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The Land of Lincoln: The Land of Huge Swings; or why I doubt a 14-4 is at all realistic

by: jsramek

Wed Mar 30, 2011 at 1:25 AM EDT


Illinois is one of the few prizes for Democrats going into the 2010 round of redistricting.  Republicans currently control the delegation, having swung four sitting Democratic congressmen out of office in 2010.  There are only eight Democrats currently to 11 Republicans in the delegation, which must shrink by one.  But as luck would have it, Governor Quinn managed to narrowly become elected to a full first term, and Democrats managed to hold onto their majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.  Thus, Democrats get to draw the map and it will likely be a savage map toward the GOP.

Okay this much is known, and many people have drawn Democratic gerrymanders; indeed I am currently working on a 12-5-1 map myself that will be posted in a week or two once I tabulate all the precinct data (which is taking forever!).  

This, however, is a more focused diary.  It argues that Illinois is a land of massive swings between 2004, 2008, and 2010 and that only by drawing a map that survives these three cycles can one be really sure that they are drawing a Democratic map versus a dummymander.  Our base got energized in 2008 but did not turn out in 2010, and that was most pronounced in the suburbs where many of us want to draw new Democratic seats.  It is not that the GOP vote went up much, but rather that our vote plummeted, and plummeted more than probably elsewhere in the country given the home-state effect in 2008.  Kerry's vote in 2004, although dated, shows us a neutral year and it should be read also as cautionary regarding the vote pluralities a Democratic candidate can expect.

One more thing: although I include Alexi numbers here, Illinois is a state without party registration and a state full of moderates and independents.  Really to be truly safe in a 2010 style election, I believe you must look in the weeds and look down-ballot at which lever voters were pulling for Congress rather than which one they were pulling for governor or senator.  Certainly I would imagine that politicians who have to win elections are doing just this thing right now as they contemplate how they want to carve up the state.  

To make these points, I look into the weeds of one district in my budding map, a new Democratic-leaning 14th to elect Bill Foster back into Congress, connecting Aurora, and Joliet along with Elgin and Dekalb.  I imagine that Lake County/northern Cook will show a similar pattern when I get there, as will Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, etc.  But for now let's look at the new 14th that I am hoping will get drawn.
jsramek :: The Land of Lincoln: The Land of Huge Swings; or why I doubt a 14-4 is at all realistic
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New District 14th (Hultgren is being drawn, along with Roskam and Biggert, into a super Republican vote sink starting in Republican areas of Kane and snaking through Dupage and ending in super Republican areas of Will).  Foster lives in Batavia so this would be "his" district unless a Joliet politician primaried him.

Racial data: 49.3% white, 33.5% Hispanic, 11.1% Black, 4.4% Asian, thus technically "majority-minority" which was unintended but fortuitous all the same.  Illinois just amended its redistricting statute to emphasize, wherever possible and consistent with the VRA, the creation of coalition districts.  Also, the more I think it through, and the politics of it, I find it hard to convince myself that Democrats in Springfield will actually draw a second Hispanic seat, or that doing so would be required.  Hispanics still don't vote in any sizable numbers in Chicago (look at the wards that Gutierrez has now if you doubt this), so would 65% and 57% districts really give Hispanics sufficient VRA protection to be able to select a candidate of their choice?  I am increasingly dubious.  So, draw a coalition district like this, plus one probably for Lipinski and you have something that is a compromise.

2010 congressional ballot (aggregating Foster, Harper, and Halvorson votes for areas pulled from the current 14th, 13th, and 11th, assuming for the sake of argument that a Democratic vote for congressman/woman in one district is a generic Democratic vote in another).

Generic Dem-Generic Rep: 80,538-67,285 (54.48%)

Some notable areas:
Aurora: 11,932-6,691
Elgin: 10,220-8,767
Dekalb: 5906-4004
Joliet: 12,461-6,331

Alexi does a bit worse but still carries this district slightly 50.74% to 49.26%, so it suggests to me that it would have withstood the 2010 GOP tidal wave (just).  Without knowing at all what the next ten years will bring, but being a bit cautious-minded, this might model well for what a 2014 2nd Obama midterm election (assuming his reelection) might look like, or for that matter 2018.  Our voters are more prone not to show up in off-year elections whereas the GOP's are; it is a huge problem, and one that that we ought to be very realistic about when we draw our maps.

Okay, let's look at two years earlier when Obama romped to his 25 point landslide in his home state.

Obama 161,485 - McCain 85,174 (65.47%... look at the swing between the two years)

Notable areas:
Aurora: 21,472-7,444
Elgin: 20,394-9,858
DeKalb: 12,456-4,333
Joliet: 22,748-6,023

Notice an alarming pattern here?  While we carried all four of these reliably Democratic cities in both cycles, the all-crucial pluralities coming out of them simply plummeted.  The less Democratic areas in the seat used to connect the cities did swing from Obama to generic Republican between 2008 and 2010 but this doesn't account for the swing so much as our voters simply not showing up.  

Now, finally, let's look at what a 2016 election without an Illinoian at the top of the ticket might look like.  We know what this probably looks like because we have Kerry 2004 to look at.  Again, Kerry would have carried my district, and by a healthy 54-46% margin.  But the Obama 2008 turnout numbers were historic and probably cannot be counted on across an entire decade worth of political cycles.

(Caveat: Will County doesn't have publicly-available precinct data going back before 2005, much to my annoyance.  What I did, therefore, was estimate what the likely vote share would have been for the part of Will in this district by extrapolating its 2008 numbers back onto 2004.... E.g., if 60% of Obama's total 2008 vote came from this portion alone, I am assuming that 60% of Kerry's county-wide total came from this portion as well.  A bit of an if given likely greater turnout in Joliet than elsewhere, but probably not affecting the topline total much).

119,000 Kerry - 101,000 Bush (~54%)

Notable areas:
Aurora: 17,249-13,057
Elgin: 14,359-14,486
DeKalb: 10,118-6,957
Joliet: probably 16-17,000 Kerry, 8-9,000 Bush

Having eyeballed the data for the rest of the state but not actually tallied it up precinct-by-precinct yet beyond some of the Chicagoland seats, I can vouch for this being repeated in loads of other places in the state other than Chicago.  Chicago turned out fine in 2010; it is why Governor Quinn was re-elected.  The rest of the coalition that adds up with Chicago to form 55-57% of the electorate most neutral years did not, and that is why we have Republicans representing Joliet, the Fox Valley, and Rock Island of all places.

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The Land of Lincoln: The Land of Huge Swings; or why I doubt a 14-4 is at all realistic | 14 comments
Here's the best response to your reasonable point:
Across the country, democrats are packed into overwhelming vote sinks. This will get slightly worse next year. So in order for the makeup of the house to remotely reflect the national mood, we need more "opportunity" seats. If we can't win barely Kerry seats, we're not winning the House anyway.  
possibly
you might be correct.  It would depend on what kind of candidates we run of course.  I can tell you from running the 2010 numbers for the new 8th that I have drawn Joe Walsh out of (he's packed with Manzullo) and Melissa Bean into, even without it going a foot into McHenry now and grabbing Waukegan, it only voted 52.5% for a generic Democrat in 2010 and Bush carried it in 2004.  Melissa is a perfect fit for a district like that but Jan is not; indeed, you have to be careful in not unpacking her and Mike Quigley too much that they face problems getting elected.  It is the reason btw that I drew a suburban seat here; my gut tells me that Aurora, Elgin, and Joliet voters are willing to vote Democratic but do not like Chicago politicians.
[ Parent ]
One other thing...
and I didn't have any space to comment on it in the diary itself, but it involve the ramifications of the Citizens United case for congressional races.  Perhaps I am being pessimistic here, but building a seat that would have still broke for a Democrat in the 2010 congressional ballot and then going from there guarantees that we will hold a stable 11-12 seats throughout the decade and not risk having GOP money swamp us in more swing ones.  I suppose you could try for 12-4-2, but that would just mean that in most years you would have 13-5 and a somewhat shaky 13-5 perhaps as low as 11-7 if you weakened Democratic seats to the point where a flood of GOP money and depressed turnout like in 2010 recurred again.  Intrinsically, is there much of a difference between 13-5 and 14-4?  I would rather be sure of holding down 12 seats for sure, playing for a 13th and conceding the GOP 5 (Roskam/Biggert/Hultgren vote sink in Dupage), Manzullo/Walsh, Kinzinger/Johnson, Schock/Schilling, and Shimkus is what I am envisioning right now with a swingy downstate cities seat where Johnson is drawn out of.
Low turnout in poor Democratic years is the main issue
Aurora, Elgin and Joliet would probably equal enough for a Democrat to hold in most years, but that low turnout may still prove problematic. 13-5 or 12-6 or 12-5-1 are the numbers Democrats need to consider. Manzullo and Roskam can be used as vote sinks, Shimkus and Johnson would maintain close to what their current districts are, while Walsh could possibly be put into swing district or a sink, depending on ambitious Democrats are. At least a couple of incumbent on incumbent primaries would occur, as there would be a few GOPer's without seats.

24, male, African-American, CA-24, Democrat. Chair of the SSP Black Caucus.
Walsh
I don't think there's any need to get too clever here. He lives in McHenry which can easily go into Manzullo's district, leaving much of Rockford and the bluish northwest counties for a new Dem district.

41, Ind, CA-05
[ Parent ]
You can do two things I believe with Walsh....
The simplest path - and most geographically coherent - is to cut out Rockford for the new and improved 17th - and wrap around Manzullo and Walsh together in a northern Illinois GOP vote sink.  If you wanted to be clever, you could draw a lean GOP snake that would snake around my 14th (call it the 11th if you will) and throw Kinzinger and Walsh together.  You hope this turns into a bloody GOP primary (although given that the primary happens in March there's probably too much time for the GOP regulars to patch things up... but maybe not... maybe the Tea Partiers back one candidate and the regulars the other, etc.)  Then maybe a Melissa Bean-like candidate, in a strong Obama year, could win.  I suppose you could tinker with the 14th and trade Dekalb for Geneva and call it a day, or trade some of Joliet into the 11th.  But I wouldn't weaken a sure bet - my new 14th - or a new 8th and 10th (3 sure bets to return congressmen and women that would vote for Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker that don't current exist) to play in a 4th.  That's just me... but I like 4 sure pickups (the 3 I mentioned plus a 4th in the Rockford/Rock Island/Peoria area) to risking six and having just two in the end of the day because you draw the districts too marginally.
[ Parent ]
Great diary and yes
I have been saying all along that 12-6 or even 11-7 is the likeliest map to be drawn.  Naturally that depends on candidates and political campaigns.  Who ever  thought  IL17 would  go R?  So stuff happens.  

I approach Illinois from the standpoint that various incumbents will not want to scrifice their base area  at the altar of fickled finger of fate.  There are also community interests involved.  For instance its not clear to be me that Rockford democrats would have their county  carved in half.  That division would mean Winnebago county would likely not dominate a CD after being the dominant city in one for 160 years.  That's a lot of history to throw away to beat congressman Schilling.

I could be wrong but I see Illinois democrats doing a cleaner map then what we often see pictured here.

cleaner map probably not...
after all the current map isn't all that clean.  But less reckless than 14-4, you betcha!  These politicians have careers to look after, and Phil Hare, Melissa Bean, Bill Foster, and (less so Deb Halvorson) losing put the fear of god into them.

In my map as a whole, I start from the 1st assumption that the Chicago 7 have to be accommodated pure and simple before anything else happens.  The four VRA seats are easy really once you figure out how to balance Rush, Jackson, and Davis at 52% black so you avoid retrogression suits.  Then you have to think through whether Chicago will get a 2nd Hispanic seat or not.  I answered that question in the negative when I dug into the weeds and looked at presidential turnout in Hispanic wards in Chicago compared to midterm turnout this year.  Even when Obama was energizing our base, the turnout in the areas that you would draw that second Hispanic seat in plummet by comparison.  Hard to argue that you are giving Hispanics an opportunity to choose a candidate of their choice when they are being drowned by non-Hispanic voters in actuality.

Then, what to do about Lipinski.  He really is the problem child of this map.  If you draw him a bit further out, his views on abortion and some other issues become toxic for suburban Democrats.  If you draw him in to close, you put him in a majority Hispanic seat.  But, just so it happens, Illinois just amended its redistricting statute to encourage "cross-over" and "coalitional minority-majority districts."  I think the solution is to draw Lipinski into a 43-43 district with about 10-12% black and some Asian (don't split Chinatown in other words), and that would make most people happy.

So, then there are two other Chicago-7 politicians that need to be accommodated before we start with the suburbs.  Mike Quigley represents a mostly Chicago district now and is the easiest perhaps to unpack, but since he is a Chicago politician you need to keep him at 60/40 in a 2010 wave election I believe for him to sign off on it.  Ditto with Jan.  Are suburban voters that pulled the lever last fall for Melissa Bean or even Dan Seals going necessarily to vote for Jan?  I think some would, maybe even the majority of our base.  But remember, Illinois is the land of independents (hard to quantify because we don't register by party here, but I would guess probably as high as a 1/3 of the electorate would call themselves independent here).  It accounts for the wide swings in suburbia election to election, why even this year candidates like our liberal attorney general Lisa Madigan were getting 60-65% of the vote while Bill Brady, right almost to Attila the Hun, were winning the same precincts and areas 55-60%.  

Then after that, you can easily draw the 10th into a lean Democratic/safe Democratic seat by giving it areas around Navy Pier that aren't in Jan's or Mike's seats (so you aren't taking their bases away from them), connected by a very narrow tendril up Lake Michigan.  You can then draw Melissa a safer seat that she can return to Congress by giving her Waukegan and North Chicago and subtracting out all of the parts of McHenry she got creamed in.  That leaves enough Democrats leftover in suburbia realistically for just one more seat, the 14th I give you.  Rather than divide up these cities and risk a 0-2 blowout, I would rather aim for a 1-1 split, yielding the vote sink in Dupage.  Then Rockford goes together with Rock Island but probably no other city.  Peoria and its better Democratic turnout goes with Springfield, Decatur, and Urbana-Champaign (Danville isn't all that Democratic, and Bloomington even less so).


[ Parent ]
I like the idea of Peoria with those cities
I had not thought about it, but it makes sense.

24, male, African-American, CA-24, Democrat. Chair of the SSP Black Caucus.
[ Parent ]
agree
I drew Peoria in with the new northwest IL Dem district (IL17) in my map, but you could just as easily have IL17 take more (all?) of Rockford.  

41, Ind, CA-05
[ Parent ]
I am tallying by hand today the Winnebago election results
for 2010 where we got creamed, and 2008 where we did really well.  There are Democratic or 50/50 areas north of Rockford even you can grab into the seat.  Then you have traditionally Democratic-leaning western Illinois counties like Whiteside, Henry, Bureau sometimes, the area around Monmouth and Macomb, Knox and Galesberg, Fulton for some reason is also always Democratic-leaning.  You add up the population and you probably get a good lean Democratic seat without having to go into downtown Peoria.  And I think since Rockford and its immediate suburbia probably equals vote-wise Rock Island if not slightly exceeds it, you could probably ruffle less feathers that way.

But of course I am speculating here.  I have to do the counting of precinct-by-precinct first.  And the four data sets I am using to determine my map lines are 2010 congressional vote, 2010 senate vote, 2008 presidential, and 2004 presidential.  I have the extra 2010 there to give me guidance just in case the local congressional candidate tanked, but I really expect the Kerry 2004 data to be most illuminating once I get out of Chicagoland for what a normal Democratic turnout looks like.

[ Parent ]
12-6 is safe
and entirely doable.  That would still be a swing of +4 Dems, -5 GOP and probably the biggest swing in any single state next year, unless things get crazy in California under the new commission map.

We need a 25 seat pickup to get back in.  Illinois is obviously going to be a huge part of that, but we risk dummymandering by shooting for much more than 12-6 in this state.

13-5 is about the upper limit...
And when I say that, I am assuming that Melissa Bean runs again in a more kinder 8th and that 2010 was an aberration for Rock Island and Rockford, etc., where we simply tanked in 2010.  If you assume this, assume also that Bill Foster will try for his old seat.  That's 3 seats right there.  Then you swap out downtown white areas out of Danny Davis's seat for York Township in Dupage and hook those liberal voters up with Lake County and make a 4th pickup.  Best of all, it doesn't steal from Schakowsky or Quigley's bases of support.  If you stopped right there, you have 12-6.  But why stop there?  You then draw a swing/lean Democratic seat connecting all the cities in downstate that are split between various GOP seats.  This is a remnant of a 1991 GOP gerrymander that got frozen in place 10 years ago when they did incumbent protection.  In most years I think a 13-5 is what can be pulled off and that is what I would aim for, with the fallback drawing 12 safe seats so you have at least 12 Democrats in the delegation.
[ Parent ]
and 12-6 should be the absolute minimum they should settle for
I agree that 12-5-1 or 13-6 would probably be ideal, but I'll wait for RM's analysis.

Ad hoc, ad loc and quid pro quo!
So little time, so much to know!
[ Parent ]
The Land of Lincoln: The Land of Huge Swings; or why I doubt a 14-4 is at all realistic | 14 comments

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