So, on the one hand, I love fairness and justice and support the Voting Rights Act.
On the other hand, I hate stupid gerrymandering and the jiggering of districts to try to make them "safe." For either party. (I mean, really, it's fun to pretend to be Tom DeLay for a while . . . but only on Halloween.)
So I decided to use Dave's Redistricting App to try my hand at redistricting Illinois. Fo' realz. As in, I wanted to create a map that (a) could actually be adopted, (b) wouldn't make an outsider gape in horror and (c) within those parameters, does all the things a good liberal would like it to do. Unlike other posters here, I'm not trying to optimize for Democratic interests -- I'm trying to optimize for the interests of everyone in the state. A state that happens to contain a lot of Democrats.
One problem, though, is that I don't know where to find the district-by-district voting data that would tell me which of my districts are solid Democratic, solid Republican or leaners. I can make educated guesses, but I don't know for sure. This is one of the things I'm hoping you folks will help me with.
I am as partisan a Democrat as most people on this website. As an Illinoisan, I am dismayed that my state elected five freshmen Republicans last fall but very grateful (for a whole lot of other reasons besides redistricting) that Governor Quinn just managed to hold on. Otherwise we would be looking at another "incumbent protection" map, which in a state that just elected five freshmen GOP congressmen last fall, would be tantamount to a GOP gerrymander.
Various would-be mappers such as Silverspring have proposed 14-4 maps that would make Delay and Phil Burton proud. But many of these maps go by Obama 2008 data, which is a fundamentally flawed data set to be basing districts on in my very educated opinion. On the surface maps provided by such places as usaelection.org, you can see counties like Kendall and Grundy and Stephenson and McHenry (just to name a few) that wound up in Obama's column in 2008. No seasoned Democratic politician in Illinois would ever call these counties that are Democratic by any means. Perhaps as suburban/exurban areas of McHenry and Kendall start to fill up and become more swingy, those counties might change.
This diary, however, focuses on a slightly different problem with the Obama 2008 data when compared against Kerry 2004 downstate (where it models pretty accurately - I understand the concerns people have about Cook and Dupage which may be a bit bluer now in 2011 but that trend is not noticeable anywhere outside of Chicagoland). The problem is this: several of the downstate cities that mappers such as myself and Silver Spring and others count on to create as many Democratic-leaning districts as we can, aren't really all that blue to begin with. In other cases, such as Decatur and Urbana-Champaign, they are quite blue, but turnout is a problem. Follow me across the jump where I demonstrate this using a new district I have been creating in most of my maps - a new 13th which disappears in Chicagoland and reappears as a vacant downstate cities seat.
The partisan data is still not in the Application. Nevertheless, I wanted to post this DRAFT map now that the Census numbers are out.
I feel that my first attempt 15-3 map was perhaps too ambitious, but I feel confident that 14-4 is VERY doable in Illinois -- ofcourse, the lines will have to be ugly like this "Texas-style" map.
This map is intended to favor Dems as they control both houses and the governor's office. I tried to avoid any egregious gerrymanders, and I suspect that some of the suburban Chicago districts could be made more favorable. The only really ugly districts are IL5 (Quigley) and IL9 (Schakowsky). IL5 had to take a pretty strained shape to get a voting-age Hispanic plurality, although it still isn't nearly as bad as the current Hispanic-majority IL4 (Gutierrez). IL9 had to pick up the vacated IL5 precincts that didn't have enough Hispanics, as IL7 (Davis) has just a 50.1% voting-age black majority and could not pick anything up.
Illinois is losing one congressional district this year - going from 19 to 18. I have created a map that takes the current map with a delegation of 11 Republicans and 8 Democrats to one with 12 Democratic seats and 6 Republican ones. I consider this an ambitious gerrymander favoring the Democrats, but one that is realistic and keeps a few things in mind:
1.) Michael Madigan is in charge and he will look out for his interests first. He also will never do a dummymander.
2.) The Democratic incumbents also have input and their interests will be considered. None of them will want their district lines to change much and all want their Democratic primary bases to be kept intact. They also don't want to be thrown from safe seats to possibly competitive ones.
3.) African Americans will insist on maintaining their three black majority districts, no matter how much population they have lost in the city. The Hispanics will want at least one - two may be forced by the courts - but Madigan and his allies will likely push for one Hispanic district to maintain Lipinski's seat. Also, we have seen in the City of Chicago that Hispanic majority seats often go to white incumbents who control the Democratic machine. Alderman Ed Burke's 14th ward is 88% Hispanic, Madigan's 13th ward is 72% Hispanic and just elected somebody named "Marty Quinn" to be Alderman.
4.) Madigan will go after Freshman GOP before those with more seniority. Not only are they easier targets, but having seniority on both sides of the aisle is good for Illinois.
Below is each new district with data and analysis. I have calculated the results from the 2010 Senate race (Kirk v. Giannoulias) and from the 2004 Presidential race (Bush v. Kerry - I know, old). I used the 2010 Senate race rather than the Governor's race because it is on the Federal level, and to use data against moderate Republican. I did not calculate data from the 2008 election, because Obama's landslide was far too big and unevenly distributed in Illinois (I feel Chicagoland was much more skewed than Downstate). The 2010 numbers are exact (to the precinct) except for Tazewell, Marion, Moultrie, and Menard Counties, which I allocated votes by ratio of population in each district. The same goes for 2004 numbers, except I had to extrapolate the precinct data for Lake and Will counties from 2010 data.
For now, here are three tables with election data, racial population data, and VAP data. I will add more analysis in the next few days.
This is a part of a series of posts analyzing the 2010 midterm elections. This post will focus on the Illinois Senate election, in which Republican candidate Mark Kirk pulled out a close Republican victory in a strongly Democratic state.
The four states this week for the Census 2010 data dump are Illinois, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas. South Dakota has only one congressional district and Texas I'm reserving for its own special in-depth post which will look at changes in racial composition in each district over the decade (and Texas isn't out yet today, so it's a moot point), so here are just Illinois and Oklahoma. The Illinois target (based on the drop to 18 seats) is 712,813. (Check out the depopulation on Chicago's South Side in IL-01 and IL-02. Bobby Rush and Jesse Jackson Jr.'s districts already include small amounts of suburbs, but they're going to need to take on significantly more.)
District
Population
Deviation
IL-01
587,596
(125,217)
IL-02
602,758
(110,055)
IL-03
663,381
(49,432)
IL-04
601,156
(111,657)
IL-05
648,610
(64,203)
IL-06
657,131
(55,682)
IL-07
638,105
(74,708)
IL-08
738,840
26,027
IL-09
628,859
(83,954)
IL-10
650,425
(62,388)
IL-11
759,445
46,632
IL-12
666,459
(46,354)
IL-13
773,095
60,282
IL-14
840,956
128,143
IL-15
681,580
(31,233)
IL-16
718,791
5,978
IL-17
634,792
(78,021)
IL-18
665,723
(47,090)
IL-19
672,930
(39,883)
Total:
12,830,632
In case you were wondering about population growth in the few Illinois districts where the state's growth was concentrated, much of that growth is Hispanic. For instance, IL-08 went from 11% Hispanic in 2000 to 17% Hispanic in 2010. IL-11 went from 7% to 11% Hispanic. IL-13 went from 5% to 11% Hispanic, while IL-14 went from 18% to 25% Hispanic. (Perhaps not coincidentally, we lost seats in three of these districts, as turnout in 2010 was much whiter and older than in 2008.)
Oklahoma (which stays at 5, and where the growth has been remarkably consistent across CD boundaries) has a target of 750,270.
Now that it's 2011, the redistricting games will soon begin in earnest, with more detailed Census data expected in February or March and some states holding spring legislative sessions to deal with drawing new maps. Long ago I planned to do state-by-state rundowns of the redistricting process as soon as 2010 election results and Census reapportionment were clear. Now that time has arrived, and it's time to look at Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa.
The goal of this map is to reduce the number of Republican representatives in Illinois from the current 11 to 3. I must admit that my ideal would be for every single state to have a non-partisan commission to do redistricting. Doing partisan maps such as this is indeed playing "ugly." However, as long as Republicans continue to push the envelope on this issue (including unprecedented mid-decade remaps like the one in Texas) there is no reason the Democratic Party should not likewise draw partisan maps in the states where it controls the process.
