2015 county predictions

[Kevinstat]

The closest (in population) possible plan for Maine's two congressional districts consisting of (contiguous) whole Maine counties will go from this as of and according to the 2014 estimates



to this


.

The closest possible plan using (not necessarily functional or by land) contiguous whole Maine counties in 2010 was


,

While in 2000 it was


.  (There were only 123 more people in the green district than the blue one as of and according to the 2000 census.)

This wouldn't be very close in population, but just imagine the 2000 closest plan with Somerset County moved over:


.

[Kevinstat]

The closest (in population) possible plan for Maine's two congressional districts consisting of (contiguous) whole Maine counties will go from this as of and according to the 2014 estimates



to this

I was wrong.  The second map, which stayed in "second place", did overtake the first, which fell to fourth, but the closest possible plan for Maine's two congressional districts with contiguous as of and according to the 2015 estimates is



The estimates released today have the green district having 126 more people than the blue one (so each district is 63 people off).  The difference in the next closest plan (with at least technically contiguous counties) is 1,308 (each district 1,504 654 people off).

[Kevinstat]

The closest (in population) possible plan for Maine's two congressional districts consisting of (contiguous) whole Maine counties will go from this as of and according to the 2014 estimates



to this

I was wrong.  The second map, which stayed in "second place", did overtake the first, which fell to fourth, but the closest possible plan for Maine's two congressional districts with contiguous as of and according to the 2015 estimates is



The estimates released today have the green district having 126 more people than the blue one (so each district is 63 people off).  The difference in the next closest plan (with at least technically contiguous counties) is 1,308 (each district 1,504 654 people off).

What are the partisan leans/PVI of your districts?

I wasn't doing that with that in mind, and the easiest way on Dave's Redistricting App to generate multiple maps with shifting counties is to make each county its own district and just change the colors of the county-districts to blue and green, which wouldn't work for the election data on that app.  But I did create the last map the normal way.  I don't have the mental energy to check that out tonight but maybe over the weekend I will.

[Kevinstat]

- Just a side note, if Oregon "doesn't" gain another congressional district in 2020, it's 5 districts will need around 850k people each if the current growth rate stays somewhat constant (big if I know, but still).     Isn't that a bit high?   If you divide Oregon's current districts evenly they're already past the 800k range. 

That's what happens when smaller states fall just short.

Montana, with a resident population of 989,415 (and an apportionment population of 994,416) as of and according to the 2010 census, has only one congressional district.  It's been estimated as having over a million people since 2012, but I believe is generally expected to miss out on a second district in the 2020s reapportionment.

[Kevinstat]

How many plans are there within +- 0.5% (3000-ish)?

I couldn't tell whether you meant difference (as a percentage of the ideal) or deviation from the ideal (probably the latter), so I'll list both.

2015 estimates
Difference ≤ 0.5% (deviation from ideal ≤ 0.25%) of ideal district population - two plans:
1)

blue district 664,601 (-63 people or -0.01%)
green district 664,727 (+63 people or +0.01%)
difference 126 people (0.02%)

2)

blue district 664,010 (-654 people or -0.10%)
green district 665,318 (+654 people or +0.10%)
difference 1,308 people (0.20%)

Deviation from ideal ≤ 0.5% (difference ≤ 1.0%) of ideal district population - two more plans:
3)

blue district 666,941 (+2,277 people or +0.34%)
green district 662,387 (-2,277 people or -0.34%)
difference 4,554 people (0.69%)

4)

blue district 667,497 (+2,833 people or +0.43%)
green district 661,831 (-2,833 people or -0.43%)
difference 5,666 people (0.85%)

2010 census
Difference ≤ 0.5% (deviation from ideal ≤ 0.25%) of ideal district population:
No plans involving two strings of (at all) contiguous counties.

Deviation from ideal ≤ 0.5% (difference ≤ 1.0%) of ideal district population - just one plan:


blue district 662,077 (-2,103.5 people or -0.32%)
green district 666,284 (+2,103.5 people or +0.32%)
difference 4,207 people (0.63%)

Now imagine that you had a Citizen's Redistricting Jury, say one per 1000 persons, with a guarantee of one juror for every town, and from cities, geographically representative.

The jurors would gather in their respective county seats (or perhaps multiple locations in Aroostook). After the maps are presented, they would rank them, with the votes weighted by the population they represent. Determine the Condorcet winner, and it becomes the winning plan.

Interesting idea (as your ideas always are), although as the 2010 numbers show, there wouldn't always be more than one option (or potentially even one option) where the districts are close enough in population (unless you were to remove the contiguity requirement altogether).

[Kevinstat]

How many plans are there within +- 0.5% (3000-ish)?

I couldn't tell whether you meant difference (as a percentage of the ideal) or deviation from the ideal (probably the latter), so I'll list both.

2015 estimates
Difference ≤ 0.5% (deviation from ideal ≤ 0.25%) of ideal district population - two plans:
1)

blue district 664,601 (-63 people or -0.01%)
green district 664,727 (+63 people or +0.01%)
difference 126 people (0.02%)

2)

blue district 664,010 (-654 people or -0.10%)
green district 665,318 (+654 people or +0.10%)
difference 1,308 people (0.20%)

Deviation from ideal ≤ 0.5% (difference ≤ 1.0%) of ideal district population - two more plans:
3)

blue district 666,941 (+2,277 people or +0.34%)
green district 662,387 (-2,277 people or -0.34%)
difference 4,554 people (0.69%)

4)

blue district 667,497 (+2,833 people or +0.43%)
green district 661,831 (-2,833 people or -0.43%)
difference 5,666 people (0.85%)

2010 census
Difference ≤ 0.5% (deviation from ideal ≤ 0.25%) of ideal district population:
No plans involving two strings of (at all) contiguous counties.

Deviation from ideal ≤ 0.5% (difference ≤ 1.0%) of ideal district population - just one plan:


blue district 662,077 (-2,103.5 people or -0.32%)
green district 666,284 (+2,103.5 people or +0.32%)
difference 4,207 people (0.63%)

Now imagine that you had a Citizen's Redistricting Jury, say one per 1000 persons, with a guarantee of one juror for every town, and from cities, geographically representative.

The jurors would gather in their respective county seats (or perhaps multiple locations in Aroostook). After the maps are presented, they would rank them, with the votes weighted by the population they represent. Determine the Condorcet winner, and it becomes the winning plan.

Interesting idea (as your ideas always are), although as the 2010 numbers show, there wouldn't always be more than one option (or potentially even one option) where the districts are close enough in population (unless you were to remove the contiguity requirement altogether).

You might have to open up the rules and permit county splitting. Let's say that you had a limit of +/- 5% without splitting counties. If any of these 5% plans could be improved by switching one county, then it would be eliminated.

Then for each of the plans in the 0.5% to 5% range, alternatives that would split one county, without splitting towns could be proposed. This might involve a two-stage process: (1) jurors in each county on the less populous side of the district-boundary would choose a most preferred (least disliked) county split for their county, and then the state jury would choose a preferred refinement of the base county plan.

There could also be a connectivity constraint, where Aroostook could only connect to Washington and Penobscot, and perhaps Piscataquis to Penobscot. These would have eliminated plans 1 and 3 from 2015, and the 2010 plan.

Piscataquis County is connected to both Penobscot and Somerset Counties by multiple state routes.  The only counties that border each other that have aren't undisputedly connected are (1) Aroostook-Somerset (flagrant), (2) Aroostook-Piscataquis (would also be considered flagrant by most, although there is or was a decent logging path connecting the two counties and there was a Senate district consisting of Piscataquis County and western Aroostook County (with none of Penobscot) used in the 1968 and 1970 elections in the first post-OMOV State Senate plan, drawn by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, no less), and (3) Hancock-Knox (the most obvious albeit probably the least flagrant, and Knox County contains one town, Isle au Haut (that just held it's 2015 town meeting a year late), that is connected by ferry only to Stonington in Hancock County, and Isle au Haut was in a State Senate district otherwise entirely in Hancock County (or with one neighboring town from Penobscot) from the 1972 through 1992 (primary and general) elections and again from the 2004 through 2012 elections, although it's been in Maine's first congressional district since Maine went down to 2 CDs in 1962, and as far as I know has been in the same CD as the rest of Knox County since it was shifted from Hancock County sometime around 1910).

There are some instances where part of a county is pretty much cut off from the rest of that county (Route 16 in northern Oxford County, Wellington in Piscataquis County (the usually Atlas red town in the southeastern corner, settled by "Back to the landers" in the 1970s I think), and Sagadahoc County which basically is cut in two by Merrymeeting Bay (it's current Senate district includes Dresden in Lincoln County which connects the two halves, but I'm sure candidates aren't above travelling through Brunswick outside the district to get from Bath to Topsham or vice versa)), but every main portion of each county is connected to the main portion of every county it borders by state rounts with the three above exceptions (and that obviously the Bath half of Sagadahoc County doesn't even border, let alone have a direct connection to Androscoggin or Kennebec counties, but both the Bath and Topsham halves of the county are connected to both Cumberland and Lincoln counties).  Perhaps there should be a ban on using the Androscoggin-Sagadahoc-Lincoln route without Kennebec or Cumberland counties (York + Cumberland + Oxford + Franklin + Kennebec is +5.06% based on the 2015 estimates, up from +3.82% in 2010, but could perhaps dip back under the +5% figure).

Are you a native Mainer?

Yes.  I'm a lifelong Maine resident, and a lifelong resident of one of three municipalities (two of which border the third municipality) in Kennebec County apart from my time at the University of Maine at Farmington (I was registered to vote in Farmington, using my dorm room as my address, for about half a year after a major embezzlement scandal broke in Manchester and local politics got nasty, and then I helped vote in a bunch of conservatives as selectmen without realizing it*, and I voted in Farmington for the 2001 referenda election (with one local question IIRC) and attended the 2002 Democratic caucuses there, but was back in Manchester by the time of the June primary).  I moved to Augusta, where I lived until I was four, three years ago.

*One of the conservatives elected in 2001 was elected to the State House the following year after the-then incumbent State Rep. tried to hold incompatible offices, but he switched parties a year later and was reelected in 2004 as a Democrat (and I voted for him a second time, having held my nose and voted for the incumbent Democrat in 2002).  That guy retired in 2006 and tried to make a comeback in 2007 when his Republican successor died in a ski accident, but he lost the nod of the combined town committees in the district to the 2006 Democratic candidate.  That guy, elected in June, died of cancer that fall, and his widow was elected in November and reelected in 2008 before losing in 2010.  I was in one of my Independent phases at the time so I wasn't able to go to either "caucus" where candidates were nominated (Maine doesn't have primaries for special elections other than for Governor or either house of Congress, not even for county offices where any special elections are held midway through a four-year term on the general election ballot).

Is Piscataquis pronounced as in the song, or is changed to fit the meter?

Maine County Song(mp3)

That's how it's pronounced.  When I was in high school they didn't have the "The" and "are" at the beginning of the song, so the first line (or two lines, depending on how you look at it) was "Sixteen counties in are state, Cumberland and Franklin," which was noticeably drawn out to fit "Yankee Doodle", and I couldn't resist the temptation to improve the song's fidelity to the original tune by going

"Sixteen counties in our state, Cum-
berland and Franklin, Pis- [deliberate "ss" snake sound]
cataguis and Somerset,
Aroostook, Androscoggin,"

and then, well, I should have just proceeded as normal but I would overdo things even when the humor was exhausted so I would also move syllables in the second half of the song,

"Sagadahoc and Kene-
bec, Lincoln, Knox and Han-
cock, Waldo, Washington and
York, Oxford and Penobscot"

More weird, less of an improvement in the fidelity of the song to the original tune, and less funny, although there is a "cock" in there.

[Kevinstat]

Just to be clear on the pronunciation of Piscataquis, it's

either "his" with a 'p' or an off-color name for urine (I've always used the latter, but I've heard is pronounced the "his" way and that actually may be the correct way) (in any case, the off-color name is definitely not to be dragged out like I did in my version of the Maine County Song)
cat (most emphasized)
the 'a' in "Atlanta"
"quit" with an 's' instead of a 't' (second most emphasized)

[Kevinstat]

My recollection from when doing the temporal apportionment of Maine was that Piscataquis fit well with the western part of Penobscot (Piscataquis was the only county that wasn't populous enough for its own district), and the Bangor area had multiple districts (my recollections was faulty - I had to add a few towns to Franklin, Lincoln, and Washington to get them up to 3.0 representatives).

The towns in Penobscot County south of Piscataquis do fit well (in the non-numbers sense) with Piscataquis County (very similar politically, which bears keeping in mind when people dismiss Piscataquis County going to McCain in 2008 when much of it has next to no population; the same can't be said for the western bulge of Penobscot County).  If you were to draw the type of map that you (or maybe it was Muon2) drew for Washington State, the Piscataquis-Penobscot connection might warrant a thicker line, but if the Piscataquis-Somerset connection was given a thinner line you'd have to do that for some other connections as well (York-Oxford, ...

crap, I just realized there's one other pair of counties (besides Aroostook-Somerset, Aroostook-Piscataquis and Hancock-Knox) that border each other that don't have a state route crossing the boundary: Lincoln-Waldo.  Of course, if Lincoln and Waldo county are in the same CD without either Kennebec or Knox counties then Knox County would have to be in with Hancock, so any plan with 2 CDs that relies on the Lincoln-Waldo boundary for one district to be contiguous must rely on the Hancock-Knox water boundary for the other district to be contiguous.  There is the Turner Ridge Road connecting Somerville in Lincoln County and Palermo in Waldo County, but it's not a state route and there aren't even the green signs with arrows and "SOMERVILLE" OR "PALERMO" directing people to take that road (there sometimes are even for non-state routes).  The two counties shared a sizable border until Knox County was created from (at least mostly) parts of those two counties in I think the mid-19th century (after Maine became a state).

I suspect if  you took the towns with 90% or 95% of the population of the northern counties you would have a better starting point for redistricting (maybe have the people from the north, move to the county seat until redistricting is done, and then let them move back home).

How generous of you.

Why is Aroostook populated? Was it not forested as well?

Much of its western bulge still is, but I'm not sure if the farmland near the New Brunswick border was ever a natural forest.  Of course, I've read from conservative writers that concentration of CO2 in trees (that is alleviated by timber harvesting) would result in huge forest fires that would clear-cut huge sections of forest, and for that reason many once forested areas of North America were deforested when Europeans arrived.  I really don't know about (eastern) Aroostook County.

As for why it's populated, it's good farmland (Maine was once the #1 potato producer in the U.S., but is well down the list today), and the western part of "The County", as it's often called, has large lumber resources (that's probably why the town of Allagash exists).  Also, once northeastern Maine had some population, it was able to attract people from New Brunswick like my great-grandfather, while the French Canadians who came to Maine from Quebec Provence (earlier than my great grandfather I know, but I imagine there was some immigration from New Brunswick at that time) travelled by rail through New Hampshire to places like Lewiston that aren't close to the Quebec border.  If that railroad had gone to Boston instead of Portland which was considered at the time, Maine's history would be very different.  There was a "Northwest Maine" thread on The Forum Which Cannot Be Named that observed that once you get into Quebec, "you start seeing civilization again."  Along the Maine-New Brunswick border, there's civilization on both sides (although rapidly declining on parts of the Maine side).