The Sunshine State makes a second appearance on our Top Ten list with FL-22—a classic example of an incumbent gerrymander. Florida’s 22nd Congressional District starts its beach crawl in Jupiter and ends in a flourish around Fort Lauderdale (without including much of the city proper). Republican redistricters handcrafted FL-22 after the 2000 Census by removing a heavily Democratic section of Miami-Dade County and extending the district boundaries further into Palm Beach County. Their goal was to provide a safe seat for Republican Clay Shaw, who was soundly re-elected in 2002 and 2004, serving a total of 13 terms in office. Democrat Ron Klein later defeated Shaw in the 2006 election.
Florida's 22nd Congressional District: The 2nd least compact U.S. House District
Tomorrow morning we’ll unveil the #1 least compact congressional district before launching our hotly-anticipated Redistricting the Nation site. Stay tuned!
The countdown continues, and followers of redistricting politics are sure to recognize the third least compact U.S. House district in the count: North Carolina’s Twelfth Congressional District. From its re-establishment following the 1990 Census and reapportionment, the district’s boundaries have been the subject of frequent litigation. The legal wrangling ultimately resulted in a ruling in favor of the plan’s legality because it was a partisan—rather than racial—gerrymander, once again illustrating the perverse logic that governs gerrymandering.
North Carolina's 12th Congressional District: The 3rd least compact U.S. House District
In 1996 the Supreme Court ruled that the boundaries of the district (different than those shown here) were unconstitutional because race had been a predominant factor in their formation, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Over the next 5 years the proposed district boundaries underwent a series of changes and court challenges, and in 2001 the Supreme Court upheld the district boundaries as constitutional, finding that political party affiliation, rather than race, had been the predominant factor in the district drawing process. By that time, of course, the 2000 Census had already been completed and the cycle would begin again.
Similar to IL-04, the case of NC-12 exemplifies that tangled considerations that are at stake when devising a districting plan. States that are subject to the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act have often walked a fine line with respect to ensuring that racial minorities are furnished with an opportunity for elected representation without verging into race-based gerrymandering. From the perspective of political parties, Republicans and largely Democratic African-American voters often find their interests to be strangely aligned through the packing of minority voters into a single district. White Democratic candidates, meanwhile, can benefit from the breakup of such districts, which can boost their chances of election through the dispersion of African-American Democrats into neighboring districts.
New York makes its second appearance in our list of the nation’s Top Ten least compact U.S. House districts in the #4 spot: the state’s 28th Congressional District is affectionately known as “the earmuffs” (appropriate given both its shape and its location in the frigid northern climes along the Canadian border).
New York's 28th Congressional District: the 4th least compact U.S. House District
Although NY-28 has been represented by a Democrat for more than 20 years, it is in fact a product of a gerrymander by the once-majority Republicans of New York’s state legislature, who have long maintained a hold on state legislative districts in the northern part of the state through prison-based gerrymandering (more here and here). NY-28, however, represents a classic case of gerrymandering through “packing”: concentrating members of a voting bloc in a single district, thereby allowing the other party to win the remainder of the districts. The 28th District skirts the shores of Lake Ontario to connect Democratic enclaves in the cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls in the west to those in Rochester, to the east. This gerrymander seemed to serve the Republicans well until NY-27 switched to Democratic in the 2004 elections and NY-25 and NY-29 flipped in 2008. Republicans still hold NY-26, directly to the south of NY-28.
It’s hard to predict what the future will hold for the shape of New York’s Congressional districts. Democrats currently control both houses of the state legislature, but the defection of two members of the Democrats’ slim 32-30 Senate majority prompted a leadership crisis earlier this year. Moreover, all of the seats in both the Assembly and the Senate are up for grabs in the November 2010 elections, leaving responsibility for the subsequent 2011 redistricting an open question.
Eagle-eyed blog readers will recognize the 5th least compact U.S. House district, Illinois’s Fourth Congressional District, from our earlier post, or perhaps from an article in The Economist called “How to Rig an Election” or the slideshow accompanying a Slate piece on the use of mathematical algorithms in redistricting. What is it about this Chicago district that attracts so much attention and how did it come to look this way?
Illinois's 4th Congressional District: The 5th least compact U.S. House District
Unlike some of the entries in our Top Ten list, IL-04 is an inland district whose shape has no apparent relationship to physical geography. The two major portions of the district are connected by a thin, C-shaped thread that is just one block wide in many places, running along railroad tracks and tracing Interstate 294 to the west. The district’s boundaries were drawn in relation to human geography, capturing two majority Hispanic communities—a largely Puerto Rican one to the north and a largely Mexican one to the south—and almost surrounding the majority African-American IL-07, which extends to the east.
The post-2000 Illinois Congressional redistricting plan was the subject of multiple lawsuits, some of which charged that it failed to meet the compactness requirements of the state constitution. The district is yet another illustration of the tensions inherent in the redistricting process, between the value of compact districts and the Voting Rights Act requirement that ethnic minorities have sufficient opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
The case of IL-04 also represents the challenge (likely to grow as the country’s Latino population increases) of drawing districts that afford both African-American and Latino communities the chance at elected representation, particularly in urban areas where these populations often live side by side but may be geographically dispersed due to historical patterns of urban development.
We suspect that 2011 will bring many more lawsuits challenging the spatial interpretation of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act—not to mention political self-interest—that legislative district boundaries represent.
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.
