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California (and more) [updated again]

by: dgb

Sun Oct 11, 2009 at 1:24 PM EDT


[Update 10/13 3:41 PDT: the Hispanic data for California, Kentucky and Wisconsin was incorrect. I've now uploaded the correct data. Thanks to CalifornianInTexas and nico for noticing.]

Now in Daves Redistricting!

My time coming, any day, don't worry about me, no
...
California, preaching on the burning shore
California, I'll be knocking on the golden door
Like an angel, standing in a shaft of light
Rising up to paradise, I know, I'm gonna shine
dgb :: California (and more) [updated again]
I added the data for California to the server last night. I had to make a little modification to the code to handle the new format for block group data. Both these states use block groups because no shapefiles for voting districts were provided to the Census Bureau.

Warning: for California, the Assign Old CDs operation took 10 minutes on my desktop machine (3 year old dual core AMD chip, 2.2GHz chip speed, 2GB RAM, Windows XP -- CPU bound operation). But it works!

I haven't totally verified that everything is correct, but the population numbers look right and the assigned old CDs look reasonably close.

[Updated] All states with more than 1 CD are now supported. (OK and RI fixed!)

Enjoy!
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California (and more) [updated again] | 49 comments
Thank You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 Finally, I can redistrict my home state, California. Or as we say in California, Eureka!
Thanks for getting California and the other states with more than 1 CD on the App!!!!!!!!!!!! I just have one question and I bet you will get this alot: Can you tell me when you will put partisan data onto the App? You mentioned awhile ago you would do it one state at a time.
Could you give a range of when at least one state will have partisan data and which state it is?
Again, thanks alot for all your work!

for more election analysis, visit  http://frogandturtle.blogspot....




17, CA-06,  

Partisan data
I think Maryland will be first. I've mucked around with the data a bit and now need to write some code to use it. After that, possibly NY, because Jeff Cao has done some work on that data. The caveat (from Jeff) is that for some states the voting districts from 2000 (which is what I have from the census bureau) don't always match those from 2008. I.e., the states may have changed them and so the reported data from the last election doesn't match up. We'll have to see as we go thru states where we have that data to see.

California didn't provide voting district shapes in 2000, so I'm using block groups. For states like that, it's possible for someone to map the partisan data to block groups (because the voting districts have a map back), but some block groups get split, naturally. But you could get reasonably close even without getting the splits perfect. I would not be able to do that work, but I can create a format for the data so others who are so inclined could.

Thanks.

[ Parent ]
Thanks for the info!
 Do you have a rough estimate of when you will have partisan data for Maryland on the app?


for more election analysis, visit  http://frogandturtle.blogspot....




17, CA-06,  

[ Parent ]
Maryland
2 or 3 weeks.
[ Parent ]
The chance that I'll get all my homework done this weekend just went out the window
But thanks for all your hard work!

22, Democrat, AZ-01
Peace. Love. Gabby.
Thank you!
We should see some good maps that will eliminate several Repubs fairly shortly.  I don't think we need 19 right-wing Repubs in California.

I expect Nancy Pelosi to push hard for an aggressive redistricting plan.

By the way, what big states are left?  I can only think of Wisconsin.

1-district states
Would it be possible to add them once you're done with everything else? I know it's only theoretical, but there has been discussion about Montana around here, and it would be interesting to mess around with smaller states. At least, I would think so.

Regardless, many thanks for all your hard work in making this wonderful application.

Yes
I can do that. Some people talked about doing statehouse districts, so that could be useful, even though I don't have the current statehouse district shapes.
[ Parent ]
Eureka!
Now we can see how many ways we can gerrymander ourselves to a more progressive majority!

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
The first part of my attempt
is rearranging the districts in NorCal from Sacto northwards. If we play our cards right, we may end up with only 1 Republican in this vast area.

Here is what I have so far.

CA-01: Still takes the North Coast counties Del Norte, Humboldt, and Mendocino. To account for population shifts, I shifted some of Sonoma out (which I gave to CA-06 to maintain its status as a North Bay district) and added the "tail" of Sacramento County as well as Obama-voting Trinity County.

CA-02: This is the "Republican vote sink" in Northern California. I shifted out Trinity as well as the college town of Chico, and added Modoc and Lassen, the most Republican counties in the state.

CA-03: I shifted the lines around to put this district entirely in Sacramento County and possibly make it more Democratic, making things even harder for Lungren.

CA-04: I made this district more compact and possibly Democratic enough for Charlie Brown to win by shifting out Modoc and Lassen to CA-02, and adding Chico. I also shifted parts of western Placer County, which went to the 5th.

CA-05: Still Sacramento-centric, only taking in a few northern suburbs in Sacramento County as well as some of western Placer County. This district is probably slightly more Republican, but should still be cakewalk for Matsui.

CA-06: Added in the parts of Sonoma County that I shifted out of CA-01.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)

I'd probably not be so bold
I'd probably make two solid Democratic district out of CA-3, CA-4, and CA-5, and leave the remaining one to be another GOP sink.
[ Parent ]
You do have a point.
I'll just call this map a Democratic best case scenario and then try my hand at a more realistic gerrymander to get around 40 Democrats.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
[ Parent ]
Off the top of my head
I think we can gerrymander these Repubs out fairly easily:

CA-3
CA-24
CA-28
CA-44
CA-46 or CA-48
CA-50
and maybe draw one more Hispanic majority Democratic district in the Central Valley.  We also might be able to dismantle Gary Miller's seat and draw another Hispanic majority seat out of that.

So that would be 6-8 more Democratic districts, for 40-42 Dems.

silverspring drew a 45-8 map sometime back.

[ Parent ]
Here is a visual aid of my attempted NorCal districts.
Image and video hosting by TinyPic

I put Chico back in the 2nd because CA-04 was looking awkward when I tried putting Chico in there to make it less Republican. Geographically it makes sense to keep Chico in the 2nd, plus Chico isn't really big enough to make much of a dent in CA-04 anyway. And the notch in southern Sacramento County is Galt, which I removed from CA-03 because the district was getting too big and I couldn't find any other areas to axe. I am trying to keep the deviations of each district as small as possible, below 10,000. I will put in Galt with San Joaquin County either in my 11th or 18th.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)

[ Parent ]
4th
To make it more Democratic, why not throw in all of Butte county? The County as a whole voted for Obama. Then you can get rid of Sierra, Plumas, and El Dorado (all or most of it). If there is room for more population, extend along the Nevada border to pick up Democratic areas around down through Alpine and Mono counties (though they are small, they have voted Dem, so it seems like a shame to waste them).
[ Parent ]
Butte County.
I worked on one this morning doing exactly that

Photobucket

Northern California
CD 1: Based on Napa, City of Vallejo[sonoma county] and the Coast.  All Democratic

CD 2: Eldorado County.  The specific areas in Sacramento is somewhat in the air, but should be heavily Republican
El Dorado plus Republican areas of Sacramento, East Foothills of the Sierra makes this heavily Republican

CD 3:  Sacramento County

CD 4: Population is in Placer county. Republican

CD 5:  Sacramento County [democratic heavy] and swing county Butte.

CD 6 Marin and Sonoma. Safe Democratic

CD 7 Expands further into Contra Costa. Loses heavily Dem City of Vallejo [in Solano] to the 1st district, which is picking up some R territory

CD 8 San Francisco. I expect it to vote for Pelosi

CD 9  Expands from Oakland to take in some R areas of Contra Costa

CD 10  Based on democratic Solano County and Yolo County [UC Davis]

CD 11. Takes up the Democratic areas lost by cd 10 in Contra Costa County.

CD 12. Expands further in San Mateo. D

CD 13. West Alameda County safe D, counterbalancing any minor tendencies the east part has.  May not be as friendly to an extremely liberal D as Starl os

CD 14 Small amount of Santa Cruz County, balance of San Mateo, mostly Santa Clara Democratic

CD 15 expands from Santa Clara to include souther Alameda. D

CD 16; All in Santa Clara County.  Safe D.



Joe Cooper

[ Parent ]
Central California
All districts within 1000 deviation

cd 2  Republican eastern foothills. Since 2 was eliminated from N. Calif, it has to pop up somewhere else.  In either configuration it is safe R.  

CD 17. expands further into Santa Cruz County. Safe D

cd 18. Keeps the extension into San Joaquin. shoul sill be D.

cd 19  I would expect this to be R.  

cd 20.  The Califonia desert CD.  Republican

cd 21. City of Fresno. I would think it is Democratic

cd 22. Confined to Kern County. Republican

cd 23. Converted the coast district 23 to a San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara, and a small amount of Ventura.
Democratic

cd 24 Ventura County.

Los Angeles: CD 25 is now one of the most populous in the nation.  Since Daves tool spreads the population gain for the county evenly over the county, rather than in the incrasing districts, it would take information I dont have easily available to create a new 25. The same applies to most of the Southern Cal. districts. bearing this in mind, I did draw some districts, which gives an idea of the intercounty differences.

California south

california south urban 101-5-209

Los Angeles County: because of differential population trends, all of these districts would actually be further north and east from those pictured.

Joe Cooper

[ Parent ]
On the distribution of population estimates...
Since the Bureau only has them for counties, and not smaller units, such as block groups or tracts, it's the best I can do for now. I do distribute commensurate with the current population of the block groups (or voting districts), essentially assuming that every one grew by the same percentage.

Perhaps in the future this is an area I can enlist help to collect better data.

Nice job!

[ Parent ]
I'd love to help out.
Collecting population and election data from California is a dream come true for me!

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
[ Parent ]
My basic plan for California
 I did not get too far but here is what I had.

CA-1: I put in part of Sonoma County while taking out all of Yolo County. I also added part of Republican Shasta County. Overall, the district should remain heavily Democratic.

CA-2: I added Lake County, all of Yolo County while axing out most of Shasta County. The district is pretty convoluted but we could probably knock out Herger.

CA-3 I basically split Sacramento County with the 5th district. This one voted more for Obama than the 5th so it should be easy to knock out Lungren.

CA-4 This district stays pretty much the same except it takes in more Republican areas and loses Nevada County to the 2nd.

CA-5 Matsui may not be too happy her district is majority white. Since many of the white voters appear to be Liberal, I do not see her complaining.

CA-6 I am pretty sad that I had to split the district. I live in the current form but for the basic purposes of gerrymandering, I had to move it. I kept Petaluma in it and my home county of Marin completely in it. I did send it out to the Central Valley, yes it is convoluted. The current Congresswoman, Lynn Woolsey should be fine because she has a strong anchor in Marin and Petaluma.

CA-7 I made Miller's district a bit more white so he should easily win instead of being knocked off by a minority candidate. He gains part of Walnut Creek in Contra Costa County and loses parts of heavily Democratic Richmond.

CA-8 Not much change

This is basically what I have so far. I am not sure if I should move CA-11 into Union City or if I should keep it on the Dublin side of the ridge. I am still deciding.

for more election analysis, visit  http://frogandturtle.blogspot....




17, CA-06,  

[ Parent ]
Or
maybe I'll call my CA-04 Republican-leaning for now; usually votes Republican, but can vote for a Democrat in a bad environment for Republicans. CA-03 is more Democratic because I removed strongly Republican Amador and Calaveras Counties, as well as tiny Alpine County whose impact in the district is negligible. I don't know how Republican CA-03 and 04 are, so I can't really make any revisions without partisan data.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
[ Parent ]
Looks like silver spring
leaned toward the aggressive redistricting that you intend to do in Northern Cali.  Looks like he did more or less what you did with CA-3 and CA-5.
So it is probably doable to make make the region have only one GOP seat, but you will probably have to crack the heavily Dem CA-6.

http://www.swingstateproject.c...

You're right that it is tough w/o partisan data, a crude manner is to look up the partisan breakdown by district in each county.  Obama lost the CA-4 part of Sacramento (granted it is a tiny sliver), won the CA-3 part by 3% and crushed in CA-5.  So removing the two GOP counties and adding parts of the CA-5 part of Sacramento should make it significantly more Democratic.  

[ Parent ]
Question for Dave
Firefox crashed on me (again) and I had saved my map of California, but I don't know how to open it. I hope my hard work is not lost, because I had already spent over 4 hours and had only gotten started on the Bay Area. (SoCal will probably take a whole day.)

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
And I can't find an open option anywhere. I searched the whole page.


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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
Opening maps
If you saved it correctly, it should say "Open" and then the map name under the file menu. Be sure to use "Save As" the first time for it to save properly. You have to type in a name into the filename box for it to save as.
[ Parent ]
There is no "open" option
for me anywhere. And I did save properly. I really hope I don't have to start all over again.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
[ Parent ]
Open
For me it is right under "close" in the file menu.
[ Parent ]
I tried "save as" and it won't even let me save!
It complains it is "unable to perform File Open/Save/Close operation". So I can only use "save", because now "save as" doesn't work.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
[ Parent ]
Needs a name
You have to type a name in the filename box or you get that message. Save (not Save As) saves into whatever the current file is. But if you can Save, then there is a current file and that file should be listed as an "Open filename" line under the File Menu.

Apologies for the weird Save/olpen stuff. Silverlight is very limited in saving (like no Save Dialog) because it's meant to run in the sandbox and, naturally, protect your machine from harm.

[ Parent ]
Oh. Now I see.
I entered the name in the wrong file name box. I used the one in the "save maps" section rather than the one next to the file menu.

I will have to start over, but that's okay. At least I saved the image with districts 1-6, and I can retrace my steps on the Bay Area districts.

Thanks a lot for your help and for allowing us the opportunity to create these awesome maps.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)

[ Parent ]
Yup
It took me weeks to figure out that you needed to name the file before Save As would work.  
[ Parent ]
Usability
Definitely room for usability improvement :-)
[ Parent ]
In a number of ways
Most pressingly, in addition to saving, is the way you pan (this should be possible on the map itself--perhaps by selecting a hand tool, as in Photoshop) and the way you select multiple vtds (there should be a lasso tool or  crosshairs).  
[ Parent ]
None of which, BTW, is to take away from the fact
that you've put together a remarkable resource.  
[ Parent ]
Saved files
Hi CAinTX,

In the upper left corner of the page is a button called "File Menu." Next to it is a text box. Hopefully what you did to save is the following:
-- type a name of your file in the text box
-- Click the File Menu (which gives you a drop down) and then click "Save As"

That saves [yourfilename].drf.xml in an obscure directory.  (See the Help page for how to find that directory.) Then when you load California again (this is key -- you have to select the state first), then click "File Menu" again, there should be a line that says "Open [yourfilename].drf.xml"

If you saved a Map file, that's only a description of the maps (i.e. the pictures), not the data that represents your work of assigning blocks to different CDs.

Hope this helps. Great work!

[ Parent ]
The "Save As" option doesn't work for me.
Every time I try "Save As" I always get an error message: "Unable to perform File Open/Save/Close operation", even when I saved a file name. And two searches ended up fruitless.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
[ Parent ]
nm. Problem solved.
I used the wrong file name box.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
[ Parent ]
Sorry about that

[ Parent ]
Very Cool
Thanks!
Here's something
Screen shot here (ignore my Kingdom Hearts background ._.)

I am frustrated and annoyed about the map2jpg feature, and this is the best i can do. Basically CA-04 covers every county fully except for El Dorado and Placer (other part is with CA-02), for Matsui's district, about half of her base is gone to Dan Lungren's 3rd district, but still manages to hold on to the other half, and taking in the other part of Yolo that CA-01 couldn't fit in. I am not even going to attempt SoCal, as i have already wrecked my brain doing that.

16, Male, Democrat, CA-42/sometimes CA-32.

Are old CD populations correct?
Hi Dave, all,

I loaded CA and assigned old CDs.
I noticed very high changes from 2000 in some districts.
In particular CA-47 appears to have lost more than half of its residents.
Is this actually true?
Or is it possible that the population is assigned incorrectly in the application database, or that the shapefile for this CD is incorrect?

Thanks.
-j

I've noticed that too
I've also noticed that the racial stats for several Southland districts feel rather off. For example, it seems rather unlike that CA-29, when drawn in its current shape with the new population estimates applied, is majority Hispanic (especially because ACS says it's more like 26%).  

22, Democrat, AZ-01
Peace. Love. Gabby.
[ Parent ]
I don't have the slightest idea
what happened to the link in the last comment.

22, Democrat, AZ-01
Peace. Love. Gabby.
[ Parent ]
hispanic numbers are wrong!
Looking at CaliforniaInTexas's diary spurred me to check on this and I found an error in my perl script. The total numbers are correct and for all other demographics, but Hispanic is wrong (and Other is wrong because it's where those numbers ran off to).

I will fix this right away.

[ Parent ]
Good catch
I know from my very limited experience with coding and programing that one tiny error can send everything haywire. The demographic stats seem to be coming together much more logically now, thank you very much.

22, Democrat, AZ-01
Peace. Love. Gabby.
[ Parent ]
Not sure
I'm not sure how correct. A couple of things to consider:
-- always do Assign Old CDs before any pan/zoom (which throws it off)
-- check the correctness of shapes by showing Old CDs. They should match closely.
-- areas that are seriously gerrymandered create some errors, because I what I do is take the center of the bounding box (rectangle) for each voting district/block group and find the Old CD shape that that poin is in.

I may check this myself later, but I don't time now.

[ Parent ]
Yes, here's what's going on
I finally got a chance to look at this. Using the 2000 numbers, I get CD-47 about 87,000 people short (out of 639,000). CD-31 is 120,000 people short.

What's going on is the following:
1) it appears that many block groups (which are the shapes we've got) for California, are split between CDs.
2) California is gerrymandered significantly in some cases. This causes the shapes to be weirdly shaped and some CD shapes to have these crossing lines, which really throw things off.

These things cause a lot of inaccurancies in the attempt to determine which CD a block group goes in.

So, you have to take this as an initial starting point and then work from there.

[ Parent ]
I've finally finished
redistricting California as best as I could. There are still some population areas not in a district, but they are too small for me to find, so I will just leave the map as is for now. I will post a diary on what I have done with my map.

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28, New Democrat, Female, TX-03 (hometown CA-26)
Georgia voting districts
I've noticed they're off in places.

For example, Gwinnett: http://www.gwinnettcounty.com/...

Follow the elections in Georgia at the 2010 Georgia Race Tracker.

California (and more) [updated again] | 49 comments

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