After tweaking this district all evening, I am stumped. Are there any obvious batch of Democrats I am missing? I want to save southern Montgomery and Macoupin Counties for bolstering the 12th. I suppose I could always go into Fulton County, but then I would have to replace those Democrats with other voters for my new 17th. Coles County with Mattoon and Charleston might be another possibility, but if you are going mainly by Kerry 2004 results (which I am - the 2008 Obama results are just too rosy everywhere in the state although not as bad in the central and southern part of the state as in the Chicago metro area), Kerry lost that county quite handily in 2004. Either way you look at it, because both Springfield and Bloomington-Normal in a neutral year (like 2004) are lean-GOP cities, even with the powerhouses of Urbana-Champaign, Decatur, and the lean-Democratic cities of Peoria and Dansville, you still end up no better than 51.41% Kerry (at least at my valiant attempt at it).
Any thoughts of how I should try to bolster this district to 52-53% Kerry. That is my goal for creating 3 downstate lean-Democratic seats. I got Jerry Costello's district up to 53-46 simply by axing out Williamson, Union, Pulaski, and Alexander and adding in the town of Edwardsville in Madison County and bits of southern Macoupin and Montgomeryt counties. Likewise it is easy to make the 17th into a 53-47 Kerry district by going into Rockford.
This district for what it's worth, voted 59-40 for Obama in 2008 but only 51-48 for Kerry 4 years prior. I suspect the reason has largely to do with turnout issues among minorities and college students. We won't have those worries in 2012 but I worry about the remaining 4 election cycles.
I would still advocate drawing this map, even if it is not possible to go higher than 51-48. Other than Dick Durbin (who represented Springfield and Decatur when he was in the House), these cities as far as I know have never been a) brought together; or b) represented by a Democrat. Instead Illinois suffers from decades' worth of GOP gerrymanders with the result that these cities are always split up.
Still, if Democrats get a bit skittish, I would not be entirely surprised if they sought to bolster the 17th a bit more as well as the 12th at the expense of a new district.
I am as partisan a Democrat as most people on this website. As an Illinoisan, I am dismayed that my state elected five freshmen Republicans last fall but very grateful (for a whole lot of other reasons besides redistricting) that Governor Quinn just managed to hold on. Otherwise we would be looking at another "incumbent protection" map, which in a state that just elected five freshmen GOP congressmen last fall, would be tantamount to a GOP gerrymander.
Various would-be mappers such as Silverspring have proposed 14-4 maps that would make Delay and Phil Burton proud. But many of these maps go by Obama 2008 data, which is a fundamentally flawed data set to be basing districts on in my very educated opinion. On the surface maps provided by such places as usaelection.org, you can see counties like Kendall and Grundy and Stephenson and McHenry (just to name a few) that wound up in Obama's column in 2008. No seasoned Democratic politician in Illinois would ever call these counties that are Democratic by any means. Perhaps as suburban/exurban areas of McHenry and Kendall start to fill up and become more swingy, those counties might change.
This diary, however, focuses on a slightly different problem with the Obama 2008 data when compared against Kerry 2004 downstate (where it models pretty accurately - I understand the concerns people have about Cook and Dupage which may be a bit bluer now in 2011 but that trend is not noticeable anywhere outside of Chicagoland). The problem is this: several of the downstate cities that mappers such as myself and Silver Spring and others count on to create as many Democratic-leaning districts as we can, aren't really all that blue to begin with. In other cases, such as Decatur and Urbana-Champaign, they are quite blue, but turnout is a problem. Follow me across the jump where I demonstrate this using a new district I have been creating in most of my maps - a new 13th which disappears in Chicagoland and reappears as a vacant downstate cities seat.
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.
So I'm sure that everyone here is familiar with the simplistic analysis about Independents, that they're all swing voters, that they're all somehow supporting something coherent, that they are, like their namesake, completely independent from either political party. Savvy political analysists have long understood that the number of truly Independent voters is a lot smaller than the self-identification numbers suggest, but that doesn't stop even the most savvy of political analysists from assuming that Independent = Moderate. Not only is this wrong, it's actually the case that even moderate voters are not the swing voters that the media makes them out to be.
For example, would it surprise you to learn that in 2010, when Republicans absolutely destroyed Democrats in the House, Democrats won moderates 55-43? Or maybe you'd be interested to learn that Blanche Lincoln, after losing the election to John Boozman by 21 points that she had won moderates by 14 points.
Independents, as one might expect, went very big for the Republicans, favoring them to the Democrats by a 56-37 point margin. This should serve as a strong reminder as to why Independents are not moderates and why moderates aren't necessarily swing voters.
To read the chart that's below the fold, the Independent/Moderate numbers are the percentages that Democratic candidates got, the comparison is how much more Democratic the moderate vote was compared to the Independent vote. The final number is how well the Democratic candidate did among moderates relative to Independents. The only races here are ones with exit poll data from 2010 (hence why DE-AL and VT-AL are part of the data).Also the Y and N show whether or not the Democratic candidate won the moderate vote. Also, in the case of FL-Sen, I combined Crist's numbers and Meeks's numbers together for purposes of this analysis. Alvin Greene's numbers in South Carolina are also his own, but it's also worth mentioning that 13% of the moderate vote went to the Green nominee, Tom Clemonts, meaning that the combined moderate vote in South Carolina went 53% against DeMint even as the vote went 63-37 for him.
I was working on an extended redistricting of Texas, but I accidentally closed out the file! I had saved it using an .RTF, but I don't know how to open it (can anyone help with that??). But anyway, I did take a photoshot of Southern Texas before I closed out, and I think it might be worthwhile to examine what redistricting will look like along the border.
With the Wisconsin Senate's Democratic caucus in the news recently, I thought I would look at its composition and, since the chamber flipped in 2010, what the "lost" seats looked like geographically/demographically.
Conventional wisdom has it that turnout is the key issue in midterm elections. In view of that, how well did individual House Democrats do in convincing their 2008 voters to back them again in 2010? This post looks only at total votes, not margin of victory or defeat. Members who did not run in 2008 (Bill Owens, Mark Critz, Scott Murphy) or who had no Republican opponent in 2008 are excluded. The remaining 198 members' average 2010 vote was just 61.2% of their 2008 vote. Curiously the median was also 61.2%. These folks managed to retain at least 70% of their 2008 vote:
rep dist 2008 2010 retention
Pelosi CA 8 204,996 167,957 81.9
Pingree ME 1 205,629 166,196 80.8
Schrader OR 5 181,577 145,319 80.0
Hirono HI 2 165,478 132,290 79.9
McDermott WA 7 291,963 232,649 79.7
Eshoo CA 14 190,301 151,217 79.5
Giffords AZ 8 179,629 138,280 77.0
Titus NV 3 165,912 127,168 76.6
Blumenauer OR 3 254,235 193,104 76.0
Speier CA 12 200,442 152,044 75.9
Matsui CA 5 164,242 124,220 75.6
Lee CA 9 238,915 180,400 75.5
Woolsey CA 6 229,672 172,216 75.0
Lujan NM 3 161,292 120,048 74.4
Bright AL 2 144,368 106,865 74.0
Inslee WA 1 233,780 172,642 73.8
Honda CA 15 170,977 126,147 73.8
Dicks WA 6 205,991 151,873 73.7
Tonko NY 21 171,286 124,889 72.9
Himes CT 4 158,475 115,351 72.8
Sarbanes MD 3 203,711 147,448 72.4
Richardson CA 37 118,606 85,799 72.3
Lofgren CA 16 146,481 105,841 72.3
G Miller CA 7 170,962 122,435 71.6
Larsen WA 2 217,416 155,241 71.4
Schiff CA 29 146,198 104,374 71.4
Napolitano CA 38 119,795 85,459 71.3
Stark CA 13 166,829 118,278 70.9
Sherman CA 27 145,812 102,927 70.6
Roybal-Allard CA 34 98,503 69,382 70.4
Farr CA 17 168,907 118,734 70.3
A Smith WA 9 176,295 123,743 70.2
McNerney CA 11 164,500 115,361 70.1
Here we have 24 reps from the west coast vote-by-mail states of California, Oregon, and Washington and 9 from the rest of the country. David Wu and Peter DeFazio went unopposed (at least by Republicans) in 2008 and Brian Baird retired, so every eligible rep from Oregon and Washington shows up on this list. We also see a lot of people from completely uncompetitive districts. Nancy Pelosi and Jim McDermott put up nice numbers, a function of their dogged, relentless campaigning...heh. A function of most of their constituents being unwilling to consider voting for a Republican under any circumstances.
It would be more interesting to limit the list to people who actually faced a credible threat and thus had to run a serious campaign. As a first approximation, cut out anyone whose district is D+10 or better. Here's the top 10:
9 of the 10 are in red districts, and 4 of those are really red. Charlie Gonzalez' appearance on this list is misleading as he was never in any trouble. He didn't get his people out, but he didn't need them. In any case, it's understandably a lot harder for Dems to hold on to their presidential-year voters when a lot of them are normally inclined to vote red.
So the two basic rules appear to be: 1) People are more likely to vote in midterm elections when they can conveniently vote by mail, and 2) the bluer your district is, the less likely your voters are to swing against you in a red wave year. I did a simple regression analysis to compute members' predicted retention based on the PVI of their districts and whether their state predominantly uses vote by mail. Using only the D+9 or lower district as the sample, each point of PVI increased retention by an average of about 0.25 percentage points and vote-by-mail increased it by an average of 7 points. The "diff" column shows the difference between actual retention and predicted retention. So here is the adjusted top 20 as measured by differential:
rank rep dist diff
1 Pingree ME 1 19.6
2 Bright AL 2 19.1
3 Giffords AZ 8 18.9
4 Titus NV 3 17.0
5 Lujan NM 3 13.4
6 Schrader OR 5 13.3
7 Himes CT 4 12.3
8 Kratovil MD 1 12.3
9 Tonko NY 21 12.2
10 Perriello VA 5 11.8
11 Sarbanes MD 3 11.6
12 Arcuri NY 24 10.0
13 Boswell IA 3 9.6
14 Yarmuth KY 3 9.0
15 Peters MI 9 8.9
16 Courtney CT 2 8.9
17 C Murphy CT 5 8.8
18 Altmire PA 4 7.2
19 Heinrich NM 1 6.9
20 Boren OK 2 6.8
And it's still Chellie Pingree by a nose. Interestingly, the top 19 consists of 18 freshmen or sophomores and one Boswell. (Yep, the much-maligned Leonard Boswell arguably ran the best campaign of any House Dem with actual experience of serving in the minority.) This seems counterintuitive given that newer members have not had much time to build up goodwill and thus should be more vulnerable to losing support in a red wave year. Instead, it appears that these newer reps were used to having to scratch and claw for every vote and thus adapted more easily to an unfriendly environment than veteran reps who were used to winning easily did.
There was a big gap between #3 and #4 and an even bigger gap between #4 and #5. These four super-overachievers come from dissimilar districts and had dissimilar records and this time I don't see a pattern:
Pingree was one of the few Dems to win by a bigger margin in 2010 than 2008, and this doesn't appear to be any unobserved Maine-specific effect (Libby Mitchell coattails? heh) as Mike Michaud had a differential of just +4.8. This race did not get much attention, although it was considered competitive at one point. Was Pingree's remarkable retention number a function of a sloppy campaign in 2008 or a brilliant one in 2010, or both?
Bright almost never voted with the Dems, but Gene Taylor didn't either and Bright only retained 30% more of his 2008 vote than Taylor did! It still wasn't enough to get him over the hump, but he came a lot closer than similarly situated dudes like Lincoln Davis, Chet Edwards, and Travis Childers.
Gabrielle Giffords was the other red-district rep to make the unadjusted top 10. Her district is far more purple than Bright's but she also took many more risks than he did, voting for TARP, the stimulus, cap and trade, health care, and financial reform. This did not appear to hurt her much with the Dems and swing voters who voted for her in 2008. Like Pingree, she got zero up-ballot help but unlike Pingree she just barely held her seat. Her voting record may have motivated the people who opposed her in 2008 to stick around and pull the lever for that megatool Jesse Kelly.
Unlike the top 3, Dina Titus got some indirect help in the form of Harry Reid's fearsome operation. Titus probably deserves some credit for her strong showing, though. Shelly Berkley isn't a perfect comparison (much higher baseline Dem vote but also a much less threatening opponent) and with a D+10 district just missed the regression sample, but her differential would have been +4.9, and 12 points is a big spread in any case.
Here is the adjusted bottom 20:
rank rep dist diff
100 B Miller NC 13 -8.0
101 Nye VA 2 -8.1
102 Loretta Sanchez CA 47 -8.1
103 Space OH 18 -8.1
104 Cuellar TX 28 -8.3
105 Doggett TX 25 -8.6
106 Boyd FL 2 -9.0
107 Taylor MS 4 -9.9
108 Donnelly IN 2 -9.9
109 Grayson FL 8 -9.9
110 Filner CA 51 -10.1
111 Hinojosa TX 15 -10.2
112 Ortiz TX 27 -10.8
113 Pallone NJ 6 -11.3
114 Kosmas FL 24 -11.3
115 Visclosky IN 1 -11.6
116 Carnahan MO 3 -11.9
117 Etheridge NC 2 -12.4
118 C Gonzalez TX 20 -15.2
119 Costa CA 20 -17.8
There may be some unobserved variation related to demographics or state election laws, as the only state to put a rep in both the top 20 and the bottom 20 was Virginia. Glenn Nye managed to retain 20% less of his 2008 vote than Tom Perriello did despite voting with the Dems less often. Texas in particular was a sea of apathy for Dems, as the best performer was actually Chet Edwards at -6.9! That said, Bob Etheridge's failures are his own, not North Carolina's. Heath Shuler managed a +4.6 differential.
If you rightly ignore Gonzalez who won by 29 points, Jim Costa turned in the worst performance by a country mile. It's true that his district is young and poor and heavily Hispanic, but so is Raul Grijalva's, and Grijalva had a +3.6 differential without the benefit of vote by mail! (Grijalva's big mouth probably ran up Ruth McClung's vote total as opposed to depressing his own, as his margin of defeat was worse than even the hopeless Rodney Glassman's in some counties.) We'll see if Costa takes his narrow escape as a wake-up call, as commission redistricting is likely to put him in a less friendly district.
Just eyeballing the data, it appears that richer districts generally had more retention than poorer ones (note the 3 Connecticut dudes in the top 20 and the many south Texans in the bottom 20) so I may rerun the numbers once I find enough time to enter the median income of all the districts.
Some conclusions: Chellie Pingree and Leonard Boswell are underrated. Don't be surprised to see Bobby Bright, Dina Titus, Frank Kratovil, Tom Perriello, and/or Michael Arcuri resurface. Keep an eye on Ben Lujan. Russ Carnahan and especially Jim Costa need to step it up. It may be premature to speculate about Gabrielle Giffords' future (early signs are good), but she was a beast as of 2010. Vote by mail is great. The Texas Dems' 2010 turnout was uglier than the Texas Longhorns' 2010 offense.
Thoughts? (How do you post clean tables from spreadsheets? I tried saving them as PDFs but was unable to convert them to photos.)
So, everyone else does lists at the end of the year. Why shouldn't we? Here following, my picks for the 2010 Politicos of the year (in reverse chronological order).
We were going to wait for all results to be fully official before announcing our contest results (and awarding babka), but Joe "Norm Coleman" Miller seems to refuse to give it up (not even at the urging of Norm "Norm Coleman" Coleman).
Results were calculated as follows:
For the two-way races, we asked you for a winner and a margin. We take the difference of your predicted margin and the real margin (including third party candidates), and add that to your "regular" score.
For the three-way races, we asked you for the percentage each candidate was going to get. Again, we take the difference of your prediction and the actual percentage earned by the candidate, and add that to your "three-way" score.
Your total score is the sum of the "regular" and "three way" scores, with a lower score being better.
If you didn't enter a margin/vote percentage (or we couldn't understand what you entered), you got a "penalty" equal to the maximum score from a given race.
So a few summary statistics, by race:
CT-Gov: 69% of you correctly guessed that Dan Malloy would win. Average margin was Malloy by 1.52%.
OH-Gov: 57% of you correctly guessed that John Kasich would win. Average margin was Kasich by 1.53%.
OR-Gov: 90% of you correctly guessed that John Kitzhaber would win, on average by 3.39%.
CO-Sen: 57% of you correctly guessed that Michael Bennet would win. However, the average margin was Ken Buck by 0.40%
NV-Sen: 66% of you correctly guessed that Harry Reid would win, on average by 0.30%.
WI-Sen: 91% of you correctly guessed that Ron Johnson would win, on average by 5.17%.
FL-25: Only 47% of you guessed that David Rivera would win, but the average predicted margin was Rivera by 0.45%.
PA-07: 75% of you correctly guessed that Pat Meehan would win, by 2.96% on average.
VA-11: 79% of you guessed that Gerry Connolly would win, and correctly so; the average predicted margin was 2.81%.
In the three-way races:
MN-Gov: Average prediction was Dayton 44.45; Emmer 39.68; Horner 14.75.
AK-Sen: Average prediction was McAdams 31.88; Miller 33.36; Murkowski 33.62.
This could almost be a testament to the wisdom of crowds (...or alternatively, the central limit theorem) - as a collective whole, only one race would have been called incorrectly. If averages were an entry, it would have placed 21st.
So, of course, having done our best Census Bureau impression (at least we haven't congratulated ourselves excessively!) - who won?
itskevin, abgin, and UpstateNYer come on down! (And by "come on down", I mean "email DavidNYC with contact information" ...) Sidenote: remember, you had to have submitted your entries before 5pm EDT on Election Day - and had (and still have) a valid account at the time of announcement of contest.
Full results are available here. Thanks to everyone who participated!
If you didn't win, don't worry, there may or may not be a prediction contest for the Chicago mayoral race, too. I see David's babka and raise him one deep dish. That, or some dead fish wrapped in a copy of the Trib, depending on how we feel.
Heeding some of the comments I received on yesterday's map (thank you by the way!), I drew a slightly more VRA-observant, slightly more cautious, but still robust Democratic gerrymander of Illinois. This map assumes that the DOJ is going to insist on 60%+ for Chicago's already-protected VRA Latino district and therefore only drew a second one that is 52% Hispanic for Lipinski. Probably by the end of this decade it will become enough Hispanic to elect a Hispanic congressman. I was convinced in the commentary that my 56% Latino district of yesterday's map is of questionable legality.
I also drew each of the 3 VRA Black districts 53% Black. Why 53% you might ask? That is how much each of the districts contain now when you add in additional population to account for relative population loss. That is the maximum you can realistically place in a VRA protected Black district from Chicago after 2010, assuming that the census estimates are accurate. We'll know for sure in a few months. I was under the impression that the courts have started interpreting the VRA to require 50%+1 when possible of the population but perhaps it's a bit more in areas where it is feasible to create such districts?
The other two highlighted changes from yesterday is that I firmed up the 14th and made it an almost certain Democratic pickup like the district I designed for Debbie Halvorson. I do not agree with the comment made by a person or two that my finger down the lake for the 10th isn't robust enough. I double checked the numbers today: it is nearly 150,000 new residents of precincts that on average gave 85-90% of their votes to Obama and probably 80-85% to Kerry four years earlier. This more than makes up for the loss of Waukegan. Waukegan in turn helps Melissa Bean in her rematch with Joe Walsh. I respectfully disagree with the comment suggesting it did not help elect a Democrat congressman finally to the 10th, although not three-time loser Dan Seals (please!). Whether we want to quibble over whether I should label it safe Democratic or probably Democratic, Dolt is a one-term wonder.
The second significant change is that I created a second Republican vote sink in northern Illinois and placed Biggert, Roskam, and Hultgren in the same seat that swoops from the more Republican areas of DuPage out a narrow tendril to further exurbia. Should be fun watching that primary.
I then grouped Manzullo and Schiller together in a district that favors Manzullo. The third pair-up includes Schock vs. Kinzinger out of personal spite. One of these glamour boys has got to go! And it will be 2014 until they can think on taking on Dick Durbin or Governor Quinn; good luck again either!
