NJ-6 is #6! This is the second district from New Jersey to make our Top Ten list of least compact congressional districts. What’s up with the Garden State?
Check out this 2006 article in Slate, which tells the story of New Jersey’s Great Bipartisan Gerrymander. Key concept: “…the problem in Congress isn’t just the politicians, but also the process that put them in office.”
New Jersey's 6th Congressional District: The 6th least compact U.S. House District
For more juicy stories and powerful stats about redistricting in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (with a focus on our home city of Philadelphia), check out Redistricting the Philadelphia Region. It’s a taste of what you’ll find in our broader Redistricting the Nation site, launching on October 21.
As office-bound data geeks, we seldom get to do fieldwork. But last Thursday we had the pleasure of visiting New York’s 8th Congressional District — #7 on our list of least compact congressional districts. We were at the offices of the Green Film Company in Chelsea, being interviewed for a new documentary about gerrymandering. (Big thanks to Jeff, Susan, and Gary for all their great questions about maps and politics. We hope their film travels far!)
New York's 8th Congressional District: The 7th least compact U.S. House district
NY-8 is an urban gem. While the district appears contiguous in the image above, it’s really divided across two separate land masses — the northern part of the district stretches from the Upper West Side to the tip of Manhattan; the southern part skips along the edge of Brooklyn to pick up parts of the neighborhoods of Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Borough Park, Bensonhurst, Gravesend, Brighton Beach, and Coney Island. Physical geography played a role in the creation of this two-part district, but a bigger driving force was the desire of legislators to consolidate the Hispanic vote in neighboring NY-12.
We plan to pick up the pace of our Top Ten countdown over the next several days. The October 21 launch of Redistricting the Nation is fast approaching. Like the crew of the Gerrymandering movie, we’re working down to the wire. Good luck to all of us!
Redistricting the Nation kicks off in just a few short weeks, and boy are we excited. It’s the same kind of spine-tingling anticipation we feel leading up to a big game. A really big game. Like the 2006 Penn State-Florida State showdown. The Sunshine State is on our minds again as we countdown the ten most gerrymandered congressional districts. Florida’s Third Congressional District — a classic example of racial gerrymandering — comes in just eight ticks from the end zone.
Florida's Third Congressional District: The 8th least compact U.S. House district
FL-3 — created by a coalition of Republicans and Democrats after the 1990 census — starts in Jacksonville and pulls in African-American communities from Gainesville, Palatka, and Sanford as it moves south to the Orlando suburbs. It’s difficult to say what this district looks like because it’s so oddly shaped. But “flying squirrel, plunging downward head first” comes to mind, as does “mangled alien.” One colleague says that FL-3 reminds her of her toddler’s Ugly Doll, right down to the missing antenna, torn off during a rough-and-tumble play date.
Stay tuned for more countdown highlights later this week. Redistricting the Nation will launch on October 21.
Our work on the Redistricting the Nation site proceeds apace for the big launch on October 21. We’ll be revealing it piece by piece over the coming weeks– head over there now for your first glimpse. In exciting news, we are partnering with the Committee of Seventy (a local political watchdog organization with which we’ve collaborated on election incident mapping) to launch a companion site focused on the Philadelphia region. Both websites are aimed at educating and engaging the public around redistricting issues, prior to the 2010 Census and the 2011 national redistricting process.
Meanwhile, our national countdown brings us to the ninth least compact district in the U.S. House of Representatives: Maryland’s Second Congressional District.
Maryland's 2nd Congressional District: the 9th least compact U.S. House District
This district has a colorful history, having existed since the First United States Congress in 1789. Since that time it has passed through the hands of numerous parties with colorful and unfamiliar names like Know-Nothing and Unconditional Unionist.
While a number of Maryland’s congressional districts earn low compactness scores because their boundaries follow the filigreed shores of the Chesapeake Bay, there is also clearly an element of intent at work here. The district largely curves around Baltimore City to include portions of Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Harford Counties. A contentious redistricting process following the 2000 Census enabled the state’s Democrats to draw boundaries that rendered the Second District competitive and resulted in a pickup after nearly 20 years of Republican control.
Although we were far from a consensus, a quick poll of the office found that a hanger (albeit fragmented and turned sideways) was the most common interpretation of the district’s shape. Tell us what you think.
New Jersey's 13th Congressional District: the 10th least compact U.S. House District, by our reckoning
We’ll be launching our Redistricting the Nation site on October 5th 21st and we’ve decided to kick it off in style (and give our loyal blog readers a sneak peek of what is to come) by counting down through America’s ten least compact Congressional districts.
Coming in at the 10 spot is NJ-13. This Garden State district — first created in 1933 — includes parts of Jersey City, Newark, and the New Jersey coastline. In fact, if it didn’t sneak out into the water, the district’s upper and lower halves wouldn’t be contiguous. Experts are divided on how congressional districts in New Jersey will change form following the 2010 U.S. Census. The state may even lose a House seat, meaning that this could be your last chance to marvel at the shape of the Thirteenth and ask yourself “Y?” Others on the team insist that the district looks a bit like a scorpion. Weigh in with your opinion or join our office game of Redistricting Rorschach by leaving your interpretation in the comments.
Update: The site launch has been changed to October 21st– check out the exciting news. Great content remains consistent.
With the 2010 Census and subsequent reapportionment and redistricting fast approaching, the Cicero team has been plugging away on an updated version of the Gerrymandering white paper and a companion website (keep your eyes peeled for more news). A key part of this process has been an expansion of the metrics used to measure district compactness, which is often used as a proxy to assess the extent of gerrymandering.
As we’ve run the calculations over the past few months, the members of the team have cultivated a sense of mixed horror and wonderment at the feats of contorted district drawing achieved at every legislative level. We’ll frequently send images or call colleagues over as we come across particularly astonishing examples. Most of our analysis has been conducted in ArcMap, supplemented with some of the great tools in the ET GeoWizards plugin. Once we have identified polygons of geometrically low compactness, we overlay the district boundaries on a base map to see how they correspond to the physical geography of the area.
One of my personal favorites has long been U.S. House District 4 in Illinois, based on the shape of the area alone. Imagine my surprise when I took a look at the district in context and discovered that the town of Cicero lies smack dab in the heart of the district. What a strange coincidence and incongruity that the Roman statesman who serves as the namesake of our elected official lookup application has also lent his name to a city in one of the strangest-looking legislative districts in the country.
We’ve decided to take this as a sign that fates of the two Ciceros are set to coincide: we hope that the tools provided by Azavea’s Cicero API and on our forthcoming Redistricting the Nation website can facilitate public engagement through a transparent and open process that brings fair districting to every part of the country.
