Notable Changes:
The 1st district (Blue) picks up Northampton and some other nearby towns, smoothing the boarder with the second.
The 2nd District (Green) makes up for the loss by grabbing Franklin, Attleboro and some other towns in that area.
The 3rd District (Purple) retains its Worcester and Fall River anchors but otherwise shifts to the East picking up such towns as Foxborough and Taunton.
The 4th District (Red) likewise shifts east, while retaining New Bedford and Frank’s hometown Newton. Gains include Brockton, Bridgewater, Dedham and portions of Boston.
The 5th District (Gold) is mostly unchanged, adding Marlborough and a couple other towns.
The 6th District (Teal) also changes little, though it does gain Woburn, Winthrop and Revere from the 7th.
The 7th District (Gray) makes up for these losses by diving South, gaining such towns as Needham, Dover and Easton.
The 8th District (Periwinkle) gains most of Southie, Roslindale, and Milton. It loses Allston/Brighton to the 4th. It retains its majority-minority status at 49% non-hispanic white, which is about the same as it is currently.
The old 10th District (Cyan), now redesignated the 9th, gains the rest of Southie, the white parts of Dorchester, Braintree and a couple other towns. (Yes I split Lynch’s South Boston base.)
The tool I used to create this map is Dave’s Redistricting App.
I created a map of all the towns in Massachusetts using the app as well, which is immensely helpful, since it only shows city lines and not town lines. If anyone wants this, shoot me an email and I’ll send it to you.
” A little dab will do ya” and is really too much too slick and too slippery.
Of all the delegation I believe he was most recently a state legislator (both chambers) so those connections may help him.
I’m as eager to shed Lynch as anyone else, but forcing parts of Boston into the same district as Cranberry Country is a pure gerrymander. If we have 9 seats, do we really need to split any of our 351 towns outside Boston?
A) Lynch least likely to get redistricted
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p>He has big connections with Sen. Jack Hart and Sen. Moran both of whom run the election committees in that chamber and would presumably hold influence in a redistricting move.
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p>B) Makes the 8th more conservative
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p>By adding Southie, the only section of Boston to vote McCain in 08 or Bush in 04 you basically prevent a progressive from being elected. Reagan Democratic Charlestown, East Somerville, Chelsea, and Southie would outweigh West Somerville and Cambridge and other parts of Boston in the district. Watertown would be up for grabs since its relatively evenly split. But this would produce ugly fights every cycle or a nominee that, while maybe not as conservative as Lynch would certainly be to the right of Capuano to win. Frankly its not inconcievable that an out and out Republican could be able to take this district.
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p>C) Ideological redistricting is bad
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p>Just as I opposed Finneran’s redistricting and Tom DeLay’s redistricting redistricting to potentially disenfranchise voters I disagree with is still wrong. Non-partisan redistricting is key.
There ought to be a simple algorithm to divide an area into equal-population, contiguous chunks. That purple thing is an abomination.
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p>Also, “…the white parts of Dorchester…”? I bet there’s something highly illegal with doing that, and there should be.
I don’t like the idea of considering race, but minority-majority districts have been encouraged (required?) in the past, which often means having very white districts nearby. I think there have even been SCOTUS cases on this but I don’t recall the details.
Did you know that gerrymandering for racial reasons, or causing racial effects, is a Federal suit? And that in such a suit the loser pays all legal costs for the challanger?
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p>Why can’t the Democrats avoid indictments (and convictions) when in charge of redistricting?
The 8th is a majority minority district. I am in fact required by Federal law not to change that. If I had given all of Southie and Dorchester to the 8th, it probably would have become majority white.
You’d have Lynch beating Capuano and Cambridge represented by a Reagan Dem Southie pol which while hilarious might not be what those voters or you in your ‘ideological’ redistricting want
…both with not having part of Boston in a district that extends through the Cape and with not splitting towns. My attempt at this is here
Off the top of my head – besides the city of Boston – Hanson is split between Lynch and Delahunt.
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p>Not trying to make any point, just pointing out.
This map reduces the split towns to just Boston.
Also it’s not my fault Delahunt lives in Quincy.
I made my map based on the criteria of making as few changes as possible and eliminating the 9th. The 10th already stretches from Quincy to Providencetown. The 3rd already stretches from Worcester to Fall River. The 4th already stretches from Newton to New Bedford. If you want a fair redistricting, or at least my attempt at it, see my earlier diary.
we’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. A credible challenge with decent funding and lots of grassroots support could knock off Lynch in a primary contest. It would not be easy, especially in Massachusetts, but it is doable, especially if it’s a concerted effort and a rallying point for the entire progressive movement in the state. However, the Iraq war votes, marriage equality issue and a host of other major inspirations to progressives were not enough to rally the troops against Lynch yet… so I’m just not sure it’s going to happen. I’ve sadly started to look at it half-glass-full: for our one rep who’s bad on the issues, we have 9 other (mostly) good ones, a few of them great ones.
Elect him to the Senate! đŸ˜€
I have a hard time imagining a Congressional seat based in Boston and the near burbs is going to disappear. Just don’t see it happening. At all. Ever.
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p>Sorry.
With all this talk (albeit, not entirely sincere) of redistricting out Lynch after the census, I worry about the nature of our party. I pride myself on belonging to a big tent party such as the Democratic Party. Part of the reason we made so many gains in the house has been because of Speaker Pelosi’s push for conservative Democrats to run in parts of the south and mountain west. We have the option of being so picky regarding officials because of the comfortable cushion that has been built buy expanding our coalition. I understand that there is only so far we can expand before we lose the identity that makes us who we are, but Congressman Lynch certainly isn’t the breaking point. I respectfully welcome a primary challenge against elected officials, as is the nature of our system, but we need to be careful we don’t become the Club for Growth of the left. We can’t seek to purge our party or we will become no better than the Republicans.
The progressive blogosphere and progressive movements were largely the ones pushing the dems who have won in reddish districts around the country, including conservadems, under the premise of “more and better.” It was the DCCC that picked a whole bunch of losers that cost us a great deal of resources — they only went along with some of the winners after we pushed them into contention.
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p>The general strategy is to get democrats elected wherever possible, at the cost of Republicans — and get progressive democrats elected wherever possible, sometimes at the cost of incumbent democrats. Ousting Lynch for a more progressive option is not anethema to the “more and better” strategy, which is the strategy which lead to our “so many gains in the house.”
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p>
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p>The problem with the Club for Growth (aside from the fact that they’re horrible on the issues) is that they’re purely ideological, not pragmatic. They take on races almost regardless of how the district is comprised, ousting electable Republicans for unelectable ones. The progressive/netroots movement, as a whole, has not done that as of late. We’ve taken out very few Democratic incumbents and, only then, the worst of the lot and, only then, when we could do better in the district and still win.
I completely agree with Alex and welcomed Lynch’s more conservative voice on some issues I agree with him (the bailout, abortion restrictions) and disliked them on most other issues (health care reform, Iraq, the environment) but at the end of the day the people of that district want Lynch as their Congressman. A well funded grassroots challenger in 2006 was unable to defeat Lynch in the primary, maybe a State Senator or Flaherty after he loses the Mayor’s race could pull it off, but he has significant pull in the most populous parts of his district, mainly Southie and Dorchester and those are the parts that will dominate. I am sure parts of East Somerville and Watertown might find Capuano too liberal but Cambridge, West Somerville, and the chunks of the 8th in Boston keep sending him back.
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p>Barney Frank for quite sometime had a wonderful constituent service office because he was an openly gay liberal in a conservative, Catholic, Reagan Dem district for quite sometime. He educated himself on fishing issues to help his constituents in Fall River and New Bedford, he learned Portuguese, and did what it took to win them over. So if Frank can convince Catholic Azorean fisherman to vote for him than a good progressive can convince Southie to vote for him/her.
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p>Speaking of revisionist history…
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p>Dunkelbarger was a spirited opponent, but he was neither well funder nor had a particularly large grassroots army — we were all too busy working for the Governor at that time.
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p>Lynch won the district because the primary vote was split the first time he ran, pure and simple. His district is certainly more conservative than the average in Massachusetts, but that’s not to say a far more progressive Democrat couldn’t win that seat.
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p>Finally, if you read my original comment, I basically said I was more or less content with Lynch in the seat. 9 pretty liberal to very liberal reps to our 1 conservative one ain’t all that bad. I was merely pointing out that if people want Lynch gone, they’re going to have to make it happen. He’s not going to be redistricted out of his seat — that’s a fantasy. I’m actually rather indifferent on the topic; it would take a very strong and potent progressive challenger to draw me into that race in any significant way.
… the conventional wisdom is that Olver retires in the 1st in 2012 while Neal’s 2nd District pulls back from the east and swallows all of the 1st, leaving most of the metro districts in recognizable form.
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p>While I love Berkshire County, we are the one with the largest population drop. I hope that the western 2/3rds of the state can have two congresscritters, but somehow I think that if anybody gets screwed, it will be us. I can live with John Neal as my Rep, though. From my brief conversations, he’s a really smart and solid liberal.
I wonder how Richie Neal would feel giving up his seat to John, though. đŸ˜‰
I knew that. Brain Fart.
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p>I posted the one eliminating Lynch since I felt it would be more controversial. This map I think is more likely.
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p>By the way, the current 6th district (Essex County, red on this map) has lost even more population than the 1st.
Mr. Neal’s first name is Richard.
I would not support the Democrats in the General Court attempting to redistrict with the purpose of removing Lynch from Congress.
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p>I believe there should be a separate, independent committee of citizens to perform the redistricting process every 10 years. This will promote fairness, aim to eliminate political posturing, and try to create Congressional districts with similar interests/issues and without embarrassingly gerrymandered borders.
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p>how exactly will these citizens be chosen? And what makes you think that any of them will be interested in
* fairness
* aiming to eliminate political posturing
* trying to create Congressional districts with similar interests…
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p>?!?!?!?
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p>Get real. As long as there are going to be artificial lines which move every 10 years, we’ll always have this issue to deal with. Whoever draws the lines will have the advantage, and since everybody knows this the line drawer will always be influenced. You can’t avoid it.
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p>Compact districts? Well, sure. But sometimes compactness doesn’t make sense. Ignoring minority/majority requirements, sometimes the common thread of the population isn’t compact — rings around a city, coastline, population along a river or adjacent to a large population-free area like a national forest, etc. Just who chooses the common thread of the population, anyway? Is an ethnic trend a common thread, even if that means a less compact district? Is wealth a common thread? Why should Congressional districts be compact for the sake of compactness anyway?
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p>The only “fair” way to draw districts is the Constitutional way. As long as it’s Constitutional, it’s fair by definition. Our brain tells us to be uncomfortable with non-compact districts, but the fact is that we don’t live in a homogenous distribution — cities, transportation hubs, rivers, state boundaries, mountains, county lines, town/city lines, and the interest in not radically re-drawing the current districts all play a role.
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p>I guess I’m rambling for two key points:
1. There’ll never be an apolitical way to draw these districts
2. Regardless of your goals for the districts, a large number of constraints make the process extremely hard to do well.
How about a computer program?
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p>Lines might be artificial but the impetus for them, population change, is real.
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p>
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p>Why not?
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p>The only truly ‘politick’ aspect to this is the refusal to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch across the Commonwealth. Think about it: losing one district worth of representation should not entail undue deference to all the other districts… That’s not redistricting, that’s shuffling existing districts minus one. Instead of carving up one district to be encompasssed by the others, we could just rewrite them all. The question of ‘who will lose’ is a red herring: nothing in the constitution provides for protection of house seats in this manner.
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p>
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p>The one constraint that seems to matter, that of not inconveniencing the districts that remain (or, more specifically, their present representatives…) is the only constraint that makes this difficult. It seems to me that, if we dropped this constraint, all the others seem less insurmountable.
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p>If we started with major population centers and simply draw circles around them to encompass a specific population then the issue becomes only those spaces that either overlap or aren’t covered. It would be pretty easy to simply split those areas population in halves, or thirds, or by whatever number of circles overlap or border. Problem solved. It’s not like we’re getting it all that precise right now.
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p>
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p>Wipe out the current map and start from scratch… that doesn’t remove the politick aspect, it merely resets it.
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p>Having played with redistricting maps, I simply think you’re wrong.
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p>
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p>So try it. Go use the software and make a new map. Here’s what I think you’ll find… you’ll start to draw around cities, maybe Chicopee/Springfield first. Then you’ll go west, since the population is low, and you’ll find that the “wrong” amount of population… you’ll either come up short and not make it all the way to the NE and NW borders w/ NY/VT and NY/CT respectively, or you’ll get there and you’ll have too many people, so you’ll have to either eat into your metro area of Worcester or go around it… creating an less-compact district. Then you’ll move on to Worcester, and discover that your problems are just beginning.
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p>The fact is that the population densities around the state, the specific location of cities and dense suburbs, and the parts of MA south/southeast of Brockton make this a hard problem. That’s hard, without consideration for the 14th amendment.
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p>So, go for it. Draw up your own map and show us just how easy it is. Or, learn for yourself just how hard it is. Let’s have it.
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p>Personally, I never stated ‘compactness’ as a trait either desirable or achievable. I merely note that the act of apportionment isn’t as difficult as one is led to believe, nor need be political at all. I don’t think that the suggested methodology will provide for wholly uniform districts, but rather non-politically drawn districts.
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p>It’s really a quite simple problem of geography: enclose a given population in a district using a few simple rules of apportionment. It really only gets difficult when you defer to hidebound concepts or try to make one rep the ‘loser’.
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p>Rather than starting with a district location based, solely, upon historical precedent, find centers of populations and divide the state into (in this case) 9 circular sections with rough amounts of the populations necessary. Make parts out of the whole first, rather than making the whole out of the parts after they’ve been decided (or defaulted to…) .
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p>Under this scheme, since the state is neither circular nor will the circles be uniform in radii, the problem reduces to re-apportionment of gaps and overlaps. (they won’t be quite circular either, once you affix town borders). ‘wrong’ population sizes can be worked with as either radian values (arcs of the circle) or by town populace. Rather than Gerrymandering (a practice that, btw, began in Mass…) and ending up with each district being a distinct yet incoherent shape, you start with circles of various sizes and end up with areas that will look like the edges have been nibbled at, or with chunks taken out and/or added to, in order that they provide proper populace distribution.
Use the software and make your 9 centers of population.
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p>I find it difficult to do. You think it will be easy — so do it, and show us your results!
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p>
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p>P.S. Gerrymandering didn’t begin in Mass… it was merely named Gerrymandering in Mass.
I only occasionally post and don’t have time to see if that program does what I want it to do, nor do I have time to do it.
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p>So be patient.
or perfect, but it would be better than the current situation. I am aware that even “citizens” would have influences and prejudices, but I would hope that the majority of them would not approach Congressional redistricting with the purpose of removing a Democratic congressman who strays from the party line too often.
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p>A group consisting of Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, “unenrolled” voters, etc. would have the same amount of brainpower as our elected representatives to determine what common threads would define each district.
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p>I agree with Petr below who says the best way to redistrict would be to start from scratch and ignore the current map and Representatives.
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p>Yeah? So the idea is to have a poly-partisan group? That’s not unpartisan, that’s many-partisan.
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p>
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p>See I think that’s a recipe for disaster. For one thing, you can be damn sure that the committee will have people on it gunning for the elimination of certain reps… and you’d have exactly the frustration that you face now over the anti-Lynch proposal.
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p>Secondly, it would create extra turmoil in DC. By that, I mean that we’d end up with 3 or 4 rookie Reps, with rookie staffs. The current staffs — and their work — would get lost in the shuffle, and MA would be worse off. We’d have a batch of inexperienced legislators, and a huge section of constit service lost in the ether.
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p>Instead, I think that a hybrid approach ought to be employed. Tinker with the districts to make them more compact where appropriate, without combining two legislators in the same district. For example (and I have no idea how this would work population wise or where legislators live, and I’m ignoring the reduction of 10 CDs to 9, but just consider it as an example): take Princeton, Rutland, Paxton, Holden, and Auburn and put them in CD-2, and put Bellingham and Milford in CD-3. The population swap isn’t perfect, but the idea is sound. The result is a slightly more compact CD-2 and a slightly more compact CD-3.
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p>There’s no reason to turn over the applecart — the downside is too great. Instead, slightly revising the CDs on the edges can help compactness without downside.
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p>
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p>Of course, removing a CD throws my line of thinking out the window to some extent. Still, I suspect the same thing can be done — nudging CDs a bit on the sides, trying to make things a bit more compact.
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p>Each representative serves two years at a time. They are not entitled to an easy or default route to extra terms. As much as we might like seniority and experience there is nothing in the constitution that allows us to mess with the rules to ensure this. In other words: cookies crumble.
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p>
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p>The population swap is never going to be perfect. Indeed, we are will likely sufficiently distant (in 2012)from the impetus for the redistricting (2010 census) as to be grossly out of whack with respect to proper representation for most, if not all, of the districts.
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p>There are probably a finite number of ways to chunk the state up into nine sections of equal populace: so throw the parameters at some code and let a computer draw the lines and present the legislature with 5 or 10 of the most ‘uniform’ maps (for whatever value of ‘uniform’ you might desire… compactness, geographic efficiency, etc…) Then let the lege vote up or down on the options. But let’s get away from this hand-drawn horse trading that gets done.
To be clear, there are almost certainly zero ways to chunk up the state into equal populace while respecting census block data (or tract data, I forget… the one with more granularity than cities/towns).
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p>There is likely to be a finite, but very large number of map possibilities if you allow for +/- 2000 people, which is a pretty tight map. Even making it +/- 1000 will have oodles of possibilities. Merely cranking them all out would require some serious computing horsepower and an awful lot of time.
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p>The problem is that the computer can’t possibly be programed to know the things that we know. When, for whatever reason, the computer proposal doesn’t lump Acushnet with New Bedford, we’re smaht enough to say “Hey! — they’ve both got lots of Portugese population, similar demographics, and lots of family members crossing that boarder… it makes sense for them to be in the same CD” and then trade Acushnet on one side for one or more towns somewhere else. Eliminating this from the table is a foolish way to tie hands.
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p>It actually strangely reminds me of the college football Bowl Championship Series. The committee made a formula to pick who would play for the national championship game, using computer polls, the coaches poll, and the reporters poll. They didn’t like the outcome the next year, so they added strength of schedule to the algorithm. A year or two later they didn’t like the outcome, so they added in an additional criterion, the number of losses. They’ve also changed the computer polls in the system, and how they’re aggregated, to again change the results. In the interest of “fairness” they tried to set up an algorithm to “draw the map” of the championship game. But, they never liked the results. I’d expect a similar situation with congressional districts.
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p>Not at all, as the app linked to in this post amply demonstrates. I don’t think it does what I’m asking but that’s a difference in kind, but not in degree. Compute power is there. If population and geography are the constraints then there are likely not an insurmountable number of maps to be drawn. It might be a variant of the well known four color problem
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p>
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p>Computers aren’t required to know what we know, because what we know ends up needlessly complicating things… There’s nothing about being Portugese or about proximity that entitles one to membership in the same district. That’s an arbitrary construct. You’re in the strange position of arguing things are too complicated because you’ve made them compicated. That something ‘makes sense’ doesn’t make it pass constitutional muster. Again, cookies crumble.
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p>Re: college bowl:
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p>That’s my argument in a nutshell: what one ‘likes’ or doesn’t ‘like’ becomes an excuse to redraw the map. The map is no longer a representation of population in a geographic area, and instead becomes the outcome of arbitrary metrics.
if it’s resting now.
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p>The app demonstrates no such thing. The app demonstrates that with some work, you can come up with one solution which meets the population requirements. It then demonstrates that, without much work, you can come up with a second. And a third. And a fourth. Etc. It’s not difficult to see then that there are a tremendously high number of combinations of sets of tracts which meet the population balance requirement.
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p>Compute power is there? Hardly. This is an integer programming problem, specifically a packing problem. Finding a single solution isn’t too hard, but finding the set of solutions is extremely time consuming because it effectively requires an n-ary search tree.
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p>There are only two constructs which aren’t arbitrary: approximately equal population, and the 14th amendment. But, that doesn’t mean that other constructs are considered relevant, including but not limited to some degree of compactness and/or keeping similar interests in the same CD. If you don’t care about either, why not just use lines latitude to divvy up the CDs. Start with 42.8694444 latitude (Salisbury Plains) and just move the line south until you’ve got the right population. Repeat 8 more times and you’ve got nine CDs which get the job done w.r.t. population and (maybe!) the 14th. They’d be political-free and yet ridiculous.
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p>
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p>So… have you drawn a map yet? Seriously — you protest, but you won’t step up to the plate. My claim is that drawing these maps is hard to do in ways which make sense. Pick whatever value of uniform you might desire… compactness, geographical efficiency, etc, and let’s see it.
Currently, Metrowest — arguably the state’s second economic engine (after Boston/Cambridge) is represented by the following folks — McGovern, Markey, Frank, Tsongas, and Neal (if you consider Milford to be part of Metrowest). It’s past time that a district centered in Framingham was created. The population is large enough. The political and economic interests are similar enough.
What has happened to Metrowest is called gerrymandering. It’s wrong and has disenfranchised metro west voters. The cities have take Metrowest votes.
He may vote in Quincy, but he now lives in Plymouth. Check it out.
Sorry, pressed for time, don’t have the link, but on the SoS website, take a look at the map for the Governor’s Council Districts. They make good economic, geographic, and cultural sense. Unlike the Congressional map, or any proposal I’ve seen here so far. There are only 8, but you will get the idea.
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p>Let’s stop gerrymandering in its tracks, appoint an independent panel charged with coming up with something that makes sense to the voters it is supposed to serve!
The Constitution requires that each Council district consist of five Senate districts.
The Census recognizes that counties don’t cut it in New England, so they came up with New England City and Town Areas. The idea is to lump people together who live and work together – doesn’t look like our districts, but that mapping tool would be improved if you could use those borders as well – the files to create them are here.