Challenge for map makers: white liberal districts

[RomneyGekko Situation Hairgel]

How about this metric instead:

Under the (terrible) assumption that all non-white voters vote for Obama, the percentage of whites voting for Obama is simply given by:

% Whites for Obama = (% Obama + % White - 100%) / (% White )

This will always underestimate the % Whites for Obama (%WFO) figure, but the suppression by 1/(% White) means it won't always favor places like VT-AL.

For the districts mapped above, the ones over 50% WFO:

VT-AL:  65.9% WFO
Bacon King's LA:  55.3% WFO
Miles' NC (VAP):  51.3% WFO
Miles' MN:  59.8% WFO
train's NY:  76.4% WFO
realistic's MO:  53.3% WFO
bgwah's WA (VAP): 75.9% WFO
Miles' WI (VAP):  62.5% WFO
realistic's PA (3):  56.1% WFO
realistic's PA (2):  52.9% WFO
realistic's PA (1):  54.8% WFO
realistic's MI:  59.0% WFO
WA-07:  73.0% WFO

Only the Manhattan and WA-07-based districts so far drawn seem to beat VT-AL at the moment.

Of actual CD's:

                      WhiteVAP   Obama     WFO
Fattah      PA-2     35%   90.91%     74.03%  Philly
McDermott WA-7*   73.50%   80.41%   73.35% Seattle
Maloney   NY-12   69%   80.15%    71.06%   NYC (mainly Manhattan)
Welch   VT-AL      96.30%   67.46%   66.21%  Vermont
Baldwin   WI-2    86.9%   70.1%     65.64%  Madison

I only have overall white % (72.59%) for WA-7, so I guessed at VAP, but it's prob. higher.

PA-2 is a surprise--anyone have an explanation?

Well, I live in PA-2 and I can tell you that every last inch of it is super-solid incredibly D, even the white parts.  In addition to the black parts (most of it), you've got half of Center City (which like any downtown in the Northeast is solid liberal) and University City (which is dominated by UPenn, need I say more).  Further out, Northwest Philly is far more solid liberal than the Northeast- Chestnut Hill is basically Philly's Brookline, Manayunk and Roxborough have a lot of young people.  Roxborough is probably the most Republican neighborhood in the entire district, and it was still well over 60 percent Obama.  The whole thing is pretty close to a max Democratic pack.

I live in Manayunk.  I wouldn't say "every last inch", but yeah most of it is pretty liberal.  Used to live in the Northeast.  I definitely think there's some white working class conservatives here and in Roxborough that are similar to the Northeast, but the younger more liberal crowd outweighs them more than the NE.  The Northeast, while Democratic, is older, Catholic and more socially conservative, but unions have a strong presence. 

When it comes to Philly it's not the wealthier areas that are the most Republican/conservative rather I'll say the "comfortable working class" like Fox Chase and the more Italian areas of South Philly near the Sports Complex, not so much Chestnut Hill, Pine Valley, or Crestmont Farms where you have a fair number of Jews and "limousine liberals" or even lower income white areas like Bridesburg or Mayfair where unions are stronger.

[MilesC56]

87% White VAP, 65% Obama.

I revisited my MN map. I did some uglier line drawing; while the white % is down slightly from my last iteration (87% dropping to 85.8 ), the Obama % is up almost 6 points (up to 70.6%).

Overall, thats a 65.7% WFO rating.

[NY Jew]

How about this metric instead:

Under the (terrible) assumption that all non-white voters vote for Obama, the percentage of whites voting for Obama is simply given by:

% Whites for Obama = (% Obama + % White - 100%) / (% White )

This will always underestimate the % Whites for Obama (%WFO) figure, but the suppression by 1/(% White) means it won't always favor places like VT-AL.

For the districts mapped above, the ones over 50% WFO:

VT-AL:  65.9% WFO
Bacon King's LA:  55.3% WFO
Miles' NC (VAP):  51.3% WFO
Miles' MN:  59.8% WFO
train's NY:  76.4% WFO
realistic's MO:  53.3% WFO
bgwah's WA (VAP): 75.9% WFO
Miles' WI (VAP):  62.5% WFO
realistic's PA (3):  56.1% WFO
realistic's PA (2):  52.9% WFO
realistic's PA (1):  54.8% WFO
realistic's MI:  59.0% WFO
WA-07:  73.0% WFO

Only the Manhattan and WA-07-based districts so far drawn seem to beat VT-AL at the moment.

Of actual CD's:

                      WhiteVAP   Obama     WFO
Fattah      PA-2     35%   90.91%     74.03%  Philly
McDermott WA-7*   73.50%   80.41%   73.35% Seattle
Maloney   NY-12   69%   80.15%    71.06%   NYC (mainly Manhattan)
Welch   VT-AL      96.30%   67.46%   66.21%  Vermont
Baldwin   WI-2    86.9%   70.1%     65.64%  Madison

I only have overall white % (72.59%) for WA-7, so I guessed at VAP, but it's prob. higher.

PA-2 is a surprise--anyone have an explanation?

Well, I live in PA-2 and I can tell you that every last inch of it is super-solid incredibly D, even the white parts.  In addition to the black parts (most of it), you've got half of Center City (which like any downtown in the Northeast is solid liberal) and University City (which is dominated by UPenn, need I say more).  Further out, Northwest Philly is far more solid liberal than the Northeast- Chestnut Hill is basically Philly's Brookline, Manayunk and Roxborough have a lot of young people.  Roxborough is probably the most Republican neighborhood in the entire district, and it was still well over 60 percent Obama.  The whole thing is pretty close to a max Democratic pack.

I live in Manayunk.  I wouldn't say "every last inch", but yeah most of it is pretty liberal.  Used to live in the Northeast.  I definitely think there's some white working class conservatives here and in Roxborough that are similar to the Northeast, but the younger more liberal crowd outweighs them more than the NE.  The Northeast, while Democratic, is older, Catholic and more socially conservative, but unions have a strong presence. 

When it comes to Philly it's not the wealthier areas that are the most Republican/conservative rather I'll say the "comfortable working class" like Fox Chase and the more Italian areas of South Philly near the Sports Complex, not so much Chestnut Hill, Pine Valley, or Crestmont Farms where you have a fair number of Jews and "limousine liberals" or even lower income white areas like Bridesburg or Mayfair where unions are stronger.

there is a decent size Orthodox community in NE Philly particularly in Rhawnhurst.

[muon2]

87% White VAP, 65% Obama.

I revisited my MN map. I did some uglier line drawing; while the white % is down slightly from my last iteration (87% dropping to 85.8 ), the Obama % is up almost 6 points (up to 70.6%).

Overall, thats a 65.7% WFO rating.

It looks like you go right through the area I grew up in just north of St Paul.

[dpmapper]

Wouldn't the easiest metric be to take the minimum of White VAP% and Obama%?  The WFO measurement is too easy to skew just by taking heavily black areas. 

If so, you can get over 75 in both measurements if you take most of Boulder County + parts of Fort Collins + white Denver + ski areas.  Can you crack 80% on both axes in NYC or Seattle?  Is there any other state besides Colorado, New York, and Washington which can go as high?  (I suspect NorCal + SF has too many minorities, and white Portland isn't quite big enough to fill a district.) 

[Torie]

Wouldn't the easiest metric be to take the minimum of White VAP% and Obama%?  The WFO measurement is too easy to skew just by taking heavily black areas. 

If so, you can get over 75 in both measurements if you take most of Boulder County + parts of Fort Collins + white Denver + ski areas.  Can you crack 80% on both axes in NYC or Seattle?  Is there any other state besides Colorado, New York, and Washington which can go as high?  (I suspect NorCal + SF has too many minorities, and white Portland isn't quite big enough to fill a district.) 

If you focus on those who actually vote, rather than VAP, parts of CA are surely in the hunt.

[traininthedistance]

Here's a gerrymandered-to-all-hell example in Maryland:



68.7% White, 69.2% Obama.

[RomneyGekko Situation Hairgel]

How about this metric instead:

Under the (terrible) assumption that all non-white voters vote for Obama, the percentage of whites voting for Obama is simply given by:

% Whites for Obama = (% Obama + % White - 100%) / (% White )

This will always underestimate the % Whites for Obama (%WFO) figure, but the suppression by 1/(% White) means it won't always favor places like VT-AL.

For the districts mapped above, the ones over 50% WFO:

VT-AL:  65.9% WFO
Bacon King's LA:  55.3% WFO
Miles' NC (VAP):  51.3% WFO
Miles' MN:  59.8% WFO
train's NY:  76.4% WFO
realistic's MO:  53.3% WFO
bgwah's WA (VAP): 75.9% WFO
Miles' WI (VAP):  62.5% WFO
realistic's PA (3):  56.1% WFO
realistic's PA (2):  52.9% WFO
realistic's PA (1):  54.8% WFO
realistic's MI:  59.0% WFO
WA-07:  73.0% WFO

Only the Manhattan and WA-07-based districts so far drawn seem to beat VT-AL at the moment.

Of actual CD's:

                      WhiteVAP   Obama     WFO
Fattah      PA-2     35%   90.91%     74.03%  Philly
McDermott WA-7*   73.50%   80.41%   73.35% Seattle
Maloney   NY-12   69%   80.15%    71.06%   NYC (mainly Manhattan)
Welch   VT-AL      96.30%   67.46%   66.21%  Vermont
Baldwin   WI-2    86.9%   70.1%     65.64%  Madison

I only have overall white % (72.59%) for WA-7, so I guessed at VAP, but it's prob. higher.

PA-2 is a surprise--anyone have an explanation?

Well, I live in PA-2 and I can tell you that every last inch of it is super-solid incredibly D, even the white parts.  In addition to the black parts (most of it), you've got half of Center City (which like any downtown in the Northeast is solid liberal) and University City (which is dominated by UPenn, need I say more).  Further out, Northwest Philly is far more solid liberal than the Northeast- Chestnut Hill is basically Philly's Brookline, Manayunk and Roxborough have a lot of young people.  Roxborough is probably the most Republican neighborhood in the entire district, and it was still well over 60 percent Obama.  The whole thing is pretty close to a max Democratic pack.

I live in Manayunk.  I wouldn't say "every last inch", but yeah most of it is pretty liberal.  Used to live in the Northeast.  I definitely think there's some white working class conservatives here and in Roxborough that are similar to the Northeast, but the younger more liberal crowd outweighs them more than the NE.  The Northeast, while Democratic, is older, Catholic and more socially conservative, but unions have a strong presence. 

When it comes to Philly it's not the wealthier areas that are the most Republican/conservative rather I'll say the "comfortable working class" like Fox Chase and the more Italian areas of South Philly near the Sports Complex, not so much Chestnut Hill, Pine Valley, or Crestmont Farms where you have a fair number of Jews and "limousine liberals" or even lower income white areas like Bridesburg or Mayfair where unions are stronger.

there is a decent size Orthodox community in NE Philly particularly in Rhawnhurst.

Decent sized, but I'd say the more liberal Reform Jews outnumber them.  Some of the wealthier Jewish divisions in Pine Valley and Bustleton are way more Democratic than the working/middle class ethnic white areas of Fox Chase and Mayfair.  Rhawnhurst is interesting.  Defnitely a Dem leaning swing area.  Strongly GOP towards Fox Chase in the west, strongly Dem towards US 1.  I see a ton of Orthodox Jews walking around in the area that's GOP so I see your point.

[Torie]

A Hollyweird plus gay plus counterculturist CD = a white liberal CD. Who knew? Yes, I had to carve those GOP leaning Iranian Jews in Beverly Hills out of the CD to juice it up.  But I did reach out and touch the Topanga Canyon Hippies and dope smokers however.  Yes, the bulk of my real estate "empire" is in this little creation. It's my kind of place!   And no, Muon2 would not be pleased with it.

[muon2]

A Hollyweird plus gay plus counterculturist CD = a white liberal CD. Who knew? Yes, I had to carve those GOP leaning Iranian Jews in Beverly Hills out of the CD to juice it up.  But I did reach out and touch the Topanga Canyon Hippies and dope smokers however.  Yes, the bulk of my real estate "empire" is in this little creation. It's my kind of place!   And no, Muon2 would not be pleased with it.

If I can play with VRA districts, I can certainly let Torie have fun with his special "minority".

[jimrtex]

Here's a gerrymandered-to-all-hell example in Maryland:



68.7% White, 69.2% Obama.

Too compact for a Maryland CD.

[I Can't Get That Sound You Make, Out Of My Head]

OR-03 - 80% white, yet D+19. One of the best districts in the country.

[So the Heroes Fall]

This was an interesting thread, and there's still states to do!

Here's Indiana:




81.4% White VAP and 59.3% Obama.

[So the Heroes Fall]

Upstate New York should probably be considered a separate state for the point of this exercise.



Those green specks, if you see them, are the black part of Albany, I drew that so I wouldn't include it in the main district, but had to break through it to get to the areas on the eastern border. It's 84.3% White VAP and 62.3 Obama/35.8 McCain. Whites probably made up around 86% of voters and Obama probably won around 58% of them.

[Benj]

So, I managed to create another, different district in Massachusetts that is 68.8% WFO on Erc's method of estimating, more than VT-AL. It's 80.2% white VAP and 74.4% Obama (2008). Basically contains all the white liberal areas in and around Boston stretching out along the Route 2 corridor, but excising most of the college precincts (too many Asians at MIT, Harvard and BU). Amusingly, it contains all of Mitt Romney's home town of Belmont. It also voted 66% for Coakley (!!!).

[nclib]

I made a CD for Kansas and NH (hadn't used DRA in the past since large states take too long to load), and got (NH White VAP + Obama 2008) 133.6% for KS and 152% for NH.

Can anyone explain...

How to color in an entire county (or urban area) without clicking every single precinct
How to pull up one new (or old) CD and keep the rest undelegated
How to upload a DRA file to Atlas

[traininthedistance]

I made a CD for Kansas and NH (hadn't used DRA in the past since large states take too long to load), and got (NH White VAP + Obama 2008) 133.6% for KS and 152% for NH.

Can anyone explain...

How to color in an entire county (or urban area) without clicking every single precinct
How to pull up one new (or old) CD and keep the rest undelegated
How to upload a DRA file to Atlas

You can color in solid rectangles by clicking shift-Z.  I don't think there's an option for coloring by county, or urban areas, or single congressional districts.

[Lloyd Bentsen's Ghost]

This was an interesting thread, and there's still states to do!

Here's Indiana:




81.4% White VAP and 59.3% Obama.

Is an interstate the only thing holding that district together?

It reminds me of a story about how in the '80s, Texas Democrats were trying to keep the Republicans from getting house seats in West Texas and one of the districts they came up with was a long, thin strip stretching from Fort Worth to the New Mexico border. Someone went up to the legislator the district had been drawn for and said, "If you drove from one end of your district to the other with your car doors open, you'd kill every one of your constituents."

[nclib]

I made a CD for Kansas and NH (hadn't used DRA in the past since large states take too long to load), and got (NH White VAP + Obama 2008) 133.6% for KS and 152% for NH.

Can anyone explain...

How to color in an entire county (or urban area) without clicking every single precinct
How to pull up one new (or old) CD and keep the rest undelegated
How to upload a DRA file to Atlas

You can color in solid rectangles by clicking shift-Z.  I don't think there's an option for coloring by county, or urban areas, or single congressional districts.

Thanks. Shift-Z doesn't work with my browser though holding down the mouse key while touching other precincts does. Also, how do I save the file to be able to upload it to Atlas Forum?

[traininthedistance]

I made a CD for Kansas and NH (hadn't used DRA in the past since large states take too long to load), and got (NH White VAP + Obama 2008) 133.6% for KS and 152% for NH.

Can anyone explain...

How to color in an entire county (or urban area) without clicking every single precinct
How to pull up one new (or old) CD and keep the rest undelegated
How to upload a DRA file to Atlas

You can color in solid rectangles by clicking shift-Z.  I don't think there's an option for coloring by county, or urban areas, or single congressional districts.

Thanks. Shift-Z doesn't work with my browser though holding down the mouse key while touching other precincts does. Also, how do I save the file to be able to upload it to Atlas Forum?

Best thing to do is take a screencap and then write it up, I think.

[ilikeverin]

Could be finessed a bit perhaps, but this is probably about the most White Obama district in Michigan you could have.
74.7% White VAP, 68.2% Obama.

It can be done!  Read through this thread but somehow failed to notice your map above and came to a similar general conclusion...



Detroit's suburbs do have white liberals in them; they're just in odd pockets.  74.2% white VAP, 70.9% Obama = 60.8% WFO.  Accidentally made this focusing on white population, not VAP, so it could probably be optimized even more.

[nclib]

New Hampshire (the other district still voted for Obama):