Draw the Congressional Districts of the Alternate States!

[traininthedistance]

I might do a couple Northeastern states at some point.

[traininthedistance]

I've finally had some time to fiddle around with DRA again.  It's been awhile.

Anyway, you were looking for a Republican gerrymander of Adirondack?  I can do that.  Of course, one can only do so much when the Republican numbers are several points underwater.  But if we assume ancestral downballot strength holds, this could be 6-3 Pub many years.







My usual self-imposed limits apply: no split towns, all districts plus or minus 1000 of ideal, whole-county groups used when feasible.  Here, 3 is whole-county, as well as 6/7 and 8/9.  What was thrown out the window was the usual prohibition on double-spanning, which is used and abused to get our three Dem sinks.

Note that the Dem % is artificially low in Western NY and artificially high everywhere else, b/c it's largely based on the lopsided Cuomo/Paladino race.  The Obama in 08 numbers are a better guide, if you just mentally subtract 3 or something.

District 1: Obama 62.8%, Dem 57.6%.  Buffalo, Niagara Falls, inner burbs. 17.5% black. Safe D.
District 2: Obama 46.5%, Dem 45.2%.  Buffalo burbs, west of Rochester, rural bits in between.  Without any actual large Dem areas, this is the safest the Republicans get here, and it still isn't all that gaudy. Likely R.
District 3: Obama 48.4% (McCain 49.9%), Dem 47.9%.  19.5% black. Just like in real life, Ithaca gets sunk in the Southern Tier.  Obviously the price of maxing out Pub opportunities here is that, well, they'll still have to fight close races.  Ain't no way around that. Lean R.
District 4: Obama 65.4%, Dem 65.5%.  The Rochester earmuffs go... east instead of west, to pull the beating Syracusan heart out of Dan Maffei's district. And of course Slaughter doesn't even live here either, another nice touch if I do say so myself.  Obviously this is the most egregious part of the map.  I refrained from drawing the earmuffs further south and having 5 be an elongated C, I think that would be a bridge too far for these Rockefeller Pubs even if it goosed 5 half a point or so. Safe D.
District 5: Obama 50.9%, Dem 52.4%. Rochester and Syracuse burbs, Finger Lakes.  Definitely another district that would cry out for one of those mythical Moderate Pubs who supposedly run this state.  Tilt R.
District 6: Obama 52.2%, Dem 54.6%.  No, I am not splitting the North Country. That would be a bridge too far, and probably doesn't even help much anyway.  Ancestral R, but I think Owens probably holds on and ruins their gerry. Tossup.
District 7: Obama 48.8% (McCain 49.4%), Dem 50.6%.  Hanna's made enough moderate noises that he'd probably be relatively comfortable in this third and final McCain district.  Lean R.
District 8: Obama 49.3% (McCain 48.9%), Den 51.1%.  And Gibson would likely do the same, given that his current district is actually D+1.  Though I guess he lives in 9, oops.  Lean R.
District 9: Oabma 61.8%, Dem 62.3%. Our third and final sink is mostly the Albany district, but reaches down to grab Ulster just because.  Safe D.

Anyway, this is probably 5-4 right now, but could go 6-3 in good Pub years, and as bad as 8-1 Dem in waves.  But you can't wave-proof Upstate, and honestly you couldn't even on the Dem side either.

One thing I wonder is, if they didn't have NYC to demonize, the Dems might do better there.  I also wonder if the Pubs might not actually go all-out here either.  Might throw up a map that keeps these county groups but cuts down on the double-spanning, to get a "clean" but nominally Pub-favoring setup.  (I say nominally Pub-favoring if only because of the Ithaca sink, honestly).

[traininthedistance]

Oh, oops, didn't see that Muon took care of that awhile ago.  Ah well.  Consider my effort a gentler, more constrained riff on the same basic idea.

[traininthedistance]

BTW the 18-0 New York might not actually be as airtight as people seem to be assuming, once you factor in the VRA and certain minimal standards of shame preventing multiple spaghetti strings doing things like quadruple-spanning the Queens-Nassau border.  I'll do what I can, but I suspect that Peter King will have a better-than-even shot of hanging on.

And 19-0 would ofc be marginally tougher.

[traininthedistance]

Oh, oops, didn't see that Muon took care of that awhile ago.  Ah well.  Consider my effort a gentler, more constrained riff on the same basic idea.

I see we took some different approaches to some areas, and I particularly wanted to excise the North Country tossup as I think the Pub AD Assembly would do. Any thoughts on who the candidates would be in my version?

As an aside, what do you think about my "neutral" map for the Senate?

Seems good at first glance.  I might try and mock something up when I'm done with downstate just to see what a fresh pair of eyes might come up with, but I doubt it'll be much different.

I had sort of been thinking that the North Country would be treated in much the same way as Staten Island or Bucks County are: as this separate bloc that you don't mess around with out of tradition, even in partisan plans. 

[traininthedistance]

So a solid 18-0 is, as I thought, quite impossible in New York.  It’s easy to sink Staten Island and Southern Brooklyn, and you can give the three northern districts all D+something PVIs (if not totally safe) with not too much effort, only moderate ugliness, and no split towns.  (Split towns are a necessity on LI no matter what.)  But Long Island is huge, and is too 50/50, and if you’re gonna stick to the VRA and keep a black district in Queens, you’re just gonna have to live with Peter King.

I’m gonna present two options here.  The first one keeps LI swingy and gives the Dems a shot at all of the districts, but at least two of them remain in easy reach of the Pubs as well.  This Long Island is also pretty similar to the actual court map and as such is pretty “good government”, modulo carving Islip in such a way as to shore up Tim Bishop as much as possible.  The second one will cede a crazy gerrymander to King in an effort to make the other three LI districts as secure for Dems as possible, and will go up hopefully tonight?







Note that the lines in NYC are as ugly as they are for legacy and VRA purposes more than partisanship.  I’m assuming you need to keep three BVAP-majority districts, one in Queens and two in Brooklyn, and that requires stretching things to the limit especially in Queens, which goes into East New York rather than Valley Stream for obvious partisan purposes.  Then you’ve got the Asian-plurality Queens district, and Nydia Velasquez’s Bushwick-LES-Sunset Park monstrosity, made even more monstrous by the fact that Southern Brooklyn needs to be properly gerrymandered by sticking it with Park Slope and Williamsburg.  If it was really a tabula rasa she’d get a Bushwick-Jackson Heights district instead and Sunset Park would be with the rest of South Brooklyn (which could be made Dem without too much effort).  But we’re supposed to hold everything else the same, and that means crazy dumb Brooklyn lines.  I might also present a counterfactual NYC that makes more sense and keeps everything Dem, if my computer doesn’t keep choking on NY.

Obviously I am mashing Staten Island together with Lower Manhattan.  I mean, duh. The ferry connection totally counts!

District 1: Obama 53.0%, Dem 55.6%. 74W/15H. Taking some of the more Dem-heavy parts of Islip instead of Smithtown helps shore up Tim Bishop a point or so.  But there’s not that much you can do.  Tilt D.
District 2: Obama 51.6%, Dem 53.9%. 67W/19H. Pretty much a pure tossup if it was an open seat, but the power of King’s incumbency probably keeps this Tilt R for now.  Only so much you can do.
District 3: Obama 52.3%, Dem 54.6%. 72W/10H/10A. And, likewise, the power of incumbency keeps the North Shore Tilt D.
District 4: Obama 56.5%, Dem 57.8%. 59W/17B/18H.  Entirely within Hempstead and Long Beach.  Likely D.
District 5: Obama 86.4%, Dem 87.6%. 14W/50B/18H/11A.  Has to leave Queens to break 50%, which it does just barely.  God, I wish plurality was good enough here.  It’ll have to be next time.  Safe D.
District 6: Obama 65.1%, Dem 69.0%. 31W/21H/42A.  Asian-plurality. Safe D.
District 7: Obama 76.3%, Dem 78.3%. 28W/41H/22A.  Hispanic-plurality.  God I hate this district, but I think the rules suggest it should continue to exist. Will totally blow it up in my next alternative. Safe D.
District 8: Obama 85.2%, Dem 86.3%. 21W/51B/21H.  I more-or-less preserve the boundary between the two RL black Brooklyn districts, which IIRC is mainly for the purpose of unifying the Caribbean immigrant community in 9. Safe D.
District 9: Obama 84.7%, Dem 86.2%. 29W/50B/12H.  My home district is… changed a lot less than many others here. Splits the hyper-Pub Orthodox areas with 10. Safe D.
District 10: Obama 64.0%, Dem 69.0%. 67W/14H/16A.  And here’s the Hipster vs. Hasid district (plus all the forgotten areas of Southern Brooklyn that are going to probably be majority-Asian in a decade or two).  Whee. Safe D.
District 11: Obama 62.6%, Dem 62.7%. 66W/15H.  All of Staten Island in a Safe D district!
District 12: Obama 78.1%, Dem 74.7%. 67W/14H/12A.  Pretty similar to the current West Side-Astoria district, except of course for that tendril to get Middle Village whites out of the way of 6 and 7.  Probably unnecesssary but whatever. Safe D.
District 13: Obama 91.1%, Dem 90.2%. 27W/24B/43H. Hispanic-plurality.  Didn’t even try to up the black percentage here TBH; possibly could have gotten ugly between this and 14 for a couple points, but not worth it. Safe D.
District 14: Obama 93.6%, Dem 94.5%. 28B/64H. The South Bronx, Hispanic-majority as always.  Safe D.
District 15: Obama 81.7%, Dem 82.9%. 16W/20B/54H.  Another Hispanic-majority Bronx district, this one with some parts of Queens too (most importantly Jackson Heights/Corona). Safe D.
District 16: Obama 61.3%, Dem 60.8%. 60W/16B/19H.  Co-Op City to southern Duchess! No split towns, but split counties galore as we sink the Republican band centered around Putnam County in a mostly-Westchester Safe D district.
District 17: Obama 59.5%, Dem 62.4%. 57W/17B/19H. Similar to Eliot Engel’s old district, except with no split towns, less Bronx, and going further up into Orange. Safe D one would hope.
District 18: Obama 56.3%, Dem 57.2%. 66W/10B/17H. And the northern district grabs what it can along the Hudson to goose the Dem percentage as much as possible. Without extraneous county splits you can get an roughly even PVI district, enough for a Dem to win right now but not forever.  Still not quite safe, but Lean D, bordering on likely?

[traininthedistance]

Alternate Long Island.  Towns and villages are shredded to spaghetti... well, some of them.



District 1: Obama 56.1%, Dem 58.0%.  65W/22H.  Up to Likely D for Bishop now.
District 2: Obama 44.4%, Dem 47.9%.  Congrats, Peter King.  We can't dislodge you.  Safe R.
District 3: Obama 56.7%, Dem 58.4%.  65W/14H/13A.  Except for the finger down into Babylon, this is still actually a pretty clean and sensible North Shore district.  It just, well, goes into Babylon and Jericho rather than Smithtown.  Likely D.
District 4: Obama 57.2%, Dem 58.4%.  58W/17B/18H.  Not much change.  I toyed with the idea of cutting out hyper-Pub Garden City and nearby areas, but it's not actually worth it, especially if you want to keep the fig leaf of the North Hempstead-Hempstead town line unbroken.  Likely D.

[traininthedistance]

We already knew that Allegheny would be 6-1 Pub, but here's one pretty clean example of that.





With the RL Pennsylvania gerrymander ceding the Pittsburgh district to the Dems, and the historic Dem strength in Western PA (as well as the fact that McCain's win was not that gaudy), the Pittsburgh sink seems like an obvious play-it-safe survivor. Here it is made (and all the other Dem areas sunk) with no town splits, and very few county splits besides.  1/2, 3/4, and 6/7/8 are all whole-county groups.

District 1: Obama 42.6%.  State College is overwhelmed by south-central Pubs around Chambersburg, Gettysburg, Carlisle, etc. Safe R.
District 2: Obama 43.1%.  Johnstown, Altoona, lots of rural.  Safe R.
District 3: Obama 45.4%.  Sinking Erie properly did take some effort, especially with so few county splits.  This Northern Tier-esque monstrosity goes all the way to Williamsburg and the Alleghenies to its south.  Safe R.
District 4: Obama 44.6%.  There's some Dem towns here- Erie burbs, New Castle, Sharon, etc.  And there's also all of Butler County.  Safe R.
District 5: Obama 42.9%.  Westmoreland and north of Pittsburgh.  Safe R.
District 6: Obama 66.9%.  21% black.  The Burgh, and as many nearby Dems as can fit while keeping the lines nice.  Safe D.
District 7: Obama 43.9%.  And the Mon Valley Dems are swamped by Pubs in the South Hills and places east such as Somerset County. Safe R.