How Democrats Fooled California’s Redistricting Commission

[Sbane]

Yeah, not bad. If the Owens valley goes in the 41st then Redlands has to go in the 43rd, otherwise we end up with my map. Keeping Redlands and Yucaipa together is probably a good idea, and the Owens valley can be put in another district. . I Disagree about the Kern cut as well. The 25th to me is an exurban LA district. There are a lot of commuters who commute into either the Santa Clarita valley or into LA from Palmdale and Lancaster. Yes, those areas of Kern are high desert like those two cities but other than that they have very little in common.

That's why I put SE Kern with Barstow and Death Valley. It keeps the high desert together better IMO.

Yes, that would be better. It might mess up the Latino influence district I drew though, which was about 45%VAP.

[Torie]

Yeah, not bad. If the Owens valley goes in the 41st then Redlands has to go in the 43rd, otherwise we end up with my map. Keeping Redlands and Yucaipa together is probably a good idea, and the Owens valley can be put in another district. . I Disagree about the Kern cut as well. The 25th to me is an exurban LA district. There are a lot of commuters who commute into either the Santa Clarita valley or into LA from Palmdale and Lancaster. Yes, those areas of Kern are high desert like those two cities but other than that they have very little in common.

That's why I put SE Kern with Barstow and Death Valley. It keeps the high desert together better IMO.

Mike, would you direct me to your "high desert" map?  I think I disagree with your perspective here, but before I comment beyond my tentative thought below, I want to see the impact on adjacent CD's.  The fundamental problem however is connecting a lot of desert to a central valley based CD, and it won't be all of the "high desert" anyway. Victorville is more or less "high desert," and separating it from the balance of the otherwise very lightly populated "high desert," is the consequence.

[muon2]

Yeah, not bad. If the Owens valley goes in the 41st then Redlands has to go in the 43rd, otherwise we end up with my map. Keeping Redlands and Yucaipa together is probably a good idea, and the Owens valley can be put in another district. . I Disagree about the Kern cut as well. The 25th to me is an exurban LA district. There are a lot of commuters who commute into either the Santa Clarita valley or into LA from Palmdale and Lancaster. Yes, those areas of Kern are high desert like those two cities but other than that they have very little in common.

That's why I put SE Kern with Barstow and Death Valley. It keeps the high desert together better IMO.

Mike, would you direct me to your "high desert" map?  I think I disagree with your perspective here, but before I comment beyond my tentative thought below, I want to see the impact on adjacent CD's.  The fundamental problem however is connecting a lot of desert to a central valley based CD, and it won't be all of the "high desert" anyway. Victorville is more or less "high desert," and separating it from the balance of the otherwise very lightly populated "high desert," is the consequence.

I'm afraid it is only a conceptual map since I can't load actual 2010 data. The best I have is from 2008, and I used that to sketch the San Bernardino districts. The Ontario district is about 65% HVAP. Rancho Cucamonga is linked to San Bernardino along the north side of I-15, and in principle I would extend up into the foothills more, but that wasn't an option with my data. To the main idea, I linked Victorville and Barstow to SE Kern to put the whole US 395 corridor in one district. I'd love to know what the actual populations are in these districts.

[Torie]

Muon2, where did the north LA County CD pick up its extra 30,000 residents?  Did it cut into the City of LA?  That Kern bit can go in either CD, but the northern LA County CD going into Ventura County towards Fillmore or into the San Fernando Valley is undesirable, as is biting a piece off the Victorville-Hesperia-Adalante metro area, which is a long way from the population centers of the northern LA County CD.

[minionofmidas]

Presumably from where you have an SB district pick up a piece of LA County, no?

[Negusa Nagast 🚀]

Muon2, where did the north LA County CD pick up its extra 30,000 residents?  Did it cut into the City of LA?  That Kern bit can go in either CD, but the northern LA County CD going into Ventura County towards Fillmore or into the San Fernando Valley is undesirable, as is biting a piece off the Victorville-Hesperia-Adalante metro area, which is a long way from the population centers of the northern LA County CD.

Santa Clarita grew by 24,000 residents in the past 10 years. I imagine that Lancaster and Palmdale make up for the rest of that 6k.

It will be interesting to see if Santa Clarita can be moved into a more competitive district. Maybe then we can finally buck Mr. "Buck" McKeon out of office.

[Torie]

Presumably from where you have an SB district pick up a piece of LA County, no?

No, that cut is into Westlake Village along Hwy 101, a long way from the north LA County CD. As I said, I don't like any of the cuts for the north LA County CD, other than into Kern County. Those cuts represent far less of a community of interest, and cutting into the city of LA to pick up a few people would just be awful.

[minionofmidas]

Presumably from where you have an SB district pick up a piece of LA County, no?

No, that cut is into Westlake Village along Hwy 101, a long way from the north LA County CD. As I said, I don't like any of the cuts for the north LA County CD, other than into Kern County. Those cuts represent far less of a community of interest, and cutting into the city of LA to pick up a few people would just be awful.

Right, there's a CD and the San Gabriel wilderness in between. Silly me. Still true "net", of course, but there'd have to be some shift through the 28th given where the road link is. How many people does your 29th have within the city of LA - since it seems it has a portion of the Valley?

[muon2]

Presumably from where you have an SB district pick up a piece of LA County, no?

No, that cut is into Westlake Village along Hwy 101, a long way from the north LA County CD. As I said, I don't like any of the cuts for the north LA County CD, other than into Kern County. Those cuts represent far less of a community of interest, and cutting into the city of LA to pick up a few people would just be awful.

I understand your reticence to go into the far northern tip of LA city to join with Santa Clarita, etc., but I think that sbane's version is preferable.

I think we all agree that Inyo and Mono should go with eastern SBD, but without using SE Kern, then Inyo only connects by a minor road through Trona or across Death Valley. From that perspective, Inyo and Mono could just as well connect across the Sierras to Fresno. US-395 is hanging right across the line in Kern and the CoI there matches as well.

I don't think that the crossing into LA from the north to balance population is so bad. To me, the connection from Santa Clarita to NW LA along I-5 seems not unlike the OC to Corona connection which is required to balance population there.

Given the choice of attaching two small counties to a large district with minimal road connections or chopping a small part of a large city just over the mountains but following along a freeway, I would strongly prefer with the latter.

[Torie]

Changed your mind eh Mike?   You said you liked my cut, and now you don't.  Anyway, I don't think HWY 395, the connector road into the Owens Valley temporarily drifting off slightly into another CD is the worst thing in the world (who cares?), but if you can stand a tri-chop of Kern, that problem can be "solved."  That has some appeal, since Ridgecrest is so divorced from Bakersfield actually.  Cutting into the agricultural river valley that Fillmore is in, with which the northern LA County CD has nothing in common, does not. That is far less desirable than Hwy 395 drifting a few miles temporarily out of CA-41, in my not very humble opinion.    Heck, just move Hwy 395 to the east of Ridgecrest rather than west, and that would do the trick too. The land there is all flat. It would be a piece of cake - just costing a few million bucks is all.

32,000 residents are involved with Ridgecrest, so that means most of Highland goes from CA-41 to CA-43. Does that make everyone happy? There will be a rather huge 32,000 resident counter-clockwise turn of the clock actually, ending up with a deeper cut into Westlake, and squeezing San Luis Obispo city. It is already under pressure when I got rid of the Riverside County chop involving 7,000 residents (which has not been posted yet) by turning the clock by that much. So maybe it won't work well given the SLO issue. If so, then well I am going to settle for the Hwy 395 drift-out myself. I consider that issue minor actually.  Nobody would care or know.

CA-29 has 52,000 residents in the city of LA Lewis, an Anglo area in a valley on the other side of a mini mountain range from the San Fernando Valley connecting down to LaCanada-Flintridge and Pasadena with no road to CA-25, other than through a bunch of Hispanics. Sorry about that.

[Torie]

My CA magnum opus map slowly continues to take shape. Silicon Valley and the Peninsula have now been drawn. So much of CA is a story of mountain ranges and Freeways (precinct lines tend to love following freeways, so using them makes for nice pretty lines). As always, comments are welcome.





By the way, I seriously played with the idea of CA-41 cutting into Kern, attempting to arrange matters, so that the Tulare CD was knocked out of Kern, to avoid a quad chop of Kern. It just doesn't work. The clock cannot be turned much counterclockwise, without generating a host of ancillary problems, including a nasty chop of Santa Cruz, or SLO, or messing up the Hispanic Fresno based CD, or all three. It just doesn't work. The clock in this map has stopped at about just the right place. CA just has too many mountain and ethnic barriers to have much flexibility in the end as to what to do.

And I got rid of the Riverside County chop!  



This was accomplished by using the Riverside-SB line as the hard line, rather than Seal Beach for the border of CA-37 and CA-40 and CA-46 (county lines in general should take precedence over municipal ones). So CA-37 takes gated geezer Rossmoor, and loses two Seal Beach precincts, and then you twist the clock (e.g., CA-48 taking more of Corona). The twist goes in the following order: CA 41-43-26-38-29-31-34-39-37-40-48-44-45-42. It is that laborious, because there are so many hard boundaries (muni lines, county lines, ethnic lines, mountain ridge lines) that cannot be crossed. Fun stuff.

[Bacon King]

Looks pretty good, Torie, but what's up with that random extension of CD47 there?

[Хahar 🤔]

Since San Francisco is too large for one district, I think I would extend the 12th into the Sunset, like both the old and new maps do. That part of the city is most like Daly City.

[Torie]

Looks pretty good, Torie, but what's up with that random extension of CD47 there?

80% Hispanic precincts, and too "good" not to go and grab. I think they are next to a rail line running from beautiful downtown Orange to Riverside - of course. The Orange RR station where you switched commuter trains to and from Riverside from the main SD to LA line, used to have this great micro brewery pub in it, which a friend of a friend owned. It was too Yuppie for the zip code and died. Sad.

[Torie]

Since San Francisco is too large for one district, I think I would extend the 12th into the Sunset, like both the old and new maps do. That part of the city is most like Daly City.

The area next to the ocean and the San Mateo County line is pretty upscale as I recall (not like Daley City at all, and Sunset Beach is up north), and my cut into SF is an Asian node, and I thought I would join that with the Asians just to the south. Plus it is nicely delimited by freeways, which tend to define precincts, and often neighborhoods, and tend to in this case. However, I will take a peek at the Commission's map, to see what they did, something that in general I try to avoid doing. None of this makes the slightest difference in partisan terms of course, but I am trying to do the very best job that I can, viewing myself as a Commissioner.

[minionofmidas]

Watsonville would be a better fit for that Salinas district, but I guess it's too many people and would end up split? Also not happy about the 14th/15th arrangement, but something's got to give  - the 12th southern and 16th western perimeter look perfect to me, so it's either this or a trichop of San Jose. I'd maybe have to see what that would look like. (California is a bitch to load, and I don't know enough about LA to dare argue with you two there, so I'm not bothering loading it at all.)

[Torie]

Watsonville would be a better fit for that Salinas district, but I guess it's too many people and would end up split? Also not happy about the 14th/15th arrangement, but something's got to give  - the 12th southern and 16th western perimeter look perfect to me, so it's either this or a trichop of San Jose. I'd maybe have to see what that would look like. (California is a bitch to load, and I don't know enough about LA to dare argue with you two there, so I'm not bothering loading it at all.)

Here is what the cut into Santa Cruz County would look like. Yes, CA-17 taking just Watsonville and nothing more would be ideal, but the cut goes into the Santa Cruz metro area, and that sucks really. So given that CA-17 already had Hollister, with Gilroy and Morgan Hill just up the road from it and being rather isolated from the Silicon Valley, and everything else for that matter, and agriculturally oriented, to me that was the better cut. Gilroy and Morgan Hill should not be in CA-14 in any event, which means one of the San Jose CD's would have to stretch down there, also not very attractive. So it was my judgement, that this was the best compromise. I went back and forth on this, and even tried to twist the clock to try to get to the Watsonville only "solution," but then you chop the city of SLO in exchange, and the twist creates other problems. So there was no escape really.

By the way, I am impressed with just how integrated the Bay area is. It is not like LA County, which is far more ethnically segregated. I don't think the VRA will rear its ugly head in the Bay area, which kind of surprises me.

[Sbane]

My CA magnum opus map slowly continues to take shape. Silicon Valley and the Peninsula have now been drawn. So much of CA is a story of mountain ranges and Freeways (precinct lines tend to love following freeways, so using them makes for nice pretty lines). As always, comments are welcome.





By the way, I seriously played with the idea of CA-41 cutting into Kern, attempting to arrange matters, so that the Tulare CD was knocked out of Kern, to avoid a quad chop of Kern. It just doesn't work. The clock cannot be turned much counterclockwise, without generating a host of ancillary problems, including a nasty chop of Santa Cruz, or SLO, or messing up the Hispanic Fresno based CD, or all three. It just doesn't work. The clock in this map has stopped at about just the right place. CA just has too many mountain and ethnic barriers to have much flexibility in the end as to what to do.

And I got rid of the Riverside County chop! 



This was accomplished by using the Riverside-SB line as the hard line, rather than Seal Beach for the border of CA-37 and CA-40 and CA-46 (county lines in general should take precedence over municipal ones). So CA-37 takes gated geezer Rossmoor, and loses two Seal Beach precincts, and then you twist the clock (e.g., CA-48 taking more of Corona). The twist goes in the following order: CA 41-43-26-38-29-31-34-39-37-40-48-44-45-42. It is that laborious, because there are so many hard boundaries (muni lines, county lines, ethnic lines, mountain ridge lines) that cannot be crossed. Fun stuff.

Not a bad job with the south bay. I would try and not split Sunnyvale though. Keep Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino and the heavily Asian adjoining areas of San Jose together. In exchange you can grab more precincts along CA-85. Or pick up Campbell if you don't want to chop San Jose again. Though grabbing the Almaden Valley and putting it in the same district as Los Gatos and Saratoga would make a lot of sense.

I drew a more Asian district in the area, but it's not really necessary. The Vietnamese and Filipino heavy areas of eastern and southern San Jose don't go that well with the more upscale Asian areas of the western valley anyways.

I like your OC districts. What is the Asian VAP of the 40th?

As to what areas the 12th should take in SF, I think your chop may make more sense than what is there currently (and I am not sure how the commission drew it). I think those areas of SF might be more Filipino than Chinese, which is similar to Daly City. Though I am not familiar enough with the area to know for sure.

[Torie]

Hey, that is perfect sbane - just perfect. Yes, the map looks a bit uglier, but the population numbers work almost perfectly - no muni cuts at all, other than a precinct or two rounding error. It doesn't increase the Asian percentage much in CA-15 (maybe 50 basis points), but keeping ethnic nodes together all things otherwise being equal, is typically desirable. Here you get not only that (not that the Asian areas here are all that Asian, but they are a substantial minority), but it largely loses a municipal cut to boot.

So your suggestion is hereby adopted.  



Oh, and here are the stats for CA-40:

[minionofmidas]

You seem to have a trapped precinct in East San Jose.

[Torie]

You seem to have a trapped precinct in East San Jose.

Man, you have good eyes, Lewis.  It's gone now.

[jimrtex]

I see the Commission really screwed up the CD numbering system too. So many districts get new numbers - needlessly. Sigh.

The constitution requires that districts be numbered north to south.  The commission interpreted this to mean that districts are numbered based on the latitude of their northernmost point¹.  But if you are searching a map you tend to concentrate on the center of the district. 

There is one district (CD-8) that extends northward through the Owen Valley, but with most of the population in San Bernardino County, including 29 Palms is "north" of San Francisco and Oakland, and almost as far north as Sacramento.

Part of San Francisco County is in the bay almost to the San Rafael-Richmond bridge, so that San Francisco is "north" of Berkeley.

I have been told that someone pointed out that California has a northernmost point and indeed it is all District 1.

¹ Senate districts are numbered slightly differently, since odd-numbered and even-numbered districts elect a senator in alternate elections.  If a voter is moved from an odd-numbered district to an even-numbered district, they will help elect a senator in 2010 and 2012; but if they were moved from an odd-numbered to an even-numbered district, they would elect a senator in 2008 and 2014.  If the senator elected in 2008 was term-limited it would be illegal for such a voter to even have a senator who they had once voted for.

The commission placed the districts into odd and even groups based on the percentage of the population that overlapped current odd- and even-numbered districts, so as to "minimize" the number of disenfranchised and extrafranchised persons, and then applied the north to south rule.

Still, about 10% of the population will vote for 12 years of senatorial representation in a redistricting decade; and 10% will vote for 8 years of senatorial representation.  This 40% variation is much larger than the 0.8% deviation that bothered the judges in West Virginia, and because of the methodology used in drawing the districts the burden will fall on communities of interest that the commission identified.

[Хahar 🤔]

Morgan Hill certainly can't be in a Santa Cruz district; there's no usable road through the mountains there, and to get from Morgan Hill or Gilroy to Santa Cruz you need to go through either Watsonville or San Jose.

Cupertino has more in common with Los Altos or Saratoga than it does with San Jose, whereas Campbell would fit better with the San Jose district than with the richer areas to its south. Demographically, Cupertino now has a large Asian majority, but income is probably a better indicator of communities of interest in the South Bay than race would be. It would be nice to simply switch Campbell with Cupertino (and the districts would look cleaner, too), but unfortunately Cupertino is significantly larger.

[muon2]

Morgan Hill certainly can't be in a Santa Cruz district; there's no usable road through the mountains there, and to get from Morgan Hill or Gilroy to Santa Cruz you need to go through either Watsonville or San Jose.

Cupertino has more in common with Los Altos or Saratoga than it does with San Jose, whereas Campbell would fit better with the San Jose district than with the richer areas to its south. Demographically, Cupertino now has a large Asian majority, but income is probably a better indicator of communities of interest in the South Bay than race would be. It would be nice to simply switch Campbell with Cupertino (and the districts would look cleaner, too), but unfortunately Cupertino is significantly larger.

I'm not sure what Torie's HVAP numbers are for his CD 17, but I was expecting Watsonville to be with the Gilroy/Salinas/Hollister district. Then the question looms as to whether the district needs to extend into SJ and lose Monterrey to break 50% HCVAP.

[Torie]

Morgan Hill certainly can't be in a Santa Cruz district; there's no usable road through the mountains there, and to get from Morgan Hill or Gilroy to Santa Cruz you need to go through either Watsonville or San Jose.

Cupertino has more in common with Los Altos or Saratoga than it does with San Jose, whereas Campbell would fit better with the San Jose district than with the richer areas to its south. Demographically, Cupertino now has a large Asian majority, but income is probably a better indicator of communities of interest in the South Bay than race would be. It would be nice to simply switch Campbell with Cupertino (and the districts would look cleaner, too), but unfortunately Cupertino is significantly larger.

I'm not sure what Torie's HVAP numbers are for his CD 17, but I was expecting Watsonville to be with the Gilroy/Salinas/Hollister district. Then the question looms as to whether the district needs to extend into SJ and lose Monterrey to break 50% HCVAP.

You really are the King of racial gerrymanders, aren't you Mike?  

Anyhoo, one can't get to anywhere near 50% HCVAP for CA-17 (they are farm workers to a substantial degree), no matter how much you just trash the map to try to get there, ignoring every other factor.

I have 3 maps below, one my existing lines for CA-17, one that does an extra county chop, and ups the Hispanic percentage by about 3 points, and then finally, the cf  Hispanic max pack version excrescence going where no man has gone before. Which would you pick, Mike?