US House Redistricting: Minnesota

[muon2]

A couple years ago I posted some plans for MN assuming a loss of a seat, but drawn to neutral criteria. This was one of them.

The districts were drawn so that Mpls and StP were kept in separate districts and only one county was split. The plan has a 0.5% population variance, so it would have minor tweaks to reach equality. It also keeps the north and south suburbs in separate districts so it is effectively a 2-2-3 plan. The difference between this version and some of the others is a true St. Cloud-based district that naturally links to the western exurbs. I'm not suggesting any legislative body would create this, but an independent special master with the right set of judicial directives could.

[muon2]

A couple years ago I posted some plans for MN assuming a loss of a seat, but drawn to neutral criteria. This was one of them.

The districts were drawn so that Mpls and StP were kept in separate districts and only one county was split. The plan has a 0.5% population variance, so it would have minor tweaks to reach equality. It also keeps the north and south suburbs in separate districts so it is effectively a 2-2-3 plan. The difference between this version and some of the others is a true St. Cloud-based district that naturally links to the western exurbs. I'm not suggesting any legislative body would create this, but an independent special master with the right set of judicial directives could.

The courts have drawn the last two Minnesota congressional plans.  In 2001, the courts switched to a (2:3) plan because it best fit the 58:42 population split.

They rejected the 4:4 plan proposed by the Democratic congressmen which attempted to maintain the 4 rural districts in the corners - and would actually give them big chunks of suburban voters.  They also rejected the Republican Hack 4:4 plan, including the Manitoba South riding.  The Democratic congressmen particularly hated that part of the map.

When the special masters hold their hearings in Moorhead and Duluth, they will get run out of town if they propose that district.

They may not like it, but if MN has 7 districts, Duluth must be combined with either the Red River valley, St. Cloud, or the northern suburbs of Anoka County. If there are three non-Twin Cities districts, it makes far more sense to keep Duluth and St. Cloud separate than to keep the northern corners separate. Moorhead will have to deal with it.

The city of St. Cloud extends into Sherburne county which reaches into the Mpls exurbs. If there is a St. Cloud-based district it makes far more geographic sense to draw it as I have than to link it to the StP suburbs in Washington County as currently exists in MN 6.

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The map I posted had no split municipalities. I would contend that the suburbs immediately south of Mpls are culturally like the north suburbs of StP, and that is reflected in my map as well. I do recognize that politically there is a great barrier to mixing Ramsey and Hennepin, except to keep St Anthony intact.

More likely would be to regroup the districts with Hennepin I show above. Then CD 5 is Mpls and the south and near west suburbs, CD 4 is Ramsey and Washington, and CD 3 outer Hennepin, Anoka and Chisago. Using the Apps estimates to get within 100 and splitting no county more than once the area might appear like the following.

[muon2]

They may not like it, but if MN has 7 districts, Duluth must be combined with either the Red River valley, St. Cloud, or the northern suburbs of Anoka County. If there are three non-Twin Cities districts, it makes far more sense to keep Duluth and St. Cloud separate than to keep the northern corners separate. Moorhead will have to deal with it.

The city of St. Cloud extends into Sherburne county which reaches into the Mpls exurbs. If there is a St. Cloud-based district it makes far more geographic sense to draw it as I have than to link it to the StP suburbs in Washington County as currently exists in MN 6.

A particular principle that the court appeared to adhere to in 2001, was community of interest.  This was behind their decision to switch to a 5:3 plan.  They didn't want to have big chunks of suburban territory in the 4 rural districts.  And they didn't want to combine NE and NW Minnesota in a single district and they didn't have to.

If they apply the same principles in 2011, as they did in 2001, they will go with a 4:3 plan.  In 2001, the plaintiffs and the 3 intervening parties each presented their redistricting principles, and then presented their plan, then critiqued the other plans.  If I were a plaintiff or intervenor in 2011, I would emphasize the precedents that they had set in 2001.

In 2001, the 11-county metro area had about 58% of the state population, which was closer to 5/8 than 4/8.  But it still needed some more population.  St.Cloud was the logical choice.  It was close by.  It was populous enough so a large extension wasn't needed, and Sherburne is part of the metro-area.

58% is a little bit more than 4/7.  So St.Cloud gets shifted to the rural area, and some metro counties have to be trimmed off.  This logically should come from the outer suburbs, Chisago, Isanti, Sherburne, Wright, Carver, Scott.  Where doesn't really, mainly which of the 3 rural districts need some more population.

St. Cloud gets assigned to CD 7 since it is adjacent, and the district has the least population of the rural districts.  Add Le Sueur, Rice, and Goodhue to CD 1, and then start shifting counties to get the rural districts up to the required population.

In 2001, the court directly addressed the issue of Isanti and Chisago being part of CD 8.  Their rationale still is valid, even if the district now includes part of Sherburne and Anoka, or perhaps Washington.

Not only does Moorhead and Duluth not want to be placed in the same district; it is unnecessary.  Keeping the basic configuration of the three rural districts is eminently doable.  Shouldn't the status quo be maintained to the extent possible - especially if a court is involved?

I'm with you up to the last step. Here's why.

I think that both a community of interest argument and core of existing district argument make a case for keeping Stearns, Benton, Sherburne and Wright together. That represents the historical greater St. Cloud area, and will have a population of just over half of a CD. The exurbs are slowly growing up the Mississippi towards St. Cloud, and this four-county area encapsulates that. Trimming Sherburne and Wright from the Metro area is consistent with your observation.

Now if I follow your suggestion that this gets added to the Red River valley, I'll have to jettison all the other counties not in the valley in current CD 7 to bring the population down to a proper size. I now have a district that runs along I 94 from the outer Metro area to Moorhead then north to Canada. I don't think it makes a lot of sense, and Moorhead probably won't like this any better than linking to Duluth. But, let's see what this does to the rest of the map.

As you noted the Duluth district now pushes into northern Anoka and/or Washington, and becomes even more a mixed suburban/rural district than it is now. CD 3 swings south into Carver and Scott so that's OK. However, the southern part of current CD 7 clearly goes into CD 1, but CD 1 ends up with 100 K too many people. The result is that CD 2 comes down the Mississippi and adds Rochester as well. When all is said and done it's the old four corners plan with three mixed suburban-rural districts. I don't think the court would end up there.

I agree that the court plan would be 4-3 with a battle between 2-2-3 and 1-3-3. My examples are designed to highlight the likely form of the rural 3 districts.

St. Cloud is in the borderland between the growing Metro and the rest of the state and is the largest such city. Even the Census now puts it in the combined statistical area with the Twin Cities. As the border area with a large central city it makes the most sense to have it anchor the area that has to come off the Metro area to make the three non-Metro districts. Once that decision is made, there is no need to peel off any other exurban counties for those three districts. The result is a map with essentially three east-west bands across the state for the rural districts.

[muon2]

For the St. Paul district, Muon2, why did you expand it into Anoka to the north, rather than into Anoka to the west, where Anoka dips down towards Minneapolis?  Isn't that prong in MN-5 at the moment? The Court is, all things being equal, going to try to minimize changing the lines - lines which it, itself, drew previously?

For CD-5 I found that adding Bloomington and Edina in the south plus Brooklyn center to the north while subtracting the Anoka section was a close match in population. I will admit that I didn't understand the court's unwillingness to split Hennepin between three districts but it was OK for Anoka (n.b. I once lived in that southern section of Anoka, so perhaps some bias shows. ) Without any other criteria I preferred the more compact arrangement that I show.

That same stretch of Anoka is not really in the same community of interest as Ramsey, but the areas like Blaine and Lino Lakes are, so I used those for CD-4. It's also likely that CD-4 would instead keep the northern part of Dakota and CD-2 would include the southern part of Washington. I splits counties more that way, but there is a strong connection between the suburbs immediately south of St Paul and the city itself. It's that way in the current plan, too.

[muon2]

Is it really that big of a deal?  I was under the impression that the Twin cities functioned like the DFW Metroplex in that they're just two urban areas of a larger metro.  Is there some kind of blood feud between the two cities?

There's an interesting dynamic in the Twin Cities. In many ways the metro area has more strong regional organizations than other similar metro regions. At deeper level there is a longstanding competition between the Cities. One newspaper used to run a regular feature noting the times a business or group took one city's label while being located in the other - they even kept score. Most suburbs take up an identity associating with one city or the other, largely based on transportation patterns. It is a bit like the Cubs - Sox rivalry in Chicagoland, where everyone seems to take a side.

[muon2]

For MN, I've used the 2009 census estimates at the level of minor civil divisions to get the metro area pop for 2010. This is much more accurate than the direct estimates from the App, which I used only to draw the maps. Using that data, I've tried to minimize changes to existing districts while respecting counties and municipalities to the extent possible.

[muon2]

Man, the intra county shifts in Hennepin County were larger than I expected, Muon2. That is a big shift there, with MN-05 now not only taking in Brooklyn Center (which I expected the bulk of which would be absorbed), but also a slug of Brooklyn Park, making MN-03 quite comfortably Pubbie now. The map that will be drawn will look very close to the one that you drew; I would think the only issue being how MN-08, MN-07 and MN-01 move around really, to equalize population. There are two or three reasonable choices there. I picked one, and you picked another, I think.

To give you an idea of the difference consider that all my districts are within a couple hundred of the ideal based on a 2010 projection of the 2009 estimates by town/city. Here's what Dave's App has for the metro districts.

CD 2: -15.0 K
CD 3: -36.3 K
CD 4: +23.5 K
CD 5: +51.9 K
CD 6: -42.2 K

That deviation in CD 5 is about 8%! That's why it's best to have town estimates in any urban county split.

[muon2]

Man, the intra county shifts in Hennepin County were larger than I expected, Muon2. That is a big shift there, with MN-05 now not only taking in Brooklyn Center (which I expected the bulk of which would be absorbed), but also a slug of Brooklyn Park, making MN-03 quite comfortably Pubbie now. The map that will be drawn will look very close to the one that you drew; I would think the only issue being how MN-08, MN-07 and MN-01 move around really, to equalize population. There are two or three reasonable choices there. I picked one, and you picked another, I think.

To give you an idea of the difference consider that all my districts are within a couple hundred of the ideal based on a 2010 projection of the 2009 estimates by town/city. Here's what Dave's App has for the metro districts.

CD 2: -15.0 K
CD 3: -36.3 K
CD 4: +23.5 K
CD 5: +51.9 K
CD 6: -42.2 K

That deviation in CD 5 is about 8%! That's why it's best to have town estimates in any urban county split.

Interesting. By the way Muon2, do you think the court would really continue to live with the split in Bejumdi (sp)?  Would not they at least unify that county in MN-07? 

I also like the straight north south line myself (which means also MN-07 also taking Hubbard County), but that is just my sense of aesthetics I guess. And then that avoids a shift of those southwestern corner counties from MN-01 to MN-07. All thing being pretty equal means avoiding the musical chairs game, no? But then MN-08 needs some more territory (rural (and yes it is rural based on a population density metric) Benton County outside the St. Cloud elbow room zone!), and around and around we go. 

I reunited Bemidji in my map. I left the reservation in northern Beltrami county in CD 7 but put most all the pop of the southern part in CD 8. I thought that it was unlikely that a plan would be approved that split the reservation, so I couldn't justify moving all of Beltrami to CD 8. In exchange I moved Wadena to CD 7 to equalize population, moving Hubbard as well was too much.

Moving Hubbard or all of Beltrami to CD 7 would require a split of another county. Whether that would be Benton or another, I didn't see that split as being superior to a split of Beltrami. Since Beltrami was already split, I continued that in this map.

[muon2]

For MN, I've used the 2009 census estimates at the level of minor civil divisions to get the metro area pop for 2010. This is much more accurate than the direct estimates from the App, which I used only to draw the maps. Using that data, I've tried to minimize changes to existing districts while respecting counties and municipalities to the extent possible.

Well Bemidji is now in MN-08, which I doubt would bother too many. Some of the metro splits are weird though, I would say MN-04 is far more likely to expand to the Cottage Grove area via Inver Grove Heights than Woodbury, and I don't see why MN-03 would extend north into Andover instead of into Blaine instead.

Adding the rest of Coon Rapids, Anoka and Andover was the right amount of population. Blaine was not (it's too big). Personally, I would rather have CD-3 go into Wright and not into Anoka at all. It would avoid the river crossing and far western Hennepin is indistinguishable from Wright. But I wanted to build as closely to the existing districts as possible, so I continued with Anoka.

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Again this was a question of population. Adding LeSueur and Goodhue while losing the SW counties was just the right shift. Rice was less so. I could also argue that northern Rice is much more connected to the metro than either LeSueur or Goodhue, so if I'm trying to work with whole counties, that's the right split.

To your earlier question about CD-4, the answer is in CD-1. LeSueur and Goodhue take pop from CD-2 and keeping Cottage Grove in CD-2 is too much, so I used Mendota Heights in CD-2 instead. That leaves no room for CD-4 in Dakota except for W and S St Paul. CD-4 needed a lot of pop and Woodbury and Cottage Grove fit best, while losing Mahtomedi and the other WBL area towns in Washington.

I probably have more sense of this area than most posters (BRTD being one of the excluded), since I lived in Ramsey and Rice when I was younger, and some of my immediate family continued to live in Ramsey County until last year. I have other more distant relatives that I see less frequently elsewhere in the Twins. Though I moved out of the eastern TC Metro long ago I've visited at least once a year.

[muon2]

For MN, I've used the 2009 census estimates at the level of minor civil divisions to get the metro area pop for 2010. This is much more accurate than the direct estimates from the App, which I used only to draw the maps. Using that data, I've tried to minimize changes to existing districts while respecting counties and municipalities to the extent possible.

I'd go west with CD-3, probably into Carver taking Chanhasen and Chaska.  Including Coon Rapids may have been OK in 2000 when just needed to go outside Heneppin a bit, but now CD-3 has to become more of a west Metro, rather than just Hennepin.  You could also go into Wright, but a lot of the growth in Wright is towards the NW, so you would be somewhat cutting off MN-6 from St.Cloud.

And with MN-5 extending northward toward Brooklyn River, it is cutting off Anoka from Hennepin, and MN-3 is threatening to split Anoka.

If MN-3 went into Carver, then MN-2 could take all of Dakota and the southern part of Washington, which would force MN-4 further north in Washington, and make MN-6 more of Anoka and St Cloud district.

Carver would be about 15 K too small to replace the Anoka parts of CD3 on my map. It would be better to add all of Wright except for Monticello (city and twp). That also keeps the swap just between CD3 and CD6.

The most problematical part of Muon2's map to me is where MN-04 will expand. He is moving around a lot of territory in order to rather perfervidly avoid splits of anything. I tend to think the court will hew more to the existing lines between MN-02 and MN-04, and just work from there. So MN-04 expands more into Dakota where it was before, and out of Washington. Just my wild guess.

There's a very natural cultural division between the W and S St Paul parts of Dakota and everything else. St Paul crosses the river and those two old suburbs have long been associated with the capital city. The Eagan/Burnsville/Apple Valley area make up the core of CD 2 and I don't see CD 4 splitting into that area, which would be needed to push CD 2 more into Washington.

Let's go back to jimrtex's Carver move into CD 3 and see where it would lead. It would move Cottage Grove and Woodbury from Washington into CD 2, making 94/494 the dividing line between CD 2 and CD 4. Virtually all the rest of Washington would need to go into CD 4, so that only Forest Lake would remain in CD 6. You could argue that those are more compact districts, but they represent a far more substantial change in the CDs from the current plan, as the districts make a major shift counterclockwise around the Cities.

[muon2]

Back in January on this thread I speculated on a plan with minimal changes. This assumed that the plan would be drawn again by the court. Since the Gov vetoed the GOP plan, I've updated my earlier map to reflect the actual 2010 populations. Drawn at the VTD (precinct) level, this map has a range of 99 and a maximum deviation of 56.

[muon2]

Hard to argue with those maps Mike. In short, they are as boring as hell! 

I doubt it will happen. In the last map the Courts argued about the relevent merits of having an outstate district span either all of Southern Minnesota, all of Western Minnesota, or all of Northern Minnesota. The court claimed the facts pointed to the Southern span being the preferable partition.

To swap the South Western corner of Minnesota would reverse that decision.

Population trends in MN-07 vis a vis the balance of the state, and where the county lines are, makes that a tougher sell now, I would think. The 1st to get to the SW corner of the state would have to be a thin as a pencil.

Here's the version if the court insists on keeping the I-90 corridor intact. The range is 74 and the deviation is 38 using 2010 VTDs from DRA.

It pushes CD 7 right up to the outskirts of St Cloud. CD 3 would have to come into Carver to reduce the pop in CD 2. At that point it makes more sense to me to add some of Wright as well to bring CD 3 up to population. That leaves Coon Rapids going to CD 6 with the rest of its neighboring 'burbs.

[muon2]

So removing part of Carver and replacing it with the industrial areas south of St. Paul? While that's not impossible, I don't think Kline would be too fond of it.

What do the courts care about incumbents?

They don't, but the northern tip of Dakota including West St Paul and South St Paul are very much part of the St Paul community of interest. The rest of Dakota is primarily newer suburbs and would be viewed as a different COI.

[muon2]

MOTHER OF ALL BUMPS!

The court will hand down the map in late february, of course.

Meanwhile, here's the parties' proposals to it, made in late november.

http://politicsinminnesota.com/files/2011/11/GOP-Congress.jpg

http://politicsinminnesota.com/files/2011/11/DFL-Congress.jpg

http://politicsinminnesota.com/files/2011/11/gop-metro.jpg

http://politicsinminnesota.com/files/2011/11/dfl-metro.jpg

Both of these include a double whammy that any unbiased court should laugh out of itself, obviously. In the GOP map, obvious attempt to bolster accidental congressman is obvious. And they are seriously suggesting splitting Saint Cloud (the city, not just the area) down the middle. Also, North Mankato from Mankato. That 7th is really something. In the metro, the third expands outward to boost its R hold.

In the Dem map, all of Saint Cloud (the city) is put in the 8th instead of exurbifying territory further east, otherwise it's sane minimal change outstate. Even that makes sense, or would if all of the St Cloud area could be transferred. The ugly bits are all around the 5th district. Moving way more of Washington into the St Paul district than is necessary in order to sink Bachmann (though she'd be replaced with another crazy in that 6th), putting the southern inner suburbs of St Paul into the 3rd in order to nick it, with outer Hennepin transferred to the 2nd as a result.

Some downstate impressions first,

From my view of the map the DFL splits the city of St Cloud, too. Only the inner precincts from the Stearns side are in the 8th (the city sits in parts of three counties). They also put Cravaack in the 6th, to open the 8th and put pressure on Bachmann. It looks very similar to the tactics used by the Dems in the IL map.

On the GOP side MN 1 seems to follow the county line, but it actually splits through North Mankato. If it didn't it would be 7815 persons short. In the north they went with the cross state MN-8, which I liked for a 7 CD plan, but doesn't work as well for 8 CDs because it requires the St Cloud split. However, by going that direction they swap Cravaack and Peterson but make both districts much more secure.

[muon2]

The Dems did a butt ugly tri-chop of Hennepin it appears. Surely that dog won't hunt would it with a court? I don't see the Mankato chop myself.

Both parties would have done themselves more good with something more realistic. A court simply is not going to do a great northern CD on its own recognizance, unless it is a Pub controlled court, with a partisan bias. The Dem map appears to be a joke.

That seems to be a big problem with the national parties. They would rather go for a max plan rather than one that can win. In states where they have the legislative majority that works, especially if the other side won't attack with an alternative that can win in court. It also works if the court decides that it doesn't want to draw its own as was the case in 1991 in IL where the GOP plan was adopted after the legislature failed to act.

But, if the court feels like it want alternatives, the party plans don't look good. In MN there were plans submitted through the public mapping process, and the court could certainly take one of those. This was the entry judged to be the best though the population would need to be adjusted to make it exact.

[muon2]

They also put Cravaack in the 6th, to open the 8th and put pressure on Bachmann. It looks very similar to the tactics used by the Dems in the IL map.

Lol, completely overlooked that. Where does Cravaack live, exactly?

On the GOP side MN 1 seems to follow the county line, but it actually splits through North Mankato. If it didn't it would be 7815 persons short.

Well the county line splits the urban core anyways. Though not the official city of Mankato.
[/quote]

Cravaack lives in Chisago county (at least that's where he was from in 2010 during the election).

[muon2]

Inspired by the renewed interest in this thread and Lewis' fine map in WV, I decided to revisit my MN work of a year ago, but now use actual data.

Here are my criteria:

No counties outside the Twin City area were divided, and no split county is split between more than two districts.

One district is entirely within Hennepin.

Split counties (Anoka, Dakota, Hennepin and Washington) do not split any municipalities or townships.

The deviations by district are:
CD 1: -314
CD 2: +513
CD 3: +264
CD 4: -171
CD 5: +572
CD 6: -132
CD 7: -510
CD 8: -225

Here are maps for the whole state and the TC Metro.

[muon2]

That's a very nice map, muon.  To the extent possible, I'd switch out the inner Hennepin suburbs for the Anoka suburbs to make MN-05 the Hennepin-only district, not MN-03, but I like it   Giving Woodbury and Cottage Grove to MN-04 is a bit unfortunate, but adding the northern suburbs of St. Paul gives the district an "intermediate" region.

Looks like trading out the Anoka bits in MN-05 for precinct W3 Brooklyn Park, New Hope, Crystal, Robbinsdale, Brooklyn Center, Golden Valley, St. Louis Park, Richfield, the airport, and Bloomington does the trick.  If you give up the "one district only in Hennepin" policy, you could also give Columbia Heights, Fridley, and Spring Lake Park back to MN-05 in exchange for Hopkins, New Hope, Crystal, and bits of St. Louis Park.

How do your proposed districts stand up to your partisan bias metrics?

Here's the PVI's for my districts:
CD 1: R+1
CD 2: R+3
CD 3: D+1
CD 4: D+12
CD 5: D+19
CD 6: R+8
CD 7: R+6
CD 8: D+3

That's 2 Strong D, 1 Lean D, 2 Even, 1 Lean R and 2 Strong R. Not that one can tell in MN since the GOP holds two D+ seats and the Dems hold two R+ seats. In any case the PBI is -2.2% and the PBF is 0.03, much less than 8. With 2 even and 2 lean districts the SSF is 9, which is right on target for 8 districts.

[muon2]

Myself, I would tolerate some cuts if that means a better tying together of communities of interest. Thus MN-05 going farther north into Anoka, seems undesirable to me, even if it avoid a municipal cut. Life is a balancing test. No one factor should reign supreme.

That's because you are a sane mapper.

My thesis is that even an independent commission needs some constraints to check any internal biases. Minimizing county splits is one such constraint, and spliting larger counties before smaller ones so that split pieces represent a small fraction of the whole county is part of that rubric. I'm willing to bend, but there has to be a compelling reason not to obey it. Relying too heavily on the subjective parts of communities of interest is where trouble begins.

For example, my first iteration was to keep Washington intact in CD 4 and use parts of Anoka and Ramsey to complete CD 5. Ramsey was a larger county, so my preference was to split it before Washington. Since I still wanted intact munis, that led to a finger that shot up through Champlin to Anoka city and a nasty line across northern Ramsey to White Bear Lake. I decided that going to the next largest county for the split was compelling as it made a much cleaner and compact CD-5 at the expense of a slightly less compact CD-6.

[muon2]

MOTHER OF ALL BUMPS!

The court will hand down the map in late february, of course.

Meanwhile, here's the parties' proposals to it, made in late november.

http://politicsinminnesota.com/files/2011/11/GOP-Congress.jpg

http://politicsinminnesota.com/files/2011/11/DFL-Congress.jpg

http://politicsinminnesota.com/files/2011/11/gop-metro.jpg

http://politicsinminnesota.com/files/2011/11/dfl-metro.jpg

Both of these include a double whammy that any unbiased court should laugh out of itself, obviously. In the GOP map, obvious attempt to bolster accidental congressman is obvious. And they are seriously suggesting splitting Saint Cloud (the city, not just the area) down the middle. Also, North Mankato from Mankato. That 7th is really something. In the metro, the third expands outward to boost its R hold.

In the Dem map, all of Saint Cloud (the city) is put in the 8th instead of exurbifying territory further east, otherwise it's sane minimal change outstate. Even that makes sense, or would if all of the St Cloud area could be transferred. The ugly bits are all around the 5th district. Moving way more of Washington into the St Paul district than is necessary in order to sink Bachmann (though she'd be replaced with another crazy in that 6th), putting the southern inner suburbs of St Paul into the 3rd in order to nick it, with outer Hennepin transferred to the 2nd as a result.

I think I'd take the GOP metro map and merge it with the DFL outstate map.

Outstate this keeps the current general configuration.  An Iowa-border district looks nice, but the population is concentrated in the Rochester and other areas in the southeast.  A Dakota-border districts seems to be elongated, but it gives you a a pure agricultural district, and ties to Dakota cities (Fargo, Grand Forks, Sioux Falls).   The fact that interstate is in the Dakotas is not reason to reject it.  And it keeps the mining/recreation/port areas separate in the northeast.

In the metro area, this gives you a clear northern and southern district and then the horizontal stack of three districts, including the Minneapolis and St. Paul seats.

It also would probably be a better transition to the 7-seat plan in 2010, which will have to be a 4:3 plan with St. Cloud definitely outstate.

I think what you suggest is basically what I posted above. Do you see any reason why a judge wouldn't like it?

[muon2]

Ironically muon's map above is basically a mild DFL gerrymander, it drives MN-05 into some swing middle suburban areas and thus allows MN-03 to take in some heavily DFL inner suburbs and greatly weaken Paulsen, it shores up Walz a bit more by dumping the heavily GOP rural areas in the western part of the district even if it replaces them with lean GOP counties, and MN-02 is also made more DFL by expanding into the inner suburbs of St. Paul. Kind of similar to what the DFL probably would've proposed if a court had to pick either their map or the GOP one like in Colorado.

I think it's only a mild DFL gerrymander in the sense that they have strong candidates in Peterson and Walz that can hold districts that should trend GOP. Peterson in particular holds a district that should reliably be GOP.

I think if the DFL were really proposing something based on my map for the court, they would instead put all of Washington in MN-04 and put the northern part of Ramsey in MN-06. It's more compact with the same number of splits, though it is a more substantial change to the existing districts.

If it were the GOP basing their submission on my map, they wold do away with my requirement that one district be wholly in Hennepin, and just keep to a maximum of one split per county. Then  it turns out that Coon Rapids, Blaine, Lexington, and Spring Lake Park are almost the same population as Wright county, so they could be swapped in MN-06. Then MN-03 would transfer Brooklyn Park, New Hope, Golden Valley and St Louis Park which have the same population from as the aforementioned Anoka communities from MN-03 to MN-05. That bumps up MN-03 to about an R+2 from my D+1.

One thing that I really objected to in both submitted party maps was the split of St Cloud. There's no reason it shouldn't get the same deference to remain intact that the other major cities do. So keeping it together means keeping the Stearns/Benton/Sherburne tri-county region together. If you move all of that into MN-7, and respect the cores of the MN-4 and 5, then either MN 06 heads north and forces a cross state MN-8 or it wraps around the eastern edge with all of Washington, and MN-02 goes to Rochester.

[muon2]

More info is here; maps will be here.

Surely, the maps have been finalized. How could nothing have leaked?

That wouldn't be Minnesota Nice.

[muon2]

Here are the stats.  Everything gets more Pub except MN-02.

It really illustrates the relative growth of the GOP suburbs compared to the rest of the state.

[muon2]

Here is a map for 7 CD's in Minnesota using 2010 population figures this time, rather than projected 2020 figures, just to make it easy. If you really focus on erosity, trying to limit chops, but only doing so if it does not materially degrade erosity, or chop metro areas, my suspicion is that typically there will be but one or two maps really in the hunt in many states. Certainly, Minnesota seems to be one of them.
This map has 3 county chops (Anoka, Wright, and Hennepin), and no locality chops. The trick is to come up with the set of rules, that forces these kind of maps to be spit out of the black box.

We seem to be generally in agreement on the map here. On my first look I got something quite similar. It would alter three of the districts to remove one chop. I'm not wild about two separate incursions into Anoka, but it seems to be better than the alternatives.



(Chops 2; Range 5901, 0.78%)

On further inspection I wanted to see if I could reduce erosity and got the following map. I think it's less erose by any measure, but it adds a larger chop into the TC metro. Technically CD 1 already chopped into it in Sibley county, which many would not consider metro at all. However, an algorithm can't tell you where the Census doesn't mesh with ground observers.



(Chops 2; Range 6866, 0.91%)

[muon2]

Torie, muon, can I have PVI's for the 7 district maps please?  (If you did and I didn't spot it, I apologize)

I've put in the 2012 results so I can use the updated PVIs. The changed values in my second map are in parentheses. Torie's CDs 1, 2, 4 and 5 are the same as my first map, and his CD 7 should be about a point stronger D making his CD 6 more R.

CD 1: R+2.6 (R+6.1)
CD 2: R+3.6 (R+0.3)
CD 3: R+2.8
CD 4: D+9.4
CD 5: D+18.1
CD 6: R+8.4
CD 7: D+1.3