The Get More Smarter Podcast: Stop Trying to Make "Gerrymandering" Happen

4 thoughts on “The Get More Smarter Podcast: Stop Trying to Make “Gerrymandering” Happen”

1. Why are they so mad anyways? They are super in the advantage for the 8th district.

   A Southern Denver suburbs district would lean Republican by 5-10pts. You could throw in Lakewood and make it a Biden district, but that would be weird to separate Arvada from Lakewood.

   A Northern Colorado (Ft Collins/Greeley) district would range from 6 points Republican to 1 point Democrat if it included Ft. Morgan and Sterling; if it included Longmont, it would average ~D+3 but that's still super winnable.

   Even the proposed Thornton/Longmont/Greeley district that the Hispanic Chamber proposed would only be blue by 6 points, and that's probably in a good year.

   The only way to really gerrymander the state for Democrats is to put Larimer in the 3rd and pair Weld with Boulder. But I have a really really hard time believing the COIRC would do that. It would be so fucking obvious that they were in the Dems' pockets, and, if you've been paying attention, you know that's not the case.

   Honestly the real scandal is that the geographic spread of voters (super dooper packed in Denver and Boulder, for example) has a pretty darn good shot of creating a 4R-4D split despite the fact that Colorado's lean would really warrant a 3R-5D split. In other words, you may have to gerrymander the map just to approximate the state's lean. Probably not, but we'll see.

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   1. Actually, what you describe is close to what I propose for a map that gives us 5 competitive districts (where one party has a less than 3% advantage over the other in registration).

      I don’t now how to insert images here, so I posted my maps on Facebook. Use this link to get to them: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1642966162567082&set=pcb.1642967182566980

      I have two sets of maps on there. One is using the current map and sandwiching in CD8 in such a way to have as few county splits as possible, the other is to radically change the map and have more competitive districts. By my reasoning, there are 3 districts that will never be competitive no matter what we do (CDs1, 4 and 5) so I focused on making the rest as even as possible.

      On each map I placed the dividing line between districts in a place where it can be easily moved to accommodate the actual numbers when we get them in August without messing up the over all plan.

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      1. You're right that the second map is very competitive, but it fails on the "whole counties" and "communities of interest" measures. It violates those two so badly that it's very obvious it exists for the purposes of changing the results of elections. (Whether that be to make them more competitive or to make them more blue.)

         I like the map with few county splits much better. I think the map is going to look surprisingly similar. But I still think it's time to separate rural and urban areas, barring whatever is needed to make D4 actually have people, and I think that changes things.

         Still, I appreciate you sharing your map. You put a lot of thought into them.

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         1. I thought having only 7 split counties for 8 districts was doing pretty good.

            As for "communities of interest" (COI) goes, that is a highly subjective term and my competitive map could be argued to accommodate communities better than the current one does. 

            NW Colorado (CD8) really does not have a definable COI beyond oil & gas being very important to their local economy. So I devised a district that has that interest as well as the bulk of the ski/tourist industry

            SW Colorado (CD3) has really no common interest with NW CO, but they do have the common link of agriculture with SE CO. This district also has a large Latinx population as well as-big-as-you're-going-to-get indigenous population.

            NE Colorado (CD4) is admittedly my ugly step-child of what was left after drawing the others, but worked out because it is one I said was solid R no matter how I cut it, so adding Douglas and Teller did not change that fact. It remains primarily the eastern plains, 

            Boulder (CD2) needs R-areas to be competitive so adding most of Weld and all of Morgan achieves that. It also remains the "higher ed" district by combining CU and UNC (currently it is CU and CSU).

            CD1 is Denver, CD5 is Colorado Springs, CD6 is Aurora (with rural portions of ArapCo and Adams), CD7 is Jeffco with enough Adams to fill the district.

            The cutline in CD5 is disproportionately a larger piece in CD4, but that is because of the mapping tool I was using. When we have the real thing, we can get down to Census blocks, so that will shrink considerably.

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