In today’s class we’ll start drawing Congressional Districts using Dave’s Redistricting App. We’re going to take a 2 week break from R.

Outline

  • Census Resources

  • Homework review

  • Redistricting Project

  • Readings Discussion

  • Dave’s Redistricting App

  • Assignment 6



Census Resources

Finding the right variable can be confusing no matter where you are looking for data.



Homework review

See the Homework Solutions in the class 6 folder folder.

See class3_homework_update.R for new functions to create categorical variables

  • case_when()
  • if_else()


We’ll walk through assignment 5b and 5c scripts in detail


Redistricting Project


We’re going to learn about redistricting by actually drawing district maps for Georgia (or another state if you prefer). We will each draw Congressional maps that prioritize different goals. Then we’ll use R to compare your maps to current maps, proposed maps, and to proportional representation.

This week we’ll learn how to use Dave’s Redistricting App, and create one Congressional map that prioritizes competitiveness. Next week we’ll discuss and then create other maps to maximize other priorities.


Redistricting

Every 10 years, after the decennial census, the US Constitution requires that states redraw election districts for:

  • US Congress
  • State Legislature
    • in most states that means State House and State Senate



Federal Laws


State Laws

Each state draws districts differently.

NCSL Summary



Criteria that some states consider







Dave’s Redistricting App

Dave’s Redistricting App is the best, and most commonly used redistricting software with nearly all of the capabilities of the very expensive software that legislators use to draw the actual maps and uses the 2020 census population and demographic data.


Go to Dave’s Redistricting App and create an account.


In-class demo of Dave’s Redistricting App



Assignment 6a. Readings

Listen to episode 5 of FiveThirtyEight’s series The Gerrymandering Project:

Even a Gerrymandering Ban Can’t Keep Politicians from Trying to Shape Their Districts


Assignment 6b Research Journal Entry

Select one research idea from your journal that you want to develop a little bit more deeply and add it as a discussion response. Your classmates will be able to see your idea, and you will be asked to look at your classmates’ research ideas. You should include a 1-2 sentence description of the research idea and what data you could use or create to study it. Some additional information you may want to include:

  • A link to or description of the inspiration for this idea
  • How this data or research could be used by others
  • How you could visualize the data or results


Assignment 6c: Drawing district maps with Dave’s Redistricting App, part 1 (partisan gerrymandering)

Create a Congressional map using Dave’s Redistricting App for either Georgia, or the state of your choice.

A map that creates the highest number of competitive districts (between 45% and 55% of either party)

Instructions:

Ideal districts size for GA = 765,136 people, it is already at the bottom of script 5c in your class6 folder. You can use that script to calculate the ideal Congressional district size for any state using 2020 Census data. You can also pull in the apportionment data from homework 3 to see how many apportioned representatives each state has according to the 2020 census counts.

Open Dave’s Redistricting App and create a new map starting from Georgia’s existing Congressional map. Change the districts so that they comply with federal laws and maximize the number of competitive districts (between 45% and 55% of either party).

Your map must comply with Federal Laws and have approximately equal population, and have as many “Majority-Minority” districts as they currently have.

Specifically, each district should be within 5% of the ideal district size. Georgia has 4 Black majority districts, so your map must too. If you choose another state, find the required number of “Majority-Minority” districts here.

Resources:

  • Check out FiveThirtyEight’s Redistricting Atlas project creating competitive maps using 2010 data to get context and clues of how to accomplish this.
  • If you are creating districts in Georgia, check out Sara’s Georgia Explorer to see precinct-level partisan data in Georgia.
  • Watch Sara’s video on using Dave’s Redistricting App for specific instructions. Note: In this video, she tried to create districts with between 45% - 50% of both parties. In this assignment you can use the slightly looser definition of competitive of between 45% and 55% of either party.

How to submit:

Download the Statistics Summary for your map and upload to the Canvas discusion thread.

Share your map by pasting the share link and writing a short description of your map(make sure you don’t select “Allow editing” when you copy the share link). Explain how you adjusted the map to increase competitiveness and what you learned about the process of redistricting through this exercise.