Mid-2014 county population estimates out tomorrow, March 26

[Torie]

As an exercise I took the 2014 estimates for IL and projected those growth rates to 2020. Then I assumed that IL would have 17 CDs and divided the state accordingly.

I permitted a variance of 5% of a CD and preserved UCCs, which accounts for the district that wraps around the western exurbs of Chicago. That district plus Lake county (light green) are equal to two CDs if Lake takes up about 20% of McHenry. Kane and DuPage (gold and orange) are together just under 2 CDs with Kane needing about 25% of DuPage to balance the population. Cook county is just under 7 CDs in population.

With Illinois losing one CD, what percentage of that lost CD is from 1) the City of Chicago, 2)suburban Cook, 3) the balance of the Chicago UCC ex Cook, and 4) downstate?

[Torie]

As an exercise I took the 2014 estimates for IL and projected those growth rates to 2020. Then I assumed that IL would have 17 CDs and divided the state accordingly.

I permitted a variance of 5% of a CD and preserved UCCs, which accounts for the district that wraps around the western exurbs of Chicago. That district plus Lake county (light green) are equal to two CDs if Lake takes up about 20% of McHenry. Kane and DuPage (gold and orange) are together just under 2 CDs with Kane needing about 25% of DuPage to balance the population. Cook county is just under 7 CDs in population.

With Illinois losing one CD, what percentage of that lost CD is from 1) the City of Chicago, 2)suburban Cook, 3) the balance of the Chicago UCC ex Cook, and 4) downstate?

The Chicago numbers for 2014 aren't out yet, but I can look at the other three divisions.

Cook: 2010 - 7.29 CDs, 2020 - 6.98 CDs, net loss 0.31 CDs.
Chicago UCC less Cook: 2010 - 4.69 CDs, 2020 - 4.52 CDs, net loss 0.17 CDs.
Downstate: 2010 - 6.02 CDs, 2020 - 5.50 CDs, net loss 0.52 CDs.

There is likely to be at least one CD with substantial population in both the suburbs and downstate area.

With the Chicago area draining African Americans, the VRA is going to be tough to nest 7 CD's in Cook County. Southwest suburban Cook has too many whites I suspect for an African American CD to take all of that territory, with the landscape their trapped by the Hispanic CD to the north. It looks like a map drawn to your metrics might end up being an even more natural Pub gerrymander than the 2010 numbers dictate (which suit the Pubs quite well). And all of the Downstate CD's you drew look like what would be the marginal CD's based on a draw using the 2010 numbers all move towards reasonably safe Pub CD's, along with the Will County CD moving substantially in the Pub direction.

[Torie]

As an exercise I took the 2014 estimates for IL and projected those growth rates to 2020. Then I assumed that IL would have 17 CDs and divided the state accordingly.

I permitted a variance of 5% of a CD and preserved UCCs, which accounts for the district that wraps around the western exurbs of Chicago. That district plus Lake county (light green) are equal to two CDs if Lake takes up about 20% of McHenry. Kane and DuPage (gold and orange) are together just under 2 CDs with Kane needing about 25% of DuPage to balance the population. Cook county is just under 7 CDs in population.

With Illinois losing one CD, what percentage of that lost CD is from 1) the City of Chicago, 2)suburban Cook, 3) the balance of the Chicago UCC ex Cook, and 4) downstate?

The Chicago numbers for 2014 aren't out yet, but I can look at the other three divisions.

Cook: 2010 - 7.29 CDs, 2020 - 6.98 CDs, net loss 0.31 CDs.
Chicago UCC less Cook: 2010 - 4.69 CDs, 2020 - 4.52 CDs, net loss 0.17 CDs.
Downstate: 2010 - 6.02 CDs, 2020 - 5.50 CDs, net loss 0.52 CDs.

There is likely to be at least one CD with substantial population in both the suburbs and downstate area.

With the Chicago area draining African Americans, the VRA is going to be tough to nest 7 CD's in Cook County. Southwest suburban Cook has too many whites I suspect for an African American CD to take all of that territory, with the landscape their trapped by the Hispanic CD to the north. It looks like a map drawn to your metrics might end up being an even more natural Pub gerrymander than the 2010 numbers dictate (which suit the Pubs quite well). And all of the Downstate CD's you drew look like what would be the marginal CD's based on a draw using the 2010 numbers all move towards reasonably safe Pub CD's, along with the Will County CD moving substantially in the Pub direction.

Losing a CD makes all the existing districts larger. The problem for the Dems downstate is they don't have a lot of population centers, and to get the 2011 map they had to do a lot of chopping. Making the districts larger makes their problem that much greater. Since this plan preserves UCCs it does about as well as they could hope by linking Rockford and Rock Island in a CD as well as by keeping Metro East intact and not trying to use it in two separate CDs, which didn't work so well in 2014.

It will be hard if not impossible to preserve 3 BVAP-majority CDs in 2020. I assume that there will be only two covered by the VRA. Similarly the case wasn't made for 2 CHVAP-majority CDs in IL in 2011, so I don't see it happening with larger districts in 2020. I'm reasonably confident that 2 black and 1 Latino CD could be nested in Cook in 2020 to comply with the VRA.

Yes, I see now. The Hispanic CD had some low percentage Hispanic precincts that it can lose to pick up others in the other Hispanic salient in Chicago farther north. The Cook County CD's might look like the below. I did not redraw anything else other than make Lake County one CD for the moment. IL-07 moves sharply Dem of course in the redraw - the one benefit to the Dems from a new "good government" map. The north shore doesn't change much.

[Torie]

Your Cook plan is very similar to what I had in mind. I left the Beverly neighborhood of Chicago with the SW suburbs, which is where it usually is placed. My CD 4 is designed to pick up areas that are anticipated to have additional Hispanic growth by 2020 (58.3% HVAP in 2010, but probably over 60% by 2020) and that leaves CD 5 as an opportunity district (37.2% HVAP in 2010, but probably well over 40% by 2020).

I'll probably do a more detailed analysis at the township level when that data comes out in the summer. I wish the Census provided data based on Chicago community areas.

But doing that with Beverly is an extra chop, no?  And you lose points for erosity by creating an opportunity CD. I am not sure how much of an opportunity it is with Hispanics at 40% HVAP anyway. You are using different metrics. You also seem to be assuming similar population changes, which I suspect will not be the case. The black south side must be draining population.

[Torie]

Ah, local Illinois politics trumps your set of metrics. I understand.   Myself, I would just say no, but I'm a hardass.

Just out of curiosity, what is your genesis of your squeamishness about linking the two Hispanic nodes?

[Torie]

Not to beat the drum until it has no sound, but why was the "earmuff" so unpopular? I mean, your Hispanic CD is itself butt ugly erose, in fact to my "artistic" eyes more ugly than my little modest earmuff.

[Torie]

"Entirely separated" really is not text that accomplishes the prohibition of C shaped districts in my view. Entirely separated means two counties not connected at all to me. Is this some judicial or commission interpretation of the statute. Anyway, putting aside the erosity issue the way you drew the Hispanic CD, you are going to be in trouble with your nesting if the two African American CD's lose as much population as I assumed, because my IL-07 will then either need to take some of the territory used by the Hispanic CD, or grotesquely wrap around it, or chop into another county, or you are back to the earmuffs.

[Torie]

Looking at the trends to 2020 from 2014 estimates in the plains states, I'll start with IA. Interestingly, IA-2 (light green) is growing at a rate so close to that of the entire state that the current projection has it at only -208 persons from the quota, so I left it alone. Most of the growth is in the Des Moines area and I project that it can't be kept with Council Bluffs in the same CD without some unusual shape, so I contracted the Des Moines CD to just 7 counties keeping the UCC together.

This plan has a maximum deviation of 1392 (0.17%) It's certainly possible to get smaller deviations in IA, but given the likely shifts in estimates over the next few years it wouldn't be very meaningful.

Is that an orange earmuff I see there?

[Torie]

A red earmuff.

[Torie]

Here's OH divided into 15 CDs using the projections of the county data out to 2020. Districts preserve UCC covering rules. All districts are within 5% except suburban Cincinnati which is slightly over and is balanced by the adjacent southern OH district. The Columbus and Cleveland areas each contain two districts.

Perhaps I made an error, but with my own spreadsheet taking the 7-1-14 numbers and projecting out to 4-1-20 the trends, I find that your OH-04 (the 14 county red CD), is about 82,000 short in population.

[Torie]

You're also not following the nesting rules for the Columbus UCC.  Seriously, I find that a most important metric myself, more than the coverage metric, which I am willing to fudge if it makes the map work much better. But two CD's need to be contained wholly within Franklin, Delaware, Licking, or Fairfield Counties in my view. You sprawl down to Pickaway, so thus the nesting metric is not followed.

You've got 79K extra folks in the Cincy UCC btw, so maybe the solution is to just have OH-04 cut into Butler County to pick up those extra 79K. That still leaves an extra 25K for the Dayton UCC to dump off somewhere. I guess that is what you were suggesting. Cutting Clermont makes for a prettier map, but maybe the numbers don't work as well. Even losing Madison, OH-07 has 23K extra folks, if it gets Cincy's excess, while the Butler chop gets one into microchop range for OH-04's other cut. To make the map look better, ideally OH-04 should pick up Hancock County.  OH-09 then drops Henry to OH-04 and picks up Defiance, and it becomes chopless, and then OH-04 can cut into Miami deep enough with the 0.5% variance rule, to get both OH-04 and OH-03 within the acceptable population range.

[Torie]

Madison, Union, and Pickaway and not growing much in population, so they are not "urbanizing" at the moment.

[Torie]

Madison, Union, and Pickaway and not growing much in population, so they are not "urbanizing" at the moment.

I think that jimtex's point is that all three counties already have enough urban population to qualify, except that most of the population is in satellite urban clusters, not in the main urbanized area. It would not take a lot of growth for a tendril of Columbus to link to one of those clusters. Then at the 2020 Census the urban cluster would count as urbanized area and the county would meet the UCC criteria.

Yes, I more or less understood that, but Madison at current rates is slated to pick up about 500 people, Pickaway 1,100, and Union 1,500.  That seems rather anemic to me.

[Torie]

The Columbus UA extends into Pickaway County? What is the definition of an urban cluster?  Anyway, when I look at the precincts, the territory along the Franklin County line, looks like it is not very densely populated at all. Only the precinct north of Commercial Point seems to have more urban like density, which precinct while large in area, has 4,700 people. Whatever. Nobody but us will be paying attention to these definitions anyway in all probability.

[Torie]

Here's my mappie extrapolating out the current  census estimates to 2020.  It assumes that an effort should be make to keep the black percentage up in the OH-13 (in this map it's 41.1% BVAP). I put all of the projected population loss for Cuyahoga in OH-13. The map reveals two issues, one of which Muon2 and myself arm wrestle over. OH-03 gets docked a point because of the coverage issue for the Dayton UCC, even though the Dayton UCC population not in OH-03 has not been increased. I still dissent from that rule. The map needs to do what it did to avoid chops elsewhere, and since I don't like the rule anyway, I chose this approach. If OH-04 loses population a bit more rapidly, the coverage issue will go away.

The other issue is OH-05. It won't score well erosity-wise, but I quite like CD's that wrap around a UCC area. It's really a community of interest.  Some thought might be given for an exception for this kind of situation, maybe assuming that the inner UCC CD's just are not there for highway connection purposes. In any event, it creates the nice squarish kind of CD that I like - sort of like a square donut in this case. The map basically has 5 realistically competitive districts which is good (OH-05 might be on its way to being competitive (under a 3% Pub PVI), by 2022. It's about a 5% PVI based on the 2008 election, and probably a point below that now. In fact it might be close to even, by 2022. Meanwhile, OH-01 will probably be a 2 or 3 point Dem CD by 2022. It's 0.5% Dem PVI based on the 2008 numbers.

Hopefully Cuyahoga will lose population at a bit faster pace, so OH-14 has an excuse to impinge on Geauga County. It's certainly a butt ugly CD now.

[Torie]

I don't understand why you ignored the pack rule, but whatever. You can't sever Wyandotte from Johnson County.

[Torie]

Anyone planning on cranking the NY county estimates? If NY loses a seat, and most of the population shortfall is north of Orange and Putnam Counties, I see my CD as the one of the chopping block. If fact, if one could email me the spreadsheet, that would be grand.

[Torie]

Does AZ law (as opposed to your rules) actually require that CD's have road connections? It still seems silly to me to chop Maricopa for the sole reason of securing a road connection from Pima to Yuma within the CD.

[Torie]

Well the problem with AZ is that there are just not good alternatives, which is an example of why I tend to favor penalizing appending counties with a link, but not prohibiting it. So in AZ's case, you either chop Maricopa or not, to get to Yuma, and it makes no difference either way when scoring the map.

[Torie]

Mississippi was pretty easy, wasn't it Muon2? Few I suspect would disagree that that is the best possible map, or that the black CD is indeed required under the VRA, and that it probably needs to hew quite closely to the lines that you drew, since the black community it encompasses is all contiguous, even if partially rural and partially urban.

[Torie]

An MCC is a contiguous minority area? If you put it all in on CD, and get substantially more than 50% BVAP, don't you have a packing issue?  It doesn't look like you hewed to the pack rule for the Birmingham UCC in your first map.

[Torie]

I was just noting the pack issue. It may be a necessary "evil." What is the BVAP percentage for the black belt CD? I was just saying that if it was substantially over 50%, that might be an issue, although I am not sure about that aspect of the VRA. If a CD takes in a contiguous black area, and there is no second black CD in play, perhaps one can take it all in, without violating the VRA, even if it say 60% or 70% BVAP (absent excessive erosity perhaps). But putting aside the VRA, I would revert to the erosity rules, when one got to 50% BVAP. I don't think it appropriate to treat a MCC as the same as a UCC other than for the purpose above. We do the MCC only for VRA purposes I would think. The 40% rule is however useful as a benchmark for rural counties for purposes of deeming what is contiguous.

Yes, I said before that I don't think the VRA requires a forced bridge to Birmingham, and going there could raise a VRA packing issue if the BVAP percentage is excessive.

[Torie]

I don't understand how your COI concept (beyond the factors we already use) helps to buttress that race is not a predominate factor making it illegal under the VRA. I don't think putting together contiguous black areas beyond packing would ever be deemed an illegal race line drawing anyway. Putting aside using it for purposes of determining contiguity, then one might ask that aside from VRA concerns, if you are using the minority COI concept, why then not for other COI groupings?

So unless I am missing something (which is possible), we will just have to disagree on this one. I guess the practical effect is that you would draw a non Section 2 required sub 50% BVAP minority district that violates our rules if your MCC concept were not in play, and I would not. You still have not told me the BVAP % of your black belt CD in that regard.

[Torie]

"That's why I only described the BVAP as being in the low 40s, upper 40s or over 50%."

Where did you do that above? I can't find it in a senior moment. The upper 40's is the most interesting for VRA purposes, where I am not sure it is entirely clear whether such a district must be drawn (assuming it's enough to elect a candidate of the minority's choice).  We know that's a floor where a higher percentage BVAP CD can be drawn, but I am not sure that we know any more than that.

[Torie]

I drew these VA maps for 2022 based on projected population figures, not so much to maximize Muon2’s scoring scheme (although the more non partisan map I think it would score reasonably well assuming that drawing two black CD’s is a constraint, which as a practical matter it probably is), but rather as an exercise in how much mileage the Pubs could get out of a Pub gerrymander next time. The answer is not much it seems. I got going on this, because Krazen on RRH suggested this devilish Pub gerrymander scheme that involved a CD snaking from Richmond into the Democratic towns in Prince William County (which makes the map hideously butt ugly, and would enrage just about everyone I suspect (including depriving the blacks of a second seat). It is really not necessary as it turns out to go there, for the Pubs to accomplish neutralizing a bunch of Dem precincts in Prince William. What works better is utilizing the old fashioned gerrymander technique of population transference from CD to CD. You just squeeze the estuary tidewater CD (VA-01) so that it juts into Prince William County. VA-01 is squeezed by the “black wall” of the two southside VA black CD’s, so it needs to go to the gates of Prince William in all events, if not necessarily much into the county itself (unless squeezed).  Below is the Pub gerrymander map for 2022 based on population projections:



Interesting, there appears to be only one CD in play via going the gerrymander route, as opposed to more of a good government map per the below. The map below is still somewhat of a Pub gerrymander, because the precincts in Fairfax were carefully selected, so long as it did not make the map too ugly (the flexibility was just where to put the VA-12 box in Fairfax County). But it does not make more than a point difference either way more or less. It also entails a score losing quad chop of Fairfax. Anyway, in the map below, VA-08 moves from about a 2% Pub PVI using 2012 numbers (you have to use 2012 numbers for Prince William, since it is trending Dem rather pronouncedly), to about a 2.5% Dem PVI. VA-10 is about a 3.5% Pub PVI. One bonus of the play of geography for the Pubs is that VRA concerns afford a justification for VA-03 to “vacuum up” all the black precincts in the Norfolk area hood (with an extra county chop), leaving the white precincts for VA-02, so its Pub PVI bounces up to about a 4.5% Pub PVI.

So all the sound of fury of gerrymandering in VA for 2022 is worth perhaps about three quarters of a CD (moving VA-08 from lean Dem to lean Pub), based on current population trends and voting habits. Sometimes gerrymanders are worth 2-4 CD’s, and sometimes they are worth just one CD at best.

 

And here is a version which will get a better Muon2 score, moving VA-08 into close to safe Dem territory at about a 4.5% Dem PVI (using 2012 numbers), and VA-10 from fairly safe Pub to quite safe Pub (3.5% Pub PVI to around 5% Pub PVI).  So this “good government” map locks in the delegation at 7 Pubs to 5 Dems. Thus the Pub gerrymander nets it one seat, while moving VA-10 into a slightly more marginal status as the cost of doing so. By 2020 if trends hold, it may be necessary for the Pubs to draw the map this way anyway, to keep its hold on VA-10. In that event, a Pub gerrymander would turn into a dummymander.