U.S. House Redistricting: Illinois

[dpmapper]

Krazen, the "quad cities" term applies to Davenport/Moline/Rock Island/Bettendorf on the IL/IA border, not Springfield etc.  Schilling's district is the quad cities district, in other words. 

Lipinski's and Costello's districts look pretty narrowly D to me, just eyeballing it, though they'll probably be safe with the current incumbents.  The green district is also not particularly Dem. 

So 8 Dem incumbents, plus Schilling's district (I assume) and the Joliet/Aurora district for 10.  5 solid GOP (from S to N, blue (Shimkus) brown (Schock) orange (Manzullo) purple (Hultgren/Walsh) red (Roskam)).  3 swingy: green downstate cities district (though I'm guessing Johnson can hold this for the GOP), the green suburban district, and Dold's district...?  Biggert is put into Quigley's district and Kinzinger is swamped by Jackson. 

[dpmapper]

Lipinski's district is a little weird; he's down to about D+5, but it definitely could be more; they seem to have marooned some overwhelmingly Hispanic precincts in IL-01 for no discernable reason, precincts that could be used to shore up Lipinski instead (while putting suburban areas in IL-01; we're talking precincts that are 90% Hispanic and 2% black, so it's not like the suburbs are any less black than they are).

How much Obama home-state discount are you applying when you say D+5? 

[dpmapper]

Though the new and long overdue Dem-leaning seat based on Aurora/Joliet/Napierville is liable to become a little more marginal as a result of its boundaries being ungerrymandered),

I have no interest in debating what constitutes a "fair" or "gerrymandered" map, but as someone who grew up near Aurora and who went to high school in Aurora I did want to chime in to say that an Aurora/Naperville/Joliet district is NOT by any means "long-overdue".  Draw it if you want, but Aurora has little in common with Naperville, other than the fact that they're large and happen to have grown so that they're next to each other.  Aurora is an old city and has been large, with a sizable poor Hispanic (and some black) population, for decades.  (Think of Lowell in relation to Boston, if you will.)  Naperville, on the other hand, is your classic suburban boom town of the 80's and 90's (fueled by easy access to I-88), with new subdivisions and tons of upper-middle class whites and Asians.  In 1960 it was probably was only at a population of ~30K.  

Aurora is probably most naturally paired with Elgin, to be honest.  Both cities have a similar history of being sizable, semi-industrial Fox Valley cities in Kane County that long ago got a large influx of blacks and Hispanics.  The tri-cities of St. Charles, Geneva, and Batavia have long been linked with Aurora as well (although they're now very different demographically).  

[dpmapper]

Just for fun, this is roughly how I would divide Chicagoland if I were drawing pure Community of Interest districts.  

City districts:
Cyan, south Cook suburbs + far south Chicago: 68% black.
Yellow, near west + near south sides of Chicago: 77% black.
Blue, north side of Chicago: this is what I'd call "fashionable Chicago" - the wealthy, the yuppies, the gays, the bohemians.  
Pink, southwest Chicago + Cicero and related inner suburbs: 58.9% Hispanic.
Tan, northwest Chicago + inner west suburbs: 44.8% white, 44.1% Hispanic, very blue-collar/working class, for the most part.  

Suburbs:
These first three have substantial Asian populations (close to 10% or more); the last four do not.  

Teal, north shore: Very wealthy, lots of Jewish voters, starts at Evanston but I stopped going up the shore at North Chicago/Waukegan because that's a pretty stark dividing point, so I went inland to pick up some more middle class suburbs in Cook County.  
Red: Northwest Cook.  Newer suburbs like South Barrington, Hoffman Estates, and Schaumburg (plus a few older ones like Arlington Heights which couldn't fit anywhere else), lots of high-tech (Motorola, etc).  
Light Green: The older core DuPage suburbs of Wheaton, Glen Ellyn, Elmhurst, etc, plus all of
Naperville and the towns south of Naperville (which are basically Naperville-lite).  

Lavender: mostly the rest of Lake County exurbia/suburbia
Purple, near southwest suburbs: mostly older suburbs, quite white at 82.3%.  
Orange: All of Kane county, plus some more Fox River communities in McHenry county.  I also added the Cook County bits of Elgin and the parts of Kendall that are most tied to Aurora.  I did *not* add the DuPage bits of Aurora since they're more similar to Naperville than to the rest of Aurora.  
Brown: Joliet plus Kankakee (these two make a lot of sense together), the rest of rapidly-exurbaning Will County, plus Kendall (which is starting to get some exurban population) and Grundy (had to add something...)  

[In case you're wondering, all of the city districts would be solid D, of course, and most of the suburban districts would be very close to even, with the exception of the teal district which is at 64% Obama.  But even there a Dold vs. Schakowsky matchup would be quite interesting I think, given Jan's socialist sympathies.  Ironically, but maybe not surprisingly, the suburban district that is least Obama-friendly (at 52.7%) is the purple one, home of one Bill Lipinski.]