US House Redistricting: Washington

[Verily]

Here's my version, for what it's worth. I modeled the districts off of the current map and kept all incumbents in their current seats. This meant some awkwardness on the Olympic Peninsula because Norm Dicks lives in NE Mason County while Jay Inslee lives on Bainbridge Island, yet the Olympic Peninsula should "naturally" contain only one seat. Oh well.

[Verily]

Taking that into account, here's a new version. I put Island County into the Olympic Peninsula seat because I wanted a separate Olympia seat, and Island County was the only other easily accessible place (via ferry from Port Townsend) that didn't quite feel like I was drawing a seat across the Puget Sound. Still had to split off a bit of western Thurston County, unfortunately.

[Verily]

Taking that into account, here's a new version. I put Island County into the Olympic Peninsula seat because I wanted a separate Olympia seat, and Island County was the only other easily accessible place (via ferry from Port Townsend) that didn't quite feel like I was drawing a seat across the Puget Sound. Still had to split off a bit of western Thurston County, unfortunately.

I think there are too many county splits in that map:
King: 6 CDs
Pierce: 4 CDs
Thurston 3 CDs

Also how is the 3rd CD linked exactly? Does it link across White Pass? I guess I am not sure if there is even a road between Skamania and Eastern Lewis County. I will say that your map is nice in that it provides a 7-3 democratic advantage  

US-12 connects Lewis to Yakima, while US-97 connects Yakima to Klickitat. There's no connection directly from Lewis to Skamania. (There's also WA-410 that connects Yakima to Enumclaw, but I think it's seasonal.)

Some of the splits are gratuitous, in particular the WA-03 part of Thurston. And some of them, like Gig Harbor with WA-01, make more sense than not splitting the county.

Also, I designed an alternative that splits Seattle but keeps a distinct district for the eastern suburbs of King County. It doesn't seem possible to do so without splitting Seattle otherwise.

[Verily]

Here's another version devoted to reducing county splits. It also reintroduces the eastern King County district by splitting Seattle, although I don't think Reichert could win the WA-10 on this map (it now contains a lot more Democratic areas in northern King County and none of Pierce County).

King County is split four ways, Snohomish and Pierce are each split three ways, and Island, Yakima, Cowlitz and Spokane are each split two ways. Every other county is intact.

[Verily]

Longview can be kept in the third. Only a portion of NW Cowlitz County would need to be removed.

SW Washington had 644,200 people on 7/09 according to OFM.   It is large enough to be its own district.   I do not see good logic in splitting it into multiple districts.   To get the remaining population it needs, it could go north into the Lewis County centric portion of Thurston County (Grand Mound) or head up the Columbia Gorge and take in Klickitat County, a Columbia River and former aluminum producing cousin of SW Washington.  

Except, if you do that, you're going to have to make an even more outrageous split crossing the mountains further north. Someone is going to have to be split up, and the Vancouver/Longview area makes the most sense. Plus, the two have very little in common; Vancouver consists solely of tax evaders from Oregon and is the only place in the state growing significantly faster than the average while Longview is old industry and is in decline.

[Verily]

Vancouver consists solely of tax evaders from Oregon and is the only place in the state growing significantly faster than the average while Longview is old industry and is in decline.

That isn't true either.  

Fastest growing places over the last couple years:

1). Tri-Cities +5.4%
2). Grant County +3.7%
3). Olympia +2.9%
4). Kittitas County 2.8%
5). Vancouver +2.7%

The Tri-Cities are embedded in a declining region, though. WA-04, although growing faster than the state as a whole, grew much more slowly than WA-03, and also slower than WA-02, and only barely faster than WA-09.

Somewhat surprisingly, the slowest-growing seat was WA-08, followed by WA-05. WA-01 and WA-06 lagged slightly, while WA-07 pretty much kept pace with the state as a whole.


Deviation from ideal (on a 9-district map) as of the 2009 estimates

WA-03 (Vancouver/Longview/Olympia): +41,828
WA-02 (Everett/Bellingham): +14,539
WA-04 (Tri-Cities): +10,443
WA-09 (Tacoma/Federal Way/Lacey): +6,223

WA-07 (Seattle): -3,213
WA-06 (Olympia Peninsula/Tacoma): -7,986
WA-01 (Kirkland/Edmonds/Shoreline): -11,127
WA-05 (Spokane): -21,238
WA-08 (Bellevue): -29,473

[Verily]

Here's my version of Washington on the Census numbers. WA-08 becomes lean D, WA-03 becomes lean R, new WA-10 is likely D, centered on Olympia.

Yes, Pierce County is split four ways, but the splits are not particularly egregious--Gig Harbor is appropriately put in with the Olympic Peninsula (which now is all in one district again), while the WA-03 parts of Pierce have only about 6,000 residents. (King County is of course split between five districts, but all of those splits are unavoidable.)

WA-03 has year-round road contiguity along the Columbia, from Klickitat County up to Yakima, and from Yakima into Lewis County along US-12.



Thoughts?

[Verily]

There's a cleaner way of doing WA-4 & WA-5 county-wise.  Put Okanogan and all of Adams in the 4th, and the only county split is Walla Walla, which now has its rural north in the 4th and everything else in the 5th.

That could work. I wanted to put the city of Walla Walla in WA-04 intentionally, though, so as to keep all of the agricultural areas with substantial Hispanic populations in one seat. (WA-04 is 32% Hispanic, WA-05 just 5%.) Could do the map that way, too, though.

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Not sure what you mean by the bolded, but yes. Yakima is going to have to get chopped up. I came very close to not having to split the city itself but ended up having to put a couple of precincts in the city of Yakima into WA-04 as well. Might be possible to finesse it so that Yakima city is not split, though.

[Verily]

US-12 is not seasonal. WA-131 is not seasonal, but the rest of the route, through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, might be--I'm not sure. It's not a state highway there, though.

As for why this is different from the Snoqualmie Pass--reasonableness. The areas on either side of Snoqualmie Pass have nothing in common with one another, while Lewis County, Clark County and Yakima County are fairly similar. Also, tradition; tradition dictates that the crossing happens along the Columbia, as this map follows.

Edit: The following source says Forest Route 25 is seasonal. No shock. http://www.ericsroads.com/roads/nf25.html

[Verily]

I don't think keeping the city of Yakima together is worth splitting up the Olympic Peninsula, Longview-Kelso and Thurston County/whatever is going on near Centralia.

[Verily]

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As for why this is different from the Snoqualmie Pass--reasonableness. The areas on either side of Snoqualmie Pass have nothing in common with one another, while Lewis County, Clark County and Yakima County are fairly similar.

Other way around.  Kittitas County has a significant amount of King County commuters and students from Western Washington.  There is very little in common with SW Washington and the Yakima Valley.  

Look at commuter #s, traffic #s, elevation: Snoqualmie Pass makes by far the most sense.

No, they don't. We established this before. Estimates of commute time found not a single person in Cle Elum, let alone Ellensburg or Wenatchee, who commuted to Bellevue/Redmond.

Kittitas is very rural, being well known for such things as hay and rodeo. Google Maps shows a small town surrounded by pastures and farmland. There are essentially no farms at all on the King County side of Snoqualmie Pass. It certainly has more in common with the agricultural Tri-Cities and Yakima than it does with high-tech Seattle suburbs.

[Verily]

There are traffic cameras on the pass.  It's your job to check it out tomorrow morning and afternoon.

The person I know who does the cross Cascades commute works M-Th, so you won't see him up on the pass until 7:30 PM.  

Since we are monitoring Snoqualmie Pass, any volunteers to monitor Satus Pass?  

The point was not that people commute over Satus Pass but do not commute over Snoqualmie Pass. Commutes were never mentioned by anyone until you came along, and we have now clearly demonstrated that no one commutes over either pass. (Well, no one has monitored Satus Pass, but it can be safely assumed.)

The point was that Centralia and Vancouver have a lot more in common with Yakima than Bellevue has with Ellensburg in terms of shared interests and demographics, a point you have yet to even make a serious attempt to refute.

[Verily]

Presumably the 6% who work in King County but are residents of Klickitat County own second homes in Klickitat but claim residence/fill out their Census forms at those homes (but really live somewhere in King County, or maybe a few on Bainbridge Island or Snohomish or Pierce Counties). Probably true of the tiny proportion of Kittitas residents who claim to work in King County, too.

[Verily]

Let's disregard the above debate, which is going in circles as we seem to have fundamental disagreements about what defines communities with shared interests.*

Anyway, another idea came to mind... The commission could decide to cross the Cascades twice! This would seem a little silly as it is unnecessary to do so, but it does preserve all micropolitan areas, unlike other plans which require splitting up one micropolis or another. Here's one possibility. The Tri-Cities are all fully in one district, although some rural areas nearby are cut out; I'm currently working on another version that keeps more of the surrounding countryside with the Tri-Cities-Vancouver seat.






*I and brittain, and others, feel that communities with minimal commercial ties that nonetheless have similar political interests (through shared economic and demographic characteristics) are more reasonable to put together in a district than communities with some few commercial ties but few or no shared political interests, while Sounder and cinyc, and others, seem to feel the opposite. All of this assumes geographic neutrality, of course, since in either case we're cutting across a navigable but remote pass through the Cascades.

[Verily]

Here's another version of the above map, only slightly modified (about 20,000 people moved around between WA-03, WA-09, WA-06 and WA-04). It does get all of the rural areas around the Tri-Cities in one seat, but it might also put a few Tacoma exurbanites in with WA-03, which is not ideal (although it's hard for me to tell where the exurbs end and what parts of southeastern Pierce County are really just rural areas).

[Verily]

One case where the Democrats would probably love such a district as it forces the split of Seattle across multiple districts (much like the talk about a Hispanic district in Colorado forcing the split of Denver).

I doubt it happens, though, and it seems likely that a 49% white seat would still elect a white Congressman.

[Verily]

The two northeasternmost precincts in King County (Skykomish) can only be reached through Snohomish County (or Chelan County), so they will be in WA-02 (that's why they're in WA-02 now). Also, you can avoid splitting Tacoma if you push WA-06 south into Grays Harbor, then switch some territory around between WA-10 and WA-09.

Also, there's no road connecting Yakima to the rest of your WA-03. You need WA-03 to reach Toppenish; that's where the road from Klickitat comes in to the Yakima Valley. I think this means the city of Yakima has to be split.

[Verily]

Interesting..... What if you traded Everett back into the 2nd, and let the 1st eat up all Monroe/US-2 territory + Skykomish?

Why Would Heck like the third's new shape?

Because he would be in the new, more Democratic WA-10.

And the map is quite ugly if Everett is kept in WA-2, which apparently might happen to protect Larsen based on what somebody  is telling me. It would have to take everything up to the Lake Stevens area (which is where Larsen lives, IIRC), and might just extend all the way to the eastern county border.

Wikipedia claims Larsen lives in Everett, in which case it will of course be left in WA-02.

Edit: Hmm, apparently the page for WA-02 and the page for Larsen disagree. Larsen's page says Lake Stevens, but WA-02 says Everett.

[Verily]

I believe Skykomish is the northernmost pass where a road crosses the Cascades at all, so your WA-02 is clearly impermissible.

[Verily]

A more interesting use of WA-20, if you were going to do that crossing, would probably be to remove Lynden and other heavily Republican areas in the north from western Washington, which could help solve the problems further south and still have only one crossing of the Cascades.

[Verily]

I believe Skykomish is the northernmost pass where a road crosses the Cascades at all, so your WA-02 is clearly impermissible.

Can't you go through Canada and then take a raft down the Columbia?

Well, of course. You wouldn't need a raft; you could do that by road. But we're assuming not using international contiguity, otherwise you could connect Detroit to the UP in one district.

[Verily]

Well, of course. You wouldn't need a raft; you could do that by road. But we're assuming not using international contiguity, otherwise you could connect Detroit to the UP in one district.

Ohio. Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin are not foreign countries.

If we're saying that, neither are Oregon and Idaho.

[Verily]

You could push the 3rd out of Lewis/Cowlitz entirely, push the 4th further out (entirely out?) of Yakima County, and push the 4th further into eastern King County to balance it out. I think that might actually be better for the Democrats as well.