splitline redistricting

[traininthedistance]

This is all kinds of awesome.  I think a computer should be doing this job from now on, not party hacks.

Yeah!  Let's splice and dice cities, ignore rivers and mountains and county/municipal lines, to hell with metro areas and communities of interest!  Pretty straight lines are all that matters!

Seriously, splitlines are atrocious.  Like, even the worst partisan gerrymanders are better because they at least try to give lip service to natural boundaries sometimes.

[traininthedistance]

Is it always bad to split cities?  I'm not saying that cities should be split in such a way that diminishes their power maliciously, but it would seem that there are a lot of cases where a city is better off being the plurality in two districts rather than 100% of the population in one district.  

The polarized situation in Congress, especially the House, is partially a result of cities not being split.  Most of the remaining moderate Republicans live in urban areas where there is no chance of electing a Republican, and moderate Dems in rural areas where the reverse is true.

The opposite of splitting big cities is to create a map like IL. Tentacles extend out from the city well into the suburbs and even to some exurbs so that a population insufficient for 4 CDs has 7 instead. The result does nothing to create moderate districts.



CD 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 are anchored in Chicago. Population 2.7 M. CD size 713 K.

Erm, I really don't think the IL map is the "opposite of splitting big cities" at all.  Chicago is split aplenty here.  (And I'd probably quibble with your final observation- I think that 3 and 9 are probably best thought of as anchored in the suburbs with smaller portions in the city.  But that's a nitpick, of course.)

Better examples would be San Fran, Denver, Columbus (which notably was split in three last time around), Louisville, Indianapolis, and such.  None of America's very largest cities are actually unsplit as much as possible.  In many cases, the VRA ensures this even when redistricting is relatively neutral and good-government, as was the case for NYC and LA.

[traininthedistance]

My typo. I meant the opposite of not splitting cities in response to the quoted post that deemed polarization was due to not splitting cities. My IL example was as a counter to show that a heavy split of Chicago into seven pieces resulted in seven partisan CDs, not moderation.

Fair enough, that is certainly true.  Sometimes splitting cities will lead to partisan CDs in one direction, or the other direction, or it will lead to swingy CDs; it all depends on the size of the metro area, its demographics, political culture, etc. 

You could probably say that splitting the largest cities will tend to create partisan D districts, splitting mid-size cities will create swingy, moderate districts, and splitting small cities will create partisan R districts.  But even that's an overgeneralization.