There is an amazing post on Daily Kos outlining how a California style non partisan redistricting commission would’ve allocated districts across the country. For what it’s worth, Massachusetts did a pretty good job this round and was only slightly modified. The standards include full compliance with the VRA, keeping towns and county borders intact, avoiding water based borders at all cost, and putting similar demographics into the same district. It is still as much of an art as a science, but instead of serving as an incumbent protection racket or conservative power grab it serves to better represent us. Using this process, Democrats definitely lose some seats in Illinois, but generally gain significantly in OH, PA, NJ, WI, and CO. More importantly the popular vote for Congressional candidates, which was solidly Democratic would actually yield a Democratic majority under this proposal. As the poster suggests, progressive should start pushing for this using ballot initiatives in several states. Independents should get on board with this, Republicans in the rare states where they were on the losing end (IL) and good government groups as well. One could see Michael Bloomberg backing this as well. What are your thoughts?
If it makes sense given the other criteria to use a river as a boundary between districts what’s the harm in that?
The linked post refers to “water contiguity.” Water often is discussed in the context of contiguity requirements in redistricting. Two land areas separated by water should not be combined into the same district unless the water is easily and readily crossed. Otherwise the two areas have little interaction (“can’t get them from here”) but are lumped together.
It’s less problematic because there are still relatively points of access, but Senate district 2EM puts Dracut on one side of the Merrimack without direct access to the other communities since there is no bridge. Of course I think Dracut and Tewksbury belong with a Lowell-based rather than Lawrence-based district anyway.
In some districts rivers, waterways, and even interstate highways connect otherwise entirely discontiguous populations. See, for eaxmple, AZ-2 in this list of most gerrymandered districts.
poster took a crack at Massachusetts, and had an exchange with the original poster (Stephen Wolf) in the comments. Also worth looking at.
The conventional wisdom has always been such a district would favor the GOP, but he says it’s safe D. One drawback is that the NY border district extends pretty far east again.
Not that many people want to live near NY.
but the current map fixed that which I saw as a good.