One of the most politically-important decisions that gets made in our system of government is in the process of being made right now: Redistricting. It’s a process that is only done once every ten years, and Massachusetts is going to be impacted by the process even more this year, now that we’re losing a congressional seat.
I just wrote my thoughts on the subject at length over at my own blog — both in terms of being bound by the Reapportionment Act of 1929, which limits us to 435 seats, as well as our local process of drawing the lines, which is dominated by behind-closed-doors politics and has led to some serious corruption in Massachusetts in the recent past (Hello, Tom Finneran, how’s it going?).
Nationally, our voices are continually drowned out, allowing large and wealthy special interests to dominate the process. Locally, we’re left with a political process that is more about protecting incumbents than it is in creating districts that are representative of the people who live in them.
What we’re left with are seats that look more representative of gross works of art than they are the people who live in them, and as interesting as some of our districts have become to look at, I don’t think they benefit the people.
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A picture of the Fourth Congressional District.
A picture of the Fourth Congressional District in Beetlejuice.
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So, I come here to ask the people of Blue Mass Group an important question: What can we do? We have, at this blog, a diverse set of talented and intelligent readers and writers from all across the Commonwealth. We’re interested in people-powered politics, and in fostering change for the better. We also have core members of the Democratic Party — as well as the fourth estate — who are interested in what we have to say. Surely, we can come together and discuss what a good set of congressional districts would look like, something that is geographically and demographically cohesive. Is this something a number of us would be interested in getting together and at least discussing?
barney frank on gerrymandering
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p>Now, the point I’m making with this video is that yes, our congressmen do admit that there is gerrymandering, BUT, from the looks of it, they neither think there is anything wrong with it nor make any plan to fix it.
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p>When voting is the foundation of a democracy, the importance of HOW we vote can’t be overstated.
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p>Barney frank thinks it’s a big joke. It’s the burden of the democrats, those who hold sway and power in MA to convince him it is not.
He’s very good at making sure everyone in his district is represented. I used his district as an example not because Barney Frank’s done anything wrong (he himself makes the point quite well that he hasn’t in the video you linked to), but because the process itself has led to a district that’s not ideal and only fits together because of someone with Frank’s skill and commitment to representing the people.
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p>Nothing Barney Frank said at all made it seem like it was some kind of “big joke,” he simply made the point that Republican leaders, a while back, ‘broke’ the seat. He was right. As for fixing it, Frank’s done about as much as he can by ensuring that his office has a reputation for being one of the finest in terms of constituent services and ensuring people are well represented across the district.
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p>When it comes to the lines of the 4th Congressional, it’s not in Frank’s ability to “fix” it, because those decisions are made on Beacon Hill and have been made over the course of many years, and each time the districts are redrawn along these kinds of lines, it makes it that much harder to significantly redraw them.
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p>That’s not to suggest that Beacon Hill won’t take these kinds of politicians into consideration, but ultimately if they try to “fix” one seat, they’re going to pretty much have to fix them all — which is a much more difficult process given the realities of our system, how influence is exerted and the kind of response big changes through a political process are going to get from constituents.
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p>At the end of the day, while there may be better ways of doing it than through Beacon Hill, many of the underlying problems cannot be addressed until there’s reform of the 1929 law. In the meantime, while we try to make this year’s redistricting “right,” I think you’re going to find yourself more helpful to the process if you avoid name-calling and those kind of tactics and instead try to contribute positively to the conversation. I’m very serious about seeing if there’s members of this community who want to put their collective heads together and actually think about what good and fair districts would look like — if we were to come up with some user-driven concepts I think they could influence the process for the better.
…there will be public hearings on this around the state. I assume with losing a district each remaining one will be bigger geographically than now. I still like my own attempt if I do say so myself, though we need updated figures and I did not take into account incumbency or racial and partisan makeup, nor did I have information to divide communities by ward and precinct.
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p>Can you elaborate on “corruption” in this context? I know Finneran got into legal trouble for lying about his role though I never did figure out what his motive was to lie beyond political spin. To me the word corruption basically means bribery. Were legislators bought off to draw lines a certain way? As distasteful as gerrymandering is I do not see that per se as corrupt.
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p>I’ve also thought for a while now that the House should have 600 members. I for one can see the logic of not expanding everytime. 600 will give most states additional representation and has the mathematical advantage of being very easy to figure out various supermajority ratios.
Christopher is right that Finneran got into trouble for lying about his role in redistricting and that there was never a charge of underlying corruption. That is, as Christopher points out, the lying was not done to cover up for anything illegal beyond having come up with a redistricting plan that was ruled unconstitutional.
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p>The more important point to me is that the redistricting in question was the MA House of Representatives not the congressional seats. If memory serves, Speaker Finneran offered a very interesting congressional redistricting plan that made much more geographic sense than the one we have. It included a southern MA district.
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p>A question for Blue Mass folks to consider would be whether or not they would be comfortable with a southern MA district that would ensure that folks from the southern part of the sate were represented by someone who lived south of say Quincy. Such a district would be very likely to go Republican.
Finneran acted on the assumption that Marty Meehan would run for Governor and wrecked havoc on Greater Lowell. There were four districts among Lowell and its immediate neighbors as I recall and a broad coalition came together to “save the 5th”.
Think redistricting is so easy? There are a bunch of tools that let you try your hand at making a map. I used Dave’s Redistricting tool a while back to make a couple maps. Most of them I don’t have available, but here’s one that I put together that combines Olver and Neal’s districts.
Getting the size of the districts to be roughly the same without breaking up too many town/ward lines and minimizing changes to current districts is trickier than you think.
One has to ask, what should be the goals of creating congressional districts? Most of the complaint focus on the strange shape of the districts — is a visually pleasing shape really a major goal of the process?
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p>I would tend to agree that “stacking the deck” to protect either incumbents or parties should not be a major goal either. But what should be the goal?
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p>We know that roughly equal numbers in each district is a paramount goal. What about beyond that?
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p>Should similar communities be placed together? What if you have 50 suburban communities and 1 rural community, should the rural community be placed with the suburban communities or should a pretty rectangular district be sacrificed so that the rural community can join with another district that is predominately rural?
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p>Should cities be split among multiple districts, or should they be kept together? I know that on a state level, Springfield is split up so that we have more representatives, but fewer that solely belong to Springfield. That can be good or bad — we have zero State Senators living in Springfield, both live in suburban communities and are more in-tune with suburban issues.
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p>On the flip side, we currently have four resident house representatives, with three other districts that only marginally touch Springfield. In theory, we could have seven representatives from Springfield even though our population supports maybe four, but on the other hand, it would be just as easy for us to have just two resident representatives (only 2 districts are 100% within city boundaries), with five others coming from the suburbs.
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p>I feel like Springfield’s representatives that share their districts with other communities are more timid about working for Springfield because they have to appeal to suburban voters too, that may make them more moderate, which could be good, could be bad. Hard to say. So maybe not grouping similar populations together makes things better, although this causes many minority groups to feel shut out of the process because it is winner-takes-all.
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p>I think the best idea is to increase the size of congress, this would make the representation more granular and would also make congress harder to lobby.
with part of Springfield, Ludlow, Wilbraham, and East Longmeadow. We’re a rural, bedroom community of 6,300. The three suburbs are approximately the same size. I don’t even know which part of Springfield is with us, but I would guess our needs at the community level really differ.
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p>Given Granby’s size, we are a convenient redistricting football. We have been represented in the state senate by Shannon O’Brien, Stan Rosenberg, and Gale Candaras.
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p>This might be the problem: who says that freehanding the map it is the answer?
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p>We have a more or less arbitrary process, freehand drawing of a map, bounded by a more or less arbitrary rule, the absolute number of seats available. What we end up with is an incoherent melange of cartography and pre-specified outcomes based, ostensibly, upon population but with little regard to density or clarity.
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p>My point exactly. “Roughly the same” means something entirely different when your base metric is geography rather than population. The overriding concern ought to be population, and geography less a concern.
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p>What might be necessary is to make the process bound by less arbitrary rulesets. For example, the present setup seems to default to a politically motivated ‘voting district grab’ so that we have house districts that grab voting districts regardless of other municipal boundaries like city and town lines. Voting districts can change often but town lines do not, so why not make the town lines the rule and, in areas of overlapping house districts make geography and abutting voting districts the split. So take the census per town and collate the HoR districts up that way. Some towns will be in two, or more, districts. So for a town that is in District X and also in District Y, divide voting districts up, first by abutment, that is each district that abuts a town that resides wholly in district X goes to X, those that abut towns wholly in District Y to Y. For those remaining districts in the town, go geographic. so if District X is to the east, all eastern voting districts to X, etc… Tiebreakers dependent upon the population, that is to say, if District X has 400K persons and District Y has 350K, then any leftover Districts go to Y.
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p>The basic idea is to have a set of rules that restrain the impulse to gerrymander… which impulses are unfettered when the process is unfettered…
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Of course the overriding concern is population. The map I produced above has districts all within 5,000 people of each other according to the population estimates provided by that site.
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p>But geography has to be taken into account for two reasons: 1) districts must be contiguous (okay, water counts) and 2) It’s dumb to break up towns just because you can. A town with six precincts shouldn’t have two members of congress. With some communities, Boston for example, it’s inevitable that they be broken up, but why should one precinct of Sterling, for example, be represented by a different congressperson than the rest of the town?
…unless there has been a shift in population since my attempt. I was able to get Boston into a single district which I think is preferable so the city does not dominate two districts.
Boston’s population is less than what these districts will be. You could take Boston, Cambridge and Somerville and make a district.
…that the entirety of those three cities would be much too big.
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p>I don’t recall saying geography ought never to be on account. I thought I was clear that geography was the last thing to take into account, but not discounted.
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p>Under the rules I posited above, most towns would be under one district. Where population and district boundaries collude to break up towns, that’s where a given town might have split representation. It’s simple: if we get 9 districts pick the nine most populous cities/towns in the state and radiate outward for each district. Draw a circle with radius from the geographic center of the given city and/or town to encompass surrounding town. In some places there will be gaps, in others overlaps. THATS when you amend the boundaries by precint rather than town: only AFTER you’ve done everything you can with town lines you amend by geography. Perfect? No. Better than the present system of incumbency protection and political infighting? Much. (which present system doesn’t much take into account city/town lines at all, not even where embarassment might ensue… )
Similar areas are generally going to have similar concerns simply because they’re in the same areas. One region may have a lot of farms, another may have common infrastructure problems, while another one may be majority-minority. Any one of them could be broken up as a matter of political convenience in some way or another, or we could try to make districts that make sense. Obviously, demographics come into play in making those decisions, but so does geography — and the two aren’t completely unrelated (does anyone think Newton and New Bedford are thrown together because it makes demographic sense?). Regions across this state have similar concerns and a shared identity — they shouldn’t be broken up because it’s politically convenient.
In many ways, Springfield has more in common with Worcester than with Granby even though Worcester is much further away.
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p>The main problem here is that there are many ways to classify a community (or a person), the classification depends on the issue at hand.
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p>If the issue at hand involves closing the Springfield Bulk Mail Center, it would be important for the representative to be concerned with the entire region; if the issue at hand involves redevelopment of brownfields, it would be important for the representative to be concerned with communities that have a lot of brownfields, so a single representative that had multiple urban areas might be better in tune with this issue; if the issue at hand involves the steering of African-Americans by real estate agents, then an African-American representative would probably be more likely to be in tune with this issue.
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p>That is why it is insane to expect that a single person can represent 700,000 individuals. It just isn’t possible. It isn’t possible to represent everyone, but if you’re representing a much smaller number of people, I think the variety of the representatives will increase, increasing the chance that people are represented in congress by someone, even if it isn’t their own congressman.
I think we can come up with a better system than 435. 700,000+ people is too many people.
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p>… which is how it’s done now.
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p>I think the pendulum can swing. We have the hand drawn map with few criteria save politics and expediency (the present system) and there is the wished for system that swings the pendulum all the way to the other side wherein we try, earnestly no doubt, to take everything into consideration. Neither of these systems are either workable nor altogether pretty and both make, I think, the wrong compromises. The city and town borders are the de facto outlines of any ‘shared identity’ that makes political sense, so keying off of them seems like a no brainer… that is, if you’re going to worry about such things. There will be compromises for some, but the idea is to limit the margins at which compromises are made and thus limit the number of people affected by those compromises.
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p>Personally, I’d simply like to know A) that everybody is represented and 2) the process by which the districts are drawn makes sense: one ought to be able to point at any given voting precinct in the state and know how and why said precinct resides in its district. Right now, you can’t say that.
I’m sure improvements could be made by getting people together with a local knowledge and with some more precise statistical analysis, but what his picture shows at the outset is that creating a different, more cohesive map is possible.
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p>I would submit to you that cities like Lowell and Lawrence, or Fall River and New Bedford (Fall River being partially split between the third and fourth), share enough in common that keeping those pairs of cities in their same, respective districts is a net positive than it would be to move them apart. There are a lot of things which can bind communities together and when there are those many things, efforts should be made to keep them together. A North Shore district without Lynn, for example, makes no sense. I’m sure I could come up with other examples like that, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head because these are the areas that I know a lot about.
quite the contrary.
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p>That is a neat tool, though. Maybe it could be helpful here.
I might be old fashioned, but each district should have about the same number of people in it. The district that did not grow as much or lost people gets eliminated.
That has been a constitutional requirement for quite some time.
I’d recommend one of two things, by Constitutional amendment.
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p>1. Since this is determined by the federal census, have the federal government redraw the districts in each and every state.
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p>– or —
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p>2. If the Mass. General Court is to retain the redistricting power, in cases where the state has lost population, the General Court should shrink as well, proportionately.
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that would ensure the largest districts are no larger than the smallest at-large seat. It would mean a fair number additional seats, which would allow for much more personal representation, freer from the power of special interests and more responsive and representative of the population.
What should be the criteria? We have some ideas, but maybe an itemized list. Geography, that’s what jumps out in District 4, overall population (David noted a requirement already), etc.
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p>There are some notes here on why certain towns need to be together, why?
The Public Mapping Project is co-led by our own local Dr. Micah Altman of Harvard. They have an open-source map editing suite that is a web-app runnable on common servers. I think several groups are running clusters of these for competitions and demos.
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p>I’m running impartial computer generated redistricting. I aim to generate an optimal compactness-based solution so that deviations from such a solution have to be justified on bases of actually improving community cohesion or administrative simplicity.
It’s not at all clear to me that drawing a district to be all rural, all suburban, or all urban is a good idea. It’s equally not at all clear to me that it isn’t a good idea.
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p>What does an ideal district look like? Take a simpler example: New Hampshire. They’ve got two districts, with a more rural northern region and a more sub/urban southern region. NH draws a vertical line, creating two CDs with somewhat similar demographics. Why not draw a horizontal line, creating a small, dense, more sub/urban southern CD and a large, rural northern CD? Which is preferable?
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p>This only considers density. This doesn’t consider industry (in MA: fishing, tourism, banking, high tech, ag, etc). It doesn’t consider finances of the residents — are there poor regions and wealthy regions? It doesn’t take race, religion, ethnic background, or other socio-backgrounds (in MA: white, hispanic, black; Catholic, Jewish, asst. conservative, moderate, and liberal Protestant, atheist, etc; yankee, black, 1900ish immigrant, Central/South American/Cape Verdean, Southeast Asian, etc etc). Should a good CD concentrate any of these, thereby guaranteeing they have a majority of a CD (and marginalizing the rest of the demographics) or should a good CD have a heterogeneous mix of lots of cultures of closer to equal size, thereby generating “equal footing”? What about physical infrastructure — how does proximity to commuter rail/highway matter? Water/electricity/natural gas district? How about artificial physical boundaries like towns or counties?
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p>I doubt that we can agree on what our goals are for a district, and if we can’t do that, how can we argue that a district is gerrymandered in the first place?
…made up of judges and population experts, as is done in many other states. This should return districts that generally keep communities intact rather than split, grouping together populations that have similar economic and political concerns. It is ridiculous that Frank represents Sharon and New Bedford, and that a number of districts snake into (Democratic-vote-rich) Boston and divide it multiple ways. It is further ridiculous that Steven Lynch acts as a conservative urban congressman while his district is largely suburban or exurban.
The reason I started playing with the redistricting tool was to see if I could come up with a way to dissolve the 10th district. I put together a fun map that combined the North Shore and Provincetown on PP’s recommendation, but that didn’t really pass the laugh test. Here’s another one that is pretty laughable, as it combines Worcester and Nantucket into the same district and Provincetown with Newton.
Still, this breaks the current 10th apart with pieces going to the 3rd, 4th, 8th & 9th.
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p>This map splits the 7th district up, leaving the rest of the districts to remain gerrymandered messes:
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p>This one eliminates the 1st and while it makes the 4th look a little less horrible, it has the disadvantage of making sure that Nikki Tsongas would be replaced by a Republican.
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p>Again, my goal wasn’t to come up with districts that looked pretty or made sense. What I wanted were districts that were of equal population, tried not to break cities or towns apart, and tried where possible to keep people with their same Congressperson. If I were to start from scratch, you bet it wouldn’t look anything like any of these.
I vaugely recall that the federal court which invalidated Speaker Finneran’s first unconstitutional effort to redraw the state legislative and Congressional districts found that Finneran’s first district map diluted minority representation unconstitutionally and violated the Voting Rights Act.
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p>It does seem a little unusual and embarrassing that progressive Massachusetts has been represented for many years in the U.S. House of Representatives by, at least, 9 (of 10) white upper-middle class males.
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p>I would like to see one of the Boston area districts re-drawn so that a minority or female candidate would have a fair chance at winning one of our now 9 Congressional seats. Of course, I would also support any Congressional map that would prompt a successful Democratic primary challenge of the quixotic and, at times, reactionary Congressman Stephen Lynch.
Dan Winslow’s working on it. Some details here.
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p>RMG not quite sure what to make of it all.
Could you explain to me the criteria that you would use to draw a district more likely to be won by a female? I can’t think of a single systematic way to do that…
a female Congressional candidate, who often has more difficulty raising money than her male counterpart, would not have to buy television and radio ad time in two different media markets, e.g., Providence and Boston.
Sure, drawing districts to protect incumbents is wrong, even if (as in our case) I like our incumbents. To protect our party per se is similarly wrong, if it deprives the opposition of the opportunity to mount reasonable challenges.
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p>But Congressional districts are for national offices. If Massachusetts reforms, while Texas mounts gerrymanders even between census decades, then nationally our side is at a significant unfair disadvantage. And that’s also wrong.
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p>We almost need something like the national electoral vote compact for redistricting reform. Maybe we could pair with a 9-CD red state.
On my idealist side, everyone who can should do fair redistricting where they can.
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p>On my vindictive side, I want California to grab 5-10 districts for democrats to offset Texas.
This little toyis a time sink. Given that the tool works on existing election districts, I think I did really well to bring each district in within 800 people of the goal of nine equal districts with a population of 705,455.
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p>I also took a close-up shot of the Boston area, so you can see the way this works in the densely-populated parts of the state. Here goes my explanation.
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p>1. (Blue) Berkshire, Springfield, and the Southern Tier: Berkshire County, Hampden County (excluding Holyoke and Chicopee), then follows the souther tier of the state through southern Worcester County as far as Millville and Mendon.
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p>2. (Green) Down by the Old Mill Stream: Think old mill cities. The district starts with Holyoke and Chicopee, then wraps around the college towns to follow the Vermont and New Hampshire border to encompass the old mill cities of Athol, Gardner, Fitchburg, Leominster, Lowell, Methuen, and Lawrence. This district is 14% Hspanic.
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p>3. (Purple) Left of Arlington and Brookline: I had fun with this one. Start in Arlington and Brookline, and go west to include Watertown, Newton, Lexington, Wellesley, Marlborough, the northern Worcester suburbs, a bunch of cows, then Amherst and Northampton.
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p>4. (Red) Gerry’s district.: Unless you are willing to carve the place into a salamander, there’s not much you can do with Essex County. It starts in Winthrop, takes in Revere and Lynn, and most of the rest of Essex County (except for Lawrence, Methuen, and a little chunk of Haverhill).
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p>5. (Yellow) Harvard to Harvard: Starts at Harvard Square, contains Cambridge, Somerville, then works its way north, then west, through Medford, Winchester, North Reading, Tewksbury, Concord, Ayer, Harvard, and Lancaster.
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p>6. (Teal) WFFF: Pronounced Woof. Worcester, Framingham, Franklin, and Foxborough.Also takes in Avon and most of Dedham.
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p>7. (Gray) Boston Plus A district that doesn’t split Boston. Every ward and precinct, plus Milton, Needham, Randolph, Canton, and a small slice of Dedham to make the numbers work.
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p>8. (Lighter Purple) Cities South This district starts in Quincy, takes in Weymouth, Brockton, Taunton, and Attleborough.
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p>9. (Light Blue) Seekonk to the Sea Follows the shore, starting at Seekonk, and following the South Coast to include New Bedford, Fall River, Plymouth, the Cape and Islands.
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p>If you ask the incumbents, this one is dead on arrival, but I did try to group as many similar communities as possible, which explains how Holyoke and Lawrence end up in the same district. I have always thought the districts that snake vertically to carve up the South Coast really diluted the common theme of these seaside communities. Under this scenario, Capuano runs for the Senate, Markey has some real fun with Cambridge and Somerville, and I am sure Barney will find joy in representing the western towns in his district.
“The Nine Nations of Massachusetts.”
This feels like an exercise out of Commonwealth Magazine.
to your imagination.
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p>Though I think your boundaries show more familiarity with the eastern part of the state than its western end.
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p>I too have wasted time at that site:
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p>Mostly on the (debatable) theory that CDs should be economically diverse as well as geographically coherent. So, pair Kingston with Brockton, Cambridge with Lowell etc., the one exception being Boston.