Mid-2014 county population estimates out tomorrow, March 26
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  Mid-2014 county population estimates out tomorrow, March 26
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Author Topic: Mid-2014 county population estimates out tomorrow, March 26  (Read 28139 times)
Torie
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« Reply #175 on: October 11, 2015, 08:31:31 AM »
« edited: October 11, 2015, 01:55:22 PM by Torie »

You also swapped out Morrison in addition to Mile Lacs.  Tongue The switches moves MN-07 40 basis points in the Dem direction. That's how the game worked out.

I for some reason errantly thought there was a cover penalty, which there is not, so your map wins the pareto optimality test by incurring just the pack penalty.

The single most controversial aspect of your rules seems to me that one incurs a horrific erosity penalty for macrochops, which perhaps in the mind of some, gives too much weight to avoiding macrochops. They are worth it (where otherwise not unavoidable), if, and only if, doing the macrochop is the only way to minimize the chop count, in which event, at best, the map would only be competitive, rather than the winning map, because there certainly will be another map, with a extra chop, but less erosity.

There is obviously no right or wrong answer here, but it is a policy choice. If say, the rule instead were that a macrochop counts for 2 chops rather than one, but no special erosity penalty other than what normally obtains, then a macrochop would leave a map competitive if it avoided two chops elsewhere, counting as chops pack and cover penalties, and winning if it happens the macrochop does not activate an additional road, and turns out to the be the map that minimizes erosity, or tying if it avoids one chop elsewhere. Whether the normal erosity penalties for macrochops is sufficient to avoid undue gerrymandering, is another issue to consider. How ugly can a macrochop get while avoiding an extra town or city chop, or activating an additional road, is the issue. Do you have any thoughts on that Muon2?

Not that you didn't already know most of the names of counties, towns and cities in MN like the back of your hand, but I suspect that by virtue of our obsession, we are both in about the 99.99% percentile when it comes to knowing, and being able to identify, counties and many of the subdivisions across the Fruited Plain. If some kind of trivial pursuits game were constructed involving having to name them, we would be near unbeatable. Smiley
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muon2
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« Reply #176 on: October 11, 2015, 06:28:40 PM »

The fundamental problem for any erosity or compactness measure is to have it make sense low density and high density areas. These are some principles I think any system should accommodate:

1. Compact shapes should be generally preferred over non-compact shapes.
2. Borders that respect natural barriers to travel should be preferred.
3. Borders that respect accepted political boundaries should be preferred and county borders should have priority over whole cities.
4. An otherwise compact shape should not be penalized for an erose boundary that arises solely from natural or accepted political boundaries.
5. Similarly-shaped districts should have comparable scores whether they cover large rural areas or small urban areas.

This last part is hard to get right. Consider the MN districts we drew. My MN-5 is certainly more erose than yours. To measure that one needs to consider the impact of the shapes of the individual munis. However, a simple chop to balance populations between two rural districts doesn't need that scrutiny.

So when does a chop rise to the level requiring a county to be viewed by its divisions? During the MI exercise we came up with 5% as a reasonable threshold.

Like all thresholds it gas consequences. Its weakness is when a rural district goes into an already chopped urban county such as your MN CD-2. It probably creates a general bias from constructing such districts, but many of the posts in other threads have noted that its not bad to disfavor such rural-urban districts. This philosophy manifests itself more clearly in the cover-pack rules, but it shows up here as well.
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Torie
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« Reply #177 on: October 11, 2015, 06:51:45 PM »

"Its weakness is when a rural district goes into an already chopped urban county such as your MN CD-2."

My MN-02 was not a rural CD. I take your point about the hostility of rural CD's intruding into urban areas, that does not obtain with respect to intra metro area CD's. Whether there is any merit to drawing a distinction is yet another matter. Indeed, I macro chopped precisely because I wanted more pure urban focused CD's.
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jimrtex
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« Reply #178 on: October 11, 2015, 07:41:57 PM »

MN was a state on the bubble to lose a seat in 2010, but they dodged a bullet and kept 8. The forecast for 2020 is that MN will lose a seat, though they are still on the bubble. I'll assume they drop to 7 as I use the 2014 data to project county totals in 2020.

The Twin Cities UCC will have about 4 1/4 seats in a seven seat map. This plan preserves the cover count of that UCC and keeps deviations within 5%. The Minneapolis area (orange) has 2 districts.



How close to the cusp vis a vis the population projections is the map below in play as between the blue and teal CD's, which has less erosity I wonder. In both maps, MN-01 moves discernibly more Pub, but it moves more in that direction in the map below.




Your line is definitely better on the erosity measure by 2 (6 vs 8 on the CD1-CD6 line). I drew it that way to better spread the inequality. My projections for CD1+CD6 are that they are about 20K short of the quota. My split left CD1 under by 7K and CD6 under by 13K. Your split puts CD1 over by 9K and CD6 under by 30K. However CD3+5 is over by 33K so you could just chop into Anoka or Hennepin to reduce inequality. Similarly CD4 is 21K to high and CD2 is 24K too low, so a chop into Washington would be required.
Is it possible to get all of the Red River into a single district?

The current 5:3 split requires inclusion of St. Cloud into the metro area. In a 4:3 split, St. Cloud goes back to the outstate districts, and logically goes to the western district, which will have to make up population to the southern district.
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muon2
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« Reply #179 on: October 11, 2015, 10:51:12 PM »

"Its weakness is when a rural district goes into an already chopped urban county such as your MN CD-2."

My MN-02 was not a rural CD. I take your point about the hostility of rural CD's intruding into urban areas, that does not obtain with respect to intra metro area CD's. Whether there is any merit to drawing a distinction is yet another matter. Indeed, I macro chopped precisely because I wanted more pure urban focused CD's.

I understand your point, I blanked on the CD-6 into Wright as opposed to the CD-2 into Hennepin. I know the area well and except for the exurb Rogers, most of your CD-2 in Hennepin is rural, so that helped me lose sight of your objective.

Erosity and compactness measures generally don't know the population make up of the geographic units in the district. The exceptions are compactness measures that use the distances to the center of population, but they aren't particularly good at measuring erosity. We spent a lot of time with Grand Rapids and Detroit area districts to find a scoring balance in macrochops that reasonably approximated what the eye suggested. I'm not sure it makes sense to go back to the drawing board.

Did you look at swinging all those chops east so that CD-2 macrochopped Washington and then CD-4 went into Anoka?
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muon2
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« Reply #180 on: October 11, 2015, 11:11:18 PM »
« Edited: October 12, 2015, 04:16:40 PM by muon2 »

Is it possible to get all of the Red River into a single district?

The current 5:3 split requires inclusion of St. Cloud into the metro area. In a 4:3 split, St. Cloud goes back to the outstate districts, and logically goes to the western district, which will have to make up population to the southern district.

Here's a version that keeps the Red River together by stretching the St Cloud CD east to WI.

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Torie
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« Reply #181 on: October 12, 2015, 08:07:35 AM »

"Its weakness is when a rural district goes into an already chopped urban county such as your MN CD-2."

My MN-02 was not a rural CD. I take your point about the hostility of rural CD's intruding into urban areas, that does not obtain with respect to intra metro area CD's. Whether there is any merit to drawing a distinction is yet another matter. Indeed, I macro chopped precisely because I wanted more pure urban focused CD's.

I understand your point, I blanked on the CD-6 into Wright as opposed to the CD-2 into Hennepin. I know the area well and except for the exurb Rogers, most of your CD-2 in Hennepin is rural, so that helped me lose sight of your objective.

Erosity and compactness measures generally don't know the population make up of the geographic units in the district. The exceptions are compactness measures that use the distances to the center of population, but they aren't particularly good at measuring erosity. We spent a lot of time with Grand Rapids and Detroit area districts to find a scoring balance in macrochops that reasonably approximated what the eye suggested. I'm not sure it makes sense to go back to the drawing board.

Did you look at swinging all those chops east so that CD-2 macrochopped Washington and then CD-4 went into Anoka?

No, I didn't. I would still have the macrochop issue that we are discussing however I presume. Anyway, it's an alternative scoring system to keep in mind. It still penalizes macros, but just in a different way, that does not swamp, and dominate, the erosity score. In smaller counties, there will not be macrochops, and with the extra chop point, an incentive to avoid them anyway. The only reason to do a macrochop into an urban area, would probably be to avoid a pack or cover penalty, or both, anyway, which facilitates, rather than degrades, the rural-urban divide.
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muon2
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« Reply #182 on: October 12, 2015, 08:44:52 AM »

I'm not sure how I score erosity for MN-05 with your proposal. Yours is better shaped than mine and should get credit for that.

I used an early system for our AL discussion that had no use of subdivisions or their shapes, just the main county chop. I found that system resulted in no penalty for a badly shaped chop in a large population county, and it could be easily gerrymandered. Invoking subdivisions for erosity in large counties was my solution.
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Torie
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« Reply #183 on: October 12, 2015, 09:13:56 AM »

One does not credit for keeping the Red River basin together, but it does appear by doing so, erosity goes down in the map above.

If based on your experience, nuking the erosity score for macrochops keeps them much cleaner, when necessary, that would be a major factor militating in favor of your approach. Being practical is job one.

I don't have a macrochop in Hennepin anyway, if the 33,000 chop number is based on projected population. The quota is about 40,000. Hennepin is projected to grow about 10% over the decade. So my map, or revised map, adjusting for the 10% population growth, has no macrochop there. I want a rescoring! Smiley My map should do what you did in Washington County to avoid a muni chop there too I suppose.

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muon2
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« Reply #184 on: October 12, 2015, 10:22:14 AM »
« Edited: October 12, 2015, 10:23:53 AM by muon2 »

One does not credit for keeping the Red River basin together, but it does appear by doing so, erosity goes down in the map above.
One thing I like about the scoring system is it allows a mapper to try to achieve certain geographic goals, and if the result stays on the Pareto frontier it can go into the mix.

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When we were looking at MI for the purposes of macrochops one situation arose where a county had two ordinary chops that would have been a macrochop had they been added together. This was felt to be an undesirable gaming of the system, so I adjusted my rule to look at the sum of all chop fragments less the most populous one to determine if a macrochop existed. The result is that once a county is macrochopped it is treated as a collection of subdivisions for all districts in that county when calculating erosity.

I looked at your Wright chop in more detail and it is perilously close to a macrochop in 2020 (39K). It is fine under this exercise, but might not be by 2020.
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Torie
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« Reply #185 on: October 12, 2015, 10:38:10 AM »
« Edited: October 12, 2015, 10:47:20 AM by Torie »

"The result is that once a county is macrochopped it is treated as a collection of subdivisions for all districts in that county when calculating erosity."

Oh, I see. That makes sense, and also, tends to discourage multi-chopping counties. I think we both thought the Florida scoring system favoring multi-chops was just nutter.

So the way to game this I guess is to have MN-06 chop into Washington or Anoka County from the north (only Anoka would be available absent your keep the Red River basin whole map), that are not toxic counties, because there is not a macrochop already in place. As to doing it in Washington, I remember now the firefight we had over that one about Lansing. It was about aggregating or not multiple chops into a county, no one of which was macro, but collectively they were. I guess you ended up, deciding to keep the regime that there is no summing of the chops.

I can exploit the 0.5% variance rule if necessary to deal with the Wright County chop getting too big, if necessary. In some maps, it would help to have a software program that does that for you. In NY, you can play with all the populations of the CD's south of Westchester, to shove the Westchester CD to just about any place you want it, given the funnel shape of the state, with Westchester being the choke point. Which raises its own issue. One could overpopulate, or underpopulate, the two regions of NY by quite a bit, just by adding up variances going all in one direction, in the NYC based region. Maybe there should be a regional variance limit to shut down that game. In most states, that will not be an issue, but in a state shaped like NY, it could be. And given the upstate versus NYC area divide in NY, that could be a sensitive issue.
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Torie
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« Reply #186 on: October 12, 2015, 01:33:55 PM »
« Edited: October 12, 2015, 01:46:24 PM by Torie »

This mappie appears to navigate through all of Muon2's little quicksand traps. Smiley  How it scores is another matter. It has no muni chops however, and no extra macrochop. Spread those chops out baby. This map was population tested throughout. I created a spreadsheet. The lines of MN-05 needed to get ugly to keep within the 0.5% quota for each CD, while avoiding muni chops. \

As a matter of clarification, when you have a macrochop, do you count as cuts any township or city subdivision appending a subdivision in another CD, as long as the two are connected by some road (presumably paved), even if not a state road?


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muon2
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« Reply #187 on: October 12, 2015, 04:13:39 PM »

I like your idea. I've adjusted it to equalize populations using my projections to 2020.




In a macrochopped county all the subdivision units are treated as linked to each other if they are locally connected (ie any paved public roads) between their town halls. Units in a macrochopped county are linked to an adjacent county if there is a numbered highway that crosses the border between them.
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Torie
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« Reply #188 on: October 12, 2015, 04:18:41 PM »
« Edited: October 13, 2015, 12:06:20 PM by Torie »

Well, our spreadsheets don't agree again for some reason. But that's OK.

Addendum: I found the errors on my spreadsheet, figured out how you determined that the cuts into Washington and Anoka, minimized the population inequality between CD's (it's better to sort MN-03 rather than MN-04 given the size of the townships), so my map is now identical to yours. I also determined that the allocation to MN-07 and MN-06 of counties there around Todd County, while not too pretty on the map, minimized road cuts, because there are no state roads between the county seats of Todd and Otter Tail and Douglas counties to the west. Well done! Smiley

I realize now that on one side of my spreadsheet, I need the 2010 population numbers, to make sure that they match what I see on Dave's redistricting utility. If one doesn't do that, one misses errors.
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Brittain33
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« Reply #189 on: October 13, 2015, 07:27:48 AM »

I wonder if this thread should put be split in two, one for MN redistricting and one for Census data.
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Torie
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« Reply #190 on: December 24, 2015, 01:21:24 PM »
« Edited: December 24, 2015, 01:31:38 PM by Torie »

Well given that AZ is sure to gain a seat, I looked into the matter using 2014 projections. And guess what? First, the additional CD will all be in Maricopa County. The bad news for the Dems is the Pubs are certain to gain the additional seat, Mathismander or no. The good news for the Dems, is that even absent a Mathismander, the current AZ-09, the Sinema CD, can now actually be legitimately drawn using good government, Muon2 metrics. My AZ-05, per 2008 results, has only a Pub PVI of 2% (before cutting that figure down to account for the McCain favorite son effect), just 0.7% more than the current AZ-09. The CD trended substantially Dem in 2012. Sinema will be safe there. So the Dems keep that seat, even if say, Torie is doing the line drawing, rather than Mathis. Smiley Of course, the AZ-03 Guijalva CD will be gone if I had any say in the matter, or Muon2 metrics are followed, but that is another matter. Guijalva will need to learn how to attract white liberal votes in a Democratic all Tucson based CD. So the Dems keep 3 seats, with AZ-01 and AZ-02 off the table for them.

Hey it only took me 90 minutes from start to finish to draw out Maricopa County, including cranking out the population numbers (about 614,000 folks per CD in Maricopa County). I am getting better at this. Smiley Pima County has had slower growth than the national average, and Cochise is losing population, so I know that the cut into Maricopa will be from the south. My AZ-07 will basically be a part of the AZ-02 CD. The cut into Maricopa represents 21% of a CD, or about 152,000 people (135,000 per the 2010 census).

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Brittain33
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« Reply #191 on: December 24, 2015, 02:36:26 PM »
« Edited: December 24, 2015, 02:46:15 PM by Brittain33 »

Tempe/North Chandler/West Mesa/Ahwatukee are a natural community of interest. Appending Tempe to eastern exurbs does not feel right, it feels like an effort to drown out a Democratic community's votes in heavily Republican territory.
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Torie
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« Reply #192 on: December 24, 2015, 03:15:25 PM »
« Edited: December 24, 2015, 03:20:45 PM by Torie »

Tempe/North Chandler/West Mesa/Ahwatukee are a natural community of interest. Appending Tempe to eastern exurbs does not feel right, it feels like an effort to drown out a Democratic community's votes in heavily Republican territory.

1. Muon2 metrics ignore communities of interest to the extent not defined by keeping municipalities or towns or counties together, with lines not too erose based on highway cuts, and of course subject to the VRA. That is the whole point of the metrics, to have objective, and automatically applied, constraints, that involve no subjectivity, because everybody has their own idea of what communities of interest are, and guess what - they almost always seem to comport with one's partisan preferences. Now one need not worry in whose hands the pencil that draws the lines happens to be in. It is a mere ministerial task, that a very smart computer should be able to do all on its own. After being properly programmed, humans are no longer needed.

Humans get back into the act, when the process of selecting the map, out of those that make the cut, occurs. I have my own little process for that, which I find appealing, that selects the maps with the fewest chops, and then the map with one extra chop and then two extra chops, and then three extra chops, and then four extra chops (what the map with the least erosity for a given number of chops selected), and both parties have to agree on one of the 5 maps, and if they fail to do so, maps are randomly eliminated from the pool, one by one, until a final default map is selected. At any time before the final selection, the parties can agree on any of the five maps. They can also agree to increase a minority's percentage that is at least 30% in a CD from the five maps in the pool, to get it up to no more than 50% BVAP or HCVAP, making changes to the lines that cause the least decline in the score of a map. The uncertainty causes both parties to try to compromise, to reduce the uncertainty of ending up with a map that screws one side of the other. In the end, the incentive is there to end up selecting a Goldilocks map.

2. There is this obsession with Tempe that I find rather odd. It really does not make much of a difference from a partisan standpoint where Tempe goes. It is really not all the Democratic, nor is it that large in population, to cause that much of a swing. And if my AZ lines went there, causing another chop, and/or more erosity, some Dem precincts in AZ-05 would probably have been lost elsewhere diluting the impact of appending Tempe. As I said, AZ-05 has lines not all that different from what Mathis did. It is almost as Dem without Tempe, because the CD has contracted, given the population increase, so it lost Pub precincts in the city of Phoenix as it contracted.

3. I drew two Dem CD's in Maricopa, one an Hispanic VRA district, and now the second district. That is all the Dems can get. Sure, with more chops, the PVI of my AZ-05 could move a point or so more Dem, but it's already effectively Dem, and trending more so. It will be safely Dem by 2022. Aside from not including Tempe, I deliberately drew, subject to Muon2 metrics, AZ-05 to maximize the Dem PVI. There are some choices as to how to play with the lines in the city of Phoenix. I picked the version that made AZ-05 the most Dem, subject to having nice clean lines. Muon2 metrics actually require that to get the Pub SKEW down, all other things being equal. If AZ, like say the WA map, had a Dem SKEW, I would have drawn the lines to avoid a second Dem CD in Maricopa.

Fair enough?
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Brittain33
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« Reply #193 on: December 24, 2015, 03:48:03 PM »
« Edited: December 24, 2015, 03:49:38 PM by Brittain33 »

Thank you for the full explanation. I want to speak to one point in particular.

2. There is this obsession with Tempe that I find rather odd.

I confess to having a personal interest in Tempe because it's an area I know unusually well, and because it is tech- and academic-heavy so feels like a distant cousin of areas I know in Boston. But I think there are reasons beyond that for treating it as unusual in the Phoenix area.

1. It's a college town. These are often Democratic islands in conservative areas, so like Bloomington, Lawrence, Charlottesville, or Gainesville, or on a different scale, Austin, it's going to stand out demographically and punch above its weight politically.
1a. Not saying you're doing this, but there is consequently a Republican tradition in red states to pack or crack these kinds of communities.
2. The previous Dem representative from this district was the mayor of Tempe.
3. Neighboring municipalities like Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, even Scottsdale are sprawling and contain political multitudes. Tempe is more compact geographically and has a smaller population.
4. The parts of those communities closer to Tempe—specifically west Mesa, north Chandler, south Scottsdale, and Ahwatukee in Phoenix—are more like Tempe than they are like the strongly Republican and affluent zones in those communities.

As a Democrat, I'm going to see Tempe as a hub of a more liberal, more diverse (but not purely Anglo vs. Latino), and more tech-oriented part of Maricopa that is different from most of the rest of the county.
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Torie
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« Reply #194 on: December 24, 2015, 06:18:36 PM »
« Edited: December 24, 2015, 06:20:26 PM by Torie »

Thank you for the full explanation. I want to speak to one point in particular.

2. There is this obsession with Tempe that I find rather odd.

I confess to having a personal interest in Tempe because it's an area I know unusually well, and because it is tech- and academic-heavy so feels like a distant cousin of areas I know in Boston. But I think there are reasons beyond that for treating it as unusual in the Phoenix area.

1. It's a college town. These are often Democratic islands in conservative areas, so like Bloomington, Lawrence, Charlottesville, or Gainesville, or on a different scale, Austin, it's going to stand out demographically and punch above its weight politically.
1a. Not saying you're doing this, but there is consequently a Republican tradition in red states to pack or crack these kinds of communities.
2. The previous Dem representative from this district was the mayor of Tempe.
3. Neighboring municipalities like Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, even Scottsdale are sprawling and contain political multitudes. Tempe is more compact geographically and has a smaller population.
4. The parts of those communities closer to Tempe—specifically west Mesa, north Chandler, south Scottsdale, and Ahwatukee in Phoenix—are more like Tempe than they are like the strongly Republican and affluent zones in those communities.

As a Democrat, I'm going to see Tempe as a hub of a more liberal, more diverse (but not purely Anglo vs. Latino), and more tech-oriented part of Maricopa that is different from most of the rest of the county.

Thanks for your interesting post. I feel your pain. No doubt, we both would want to live in exactly the same kind of places, and relate to those places in particular. I, by the way, am really not a Pub hack anymore. I have had enough. Smiley I "hate" both parties really. Sad
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Sol
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« Reply #195 on: December 24, 2015, 09:39:34 PM »

Grijalva, it should be noted, is a pretty liberal guy--he is one of the most left-wing members of Congress, and is co-chair of the Progressive Caucus. He would love a map where he were to lose his district's pubbie bits, particularly Yuma.

Of course, I imagine that Arizona's growth is going to be a little asymmetrical--the territory outside of Maricopa is growing slower than inside.
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Torie
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« Reply #196 on: December 26, 2015, 07:30:38 AM »
« Edited: December 26, 2015, 09:58:21 AM by Torie »

Grijalva, it should be noted, is a pretty liberal guy--he is one of the most left-wing members of Congress, and is co-chair of the Progressive Caucus. He would love a map where he were to lose his district's pubbie bits, particularly Yuma.

Of course, I imagine that Arizona's growth is going to be a little asymmetrical--the territory outside of Maricopa is growing slower than inside.

Grijalva's portion of Yuma is all Hispanic, and not Pub, although very few of the Hispanics there vote. Anyway, he's not going to like the maps below at all. His career will be over, and he will need to find a new line of work. Both of the Pima County based CD's are way too marginal for him to survive.

Below are three AZ map versions.  It seems that almost every map I do these days, causes me to think about the details of Muon2 metric policy issues. In these maps, the Indian Reservations were really put into play. Arizona, like Washington, is full of blockades. The state is at once parsimonious with the number of its highways that are state highways, and given the rugged and/or arid landscape, tends to lack pavement at all, where one would wish it existed. One consequence, is that most roads to the CD boundary lines seem to lead to the reservations, as it were.

So, for example, Tucson needed to be macrochopped. There is no escape. The only state highway from the west has no other state highways connecting to it that a CD can follow, until it hits downtown Tucson.  So my AZ-03 district has to follow that highway in. Also, Tucson really has no neighborhoods that are useable, and precincts are not nested. So the boundary lines follow the highways. The partisan consequence here is interesting.  AZ-02 is Dem, but barely so. My best guess of the PVI adjustment for the McCain favorite son effect is 3 points (maybe it is 4 points). It is hard to guesstimate it, because in 2012 I strongly suspect two things were happening in AZ. First, the McCain favorite son effect was gone, favoring the Dems. On the other hand,  the border incursions by large numbers of illegals at the time, was a factor causing the state to trend Pub. I am netting the two somewhat offsetting factors out at 3 points, but perhaps the adjustment for the McCain favorite son effect in 2008 should be more. One can argue either way.

Anyway, using a 3 point adjustment, the winning map, map version 1, has AZ-02 at a Dem PVI of 1.8%. Such a rather low Dem PVI for AZ-02 means that AZ-03 concomitantly has a rather low Pub PVI.  It’s about 2% Pub.  

Now on to the maps and the Indian Reservation issues. Winning map version 1, has two  extra chops beyond the obvious mandatory ones, one in Navajo County, plus the chop into Tucson in macro-chopped Pima County.  It also has the disfavored per my definition but allowed bridge chop by AZ-03 through Maricopa County since Pima and Yuma Counties have no road connections.  No chop is counted in Apache County, because the northern portion in AZ-01 is part of the Navajo Reservation. A chop is counted in Navajo County because in addition to AZ-10 taking in the Apache Reservation at the south end of the county, it also takes in a few precincts outside it.  The chop of AZ-10 into Maricopa is also an Indian reservation.

Oh, notice that under Muon2's iteration of the bridge chop rule, unless having bridge chops through two counties rather than one, makes it a non bridge chop, that my AZ-03 under his definition is still a bridge chop. Santa Cruz and Yuma are whole counties. Not good, both as to his definition, and sanction. His definition and sanction needs to be fixed in my opinion. It just does too much that is undesirable in my opinion. And it is not needed to preclude abuse, if it were switched out for my definition. My full court press on this one will continue unabated. Tongue

Map version 1



OK, no issues so far.  But look at version 2, a rather unfortunate map, but I put it up to further explore the Indian reservation issue. In Apache County, both the Navajo Reservation and the county are chopped. Should that count as just one chop or a double chop? My inclination is to count it as a double chop.  On the other hand, Navajo County is not chopped at all, but the Apache Reservation as its south end is. Should that count as a chop? My preference is that it should not.  I researched the matter, and the reservations do indeed vote for County boards of supervisors and so forth. So they do some functions separate from the county, some jointly and on yet still others, participate in county government just like everybody else. Reservations are a hybrid when it comes to local governmental functions.

However, where the choice is between chopping either a county, or an Indian reservation, chopping the reservation is disfavored. In this case, pushing AZ-01 into Gila County to take in the balance of the reservation pushed the population numbers out of the permissible variance zone, so it could not be done.  The same issue comes up with the AZ-10 chop into Maricopa County. There the population numbers allowed the chop, so I did it, given the preference for keeping the reservation together. But if the population numbers did not allow it, the reservation could have been chopped without penalty, in lieu of chopping into Maricopa.

Map version 2



Finally, there is map version 3, which I thought I might have had to live with, until I worked my way out of it vis a vis the Indian reservations, which has an extra chop in Mojave County (the chop into Gila is part of the Apache Indian Reservation), so it loses (it also pushes AZ-03 about two more points into Pub territory, and that would be disfavored due to SKEW considerations if version 1 had had AZ-03 in the tossup zone, which it almost did)). It also chops Lake Havasu, which while not counting as a chop because the county is not macro-chopped, is most undesirable, and hurts the erosity score.

Map version 3

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muon2
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« Reply #197 on: December 26, 2015, 10:13:28 AM »

I like the first AZ plan.

The reservations are indeed a problem area. They are like munis that cross county lines, but there's more desire to keep them together than munis at county lines. At a minimum I would agree that there should be no chop penalty for an area that is exactly coincident with the reservation land in a county. At one point jimrtex and I suggested treating reservations as separate counties since that would then create a chop penalty for reservation splits, but not for chopping into the counties to keep them whole. It all depends on how strong one wants to make the incentive to keep reservations whole.
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« Reply #198 on: December 26, 2015, 10:22:37 AM »

I like the first AZ plan.

The reservations are indeed a problem area. They are like munis that cross county lines, but there's more desire to keep them together than munis at county lines. At a minimum I would agree that there should be no chop penalty for an area that is exactly coincident with the reservation land in a county. At one point jimrtex and I suggested treating reservations as separate counties since that would then create a chop penalty for reservation splits, but not for chopping into the counties to keep them whole. It all depends on how strong one wants to make the incentive to keep reservations whole.

I think I have come up with the right objective function here. I like the preference metric as a way to resolve some of these issues. I will be getting to your King County Pub gerrymander post/map soon. I have quite a bit to say about that one. Smiley
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« Reply #199 on: December 26, 2015, 10:48:05 AM »

I like the first AZ plan.

The reservations are indeed a problem area. They are like munis that cross county lines, but there's more desire to keep them together than munis at county lines. At a minimum I would agree that there should be no chop penalty for an area that is exactly coincident with the reservation land in a county. At one point jimrtex and I suggested treating reservations as separate counties since that would then create a chop penalty for reservation splits, but not for chopping into the counties to keep them whole. It all depends on how strong one wants to make the incentive to keep reservations whole.

I think I have come up with the right objective function here. I like the preference metric as a way to resolve some of these issues. I will be getting to your King County Pub gerrymander post/map soon. I have quite a bit to say about that one. Smiley

Can you write your reservation preference metric in concise words? It seems plausible but I'd like to test it.

On the AZ-3 bridge chop issue, i think it comes down to the fact that we agreed, and I still believe, that there is no preference for CDs nested in a county - it's just about chops. I can rearrange your AZ-3 to put Tucson with Santa Cruz county and the rest of Pima with Yuma and SW Maricopa. The bridge chop vanishes with no extra chops.
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