe at all (a drop of two Pubbie points from 56.5% McCain to 54.5% McCain), and decided that that was too much, so abandoned splitting Morgan, and gave IN-08 a larger chunk of Vigo. (There are more people in the Monroe County handful of precincts than I thought in part.)

Oh, and I also moved tiny but heavily GOP Union County over to IN-06 from IN-09.  It probably beefs up IN-06 by maybe 10-15 basis points or so, and makes the map look prettier. I also shifted two or three other precincts to make things look prettier, and kid rid of a couple of one precinct county splits.

So, I think this map is getting close to being in final form, meaning that it becomes the 4th state of the quartet that I have done so far. I do need to check more thoroughly the stats on IN-06 just to make sure I have not made it more than just a smidgen more Dem, if that. I don't think I have, but in this case an educated guess just won't cut it.

[Vazdul (Formerly Chairman of the Communist Party of Ontario)]

Would Pence be happy being drawn into the 9th? He lives in Columbus (Bartholomew County).

[RI]

I vote for this map:



The yellow district is 51% black.

I'm sure the Republicans could win most of the rest of the seats, though I don't have evidence of that. I tried not to split any counties other than the ones the yellow district goes through.

[dpmapper]

Would Pence be happy being drawn into the 9th? He lives in Columbus (Bartholomew County).

He probably won't care, given the likelihood that he's running for governor...

[minionofmidas]

Would Pence be happy being drawn into the 9th? He lives in Columbus (Bartholomew County).

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. I have not checked the residencies for IN-09 and 06 yet. I have for IN-09 and 04 now, and made sure Young's residence in Bloomington is included in his district. I guess that explains the salient into Columbus through the NE corner in the old map. I guess I will have to shove an IN-06 prong down into Columbus to pick up Pence's home. Beyond despoiling the map, that will just make IN-09 even more uber Republican, as you can see from this map. It just doesn't have much if any Dem territory left, and I can't keep Perry County in the CD without making the map look ridiculous, and it is only worth about 30 basis points anyway. Other than Perry County, there just isn't any Dem territory for IN-09 to pick up anymore that will help out another Pubbie CD.

Nonsense. Your CD9 needs to add a single-precinct-wide connector along the river into half of Evansville ASAP.

[Torie]

Would Pence be happy being drawn into the 9th? He lives in Columbus (Bartholomew County).

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. I have not checked the residencies for IN-09 and 06 yet. I have for IN-09 and 04 now, and made sure Young's residence in Bloomington is included in his district. I guess that explains the salient into Columbus through the NE corner in the old map. I guess I will have to shove an IN-06 prong down into Columbus to pick up Pence's home. Beyond despoiling the map, that will just make IN-09 even more uber Republican, as you can see from this map. It just doesn't have much if any Dem territory left, and I can't keep Perry County in the CD without making the map look ridiculous, and it is only worth about 30 basis points anyway. Other than Perry County, there just isn't any Dem territory for IN-09 to pick up anymore that will help out another Pubbie CD.

Nonsense. Your CD9 needs to add a single-precinct-wide connector along the river into half of Evansville ASAP.

In general, I only make Dem seats an erose mess - call them the Torie yellow and gold seats. So far I have two in Indiana, four in Pennsylvania ( ran out of yellow shades for that state), and one that comes close in Michigan (MI-05)

[Torie]

And if you really want to get IN-08 (the dark green CD) all Pubbied up, the map below is the way to do it.  What do you all think? The tricky part of this map was keeping Young's home in Bloomington still in his IN-09 (the blue) CD.    And yes one huge university precinct (about 6,000 in population) in IN-08 that it now needs to traverse, will have to be redrawn to keep it out of the CD.

[Torie]

I think this map is now in final form.

In this iteration, I gave IN-08 from IN-09 very marginally GOP Crawford County, in exchange for IN-09 picking up some very marginally Dem territory in Monroe County from IN-08. It only picked up 5 basis points for IN-08, but made the map less erose, so I went for it. IN-07 will need more people when the intra county census figures come in for Marion County, and if IN-08 ends up needing to shed a few from the intra county shifts in Vigo County, IN-08 might pick up another 15 GOP basis points, and if IN-09 needs to pick up a few folks from the intra county figures in Johnson, IN-08 might pick up another few GOP basis points, and get up to perhaps McCain 53.1% or so as a guess.  Meanwhile,  IN-02 will get about 25-50 basis points more GOP, when the intra county census population numbers come in from Lake, LaPorte, Porter and St. Joseph Counties, while IN-05 may get close to a full point more GOP, as IN-07 gets more Dem, all due to Marion County action. We shall see.

Come to think of it, one way to get perhaps that extra Pubbie point, or some of it, in IN-05 (which does not need it), down to IN-08 (which does, along perhaps with IN-04 maybe), is for IN-04 to cut into IN-05 in NW Marion County above the IN-07 zone, to drain IN-05 of excess population, or some of it, IN-08 then cutting into heavily GOP Morgan County to offset what IN-04 gained in NW Marion, and IN-07 then picking up the population it needs from about 5 pretty large and fairly heavily Dem precincts in Monroe County. So this game would be pursued to the extent necessary to excise from IN-08 and into the IN-07 Dem sink its few problem precincts in Monroe County. This exercise would perhaps shove up the numbers I speculated about above, up by another 50-75 basis points or so, with a bit of that going to IN-04 perhaps.

Any comments are welcome.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

That doesn't guarantee Donnelly's defeat, and it does probably guarantee that the 8th will flip back as soon as there's another strong Democratic year. It's still the Bloody Eight after all.

[Torie]

That doesn't guarantee Donnelly's defeat, and it does probably guarantee that the 8th will flip back as soon as there's another strong Democratic year. It's still the Bloody Eight after all.

No, it doesn't as to Donnelly (although Donnelly would have lost in 2010 in his newly redrawn CD by about a 57-43 margin, in yes, a GOP wave year, particularly in this part of the country), but the odds I think are pretty heavily against him.  As to the 8th, the 8th only flipped before due to a confluence of a Dem trend year, weak incumbent and ideally situated challenger.  Now the 8th is another point farther into the GOP zone.  So it is going to be tough for another Tory Dem sheriff type from Evansville to take out Larry Buschon (a heart surgeon, and the voters just love MD's, yes they do - unlike what they think of that peculiar species of pond scum commonly referred
to as lawyers ).

In any event, this map I think is the absolutely best that can be done for the GOP (every precinct in the critical zones was carefully massaged), without going nutter, and giving folks new districts, and all sorts of other crazy stuff that will no happen.

[Nichlemn]

Is there no way your 9th can swap some Republican territory with the 8th? 56% McCain seems unnecessarily high for the former.

[Torie]

Is there no way your 9th can swap some Republican territory with the 8th? 56% McCain seems unnecessarily high for the former.

Well you could do the map below, giving IN-09 Perry County, with IN-09 getting most of Washington County in exchange, but the lines become more erose.  IN-08 gets more GOP by about 65 basis points, moving from  McCain 52.87% to McCain 53.52%. Do you think it is worth doing that? Everything in life is a balancing test.

[Torie]

This map reflects the updated (although not final) intra county population figures for Indiana. The updated figures caused the Dems to lose ground in all of the GOP friendly CD's except for IN-02, which moved 27 basis points towards the Dems primarily due to having to take in about 9,500 evenly divided voters as between Obama and McCain in northern Tippecanoe County, and IN-03, which stayed the same.

The action was mostly generated by the old city of Indianapolis (prior to merging with the county of Marion), suffering rather drastic population losses as compared to the old suburban ring of Marion County. As a consequence, IN-07 now sucks up most of Monroe County, and all those university affiliated Dems - almost all of them.

[minionofmidas]

As to the 8th, the 8th only flipped before due to a confluence of a Dem trend year, weak incumbent and ideally situated challenger.

Uh, no. That's merely why Hostettler lost by 22 points.
Incidentally, in your map a combination of strong Dem year and geographic polarization might flip the 4th.

[Torie]

As to the 8th, the 8th only flipped before due to a confluence of a Dem trend year, weak incumbent and ideally situated challenger.

Uh, no. That's merely why Hostettler lost by 22 points.
Incidentally, in your map a combination of strong Dem year and geographic polarization might flip the 4th.

Anything can flip, but one can't do much about CD's with a GOP PVI way up there if they turn. IN-04 has a 2008 GOP PVI of over 7, and its 2004 PVI is up there so high, that it is barely in earth's atmosphere. What do you mean by "geographic polarization" in this context Lewis?

As to the H man, well I said that he was flawed, but no, I didn't know that he tanked as badly as he did. If Indianapolis loses more folks in the next 10 years, maybe I will take the IN-07 down to Evansville next time. IN-07 to Evansville, and PA-14 to Sharon is my motto.

[minionofmidas]

Your fourth has partisan Republican suburbs where the (one term) Rep is from, and more rural/smalltown areas that are perhaps not as dependable, including the cities of Terre Haute and Lafayette. Terre Haute's probably the most democratic place in there, without being overwhelmingly Democrat, and has no history of being "represented" by the Indy suburbs.

Mind you. I should have given more consideration to how very well Obama did in Indiana before speaking.

[minionofmidas]

Are you going to be updating this with the actual census count numbers? Your first is about 7000 people short (meaning you can screw Donnelly a little further), didn't check anywhere else.

[Torie]

Are you going to be updating this with the actual census count numbers? Your first is about 7000 people short (meaning you can screw Donnelly a little further), didn't check anywhere else.

The Bradlee utility now has the actual census numbers?

Addendum: I opened it up with my map, and the numbers did not change. What are you using?

[JohnnyLongtorso]

If you have a saved map, it will open up with whatever numbers you were using before. You'd have to redo it to update it with the 2010 census numbers.