R.I.’s new General Assembly maps are insultingly bad
With little fanfare, the Rhode Island General Assembly has signed off on final maps with new boundaries for Rhode Island’s 2 Congressional districts, 38 State Senate districts, and 75 State House districts. The biggest surprise (and biggest blunder?) was the decision to leave RI’s 2nd congressional district relatively unchanged even with the surprise retirement of U.S. Rep. Jim Langevin. Langevin claims that top party leaders knew of his intentions months ago, but the RI Redistricting commission (Democratic leadership controls the appointments to this) didn’t move to make the seat safer for Democrats in a potential wave year for Republicans.
More to say about that in future posts. For now, I am going to be looking at the final General Assembly mapsto analyze the changes made from the old maps. I did multiple Twitter threads on the draft maps throughout this process, and wrote posts here and here about what my proposed maps looked like. In this piece, like those ones, and all my redistricting content in general, I emphasize that these maps can be judged and analyzed using many objective measures, and there is disagreement about how to prioritize them. I hope to provide an insight into how the new maps fare with these various tools.
Geography
The only change in the distribution of districts came in the Senate. The new map has 6 districts in Providence, 16 (down from 17) in the rest of Providence County, 6 (up from 5) in Kent County, 5 in South County, 2 in Bristol County, and 3 in Newport County. For reference, I categorize a district based on where the majority of its population falls.
The House remained the same geographically: 13 districts in Providence, 31 in the rest of Providence County, 12 in Kent County, 9 in South County, 4 in Bristol County, 6 in Newport County.
As for how individual districts changed, I plan on doing a running Twitter thread one district at a time, showing the change in geography and some of the other key information discussed in this post. Stay tuned.
Partisan Lean
As a reminder, I use a composite of statewide/presidential elections in 2016–2020 to look at the partisan lean of every district. The two big things I look at here are safe Democratic seats and competitive seats (tilt D or tilt R). To be clear, this isn’t to say that there will be a competitive election for General Assembly in these districts necessarily, as even seats that could be competitive in theory frequently go uncontested.
In both the House and Senate, there are more safe districts for Democrats under the new maps. In the Senate, this comes at the expense of a competitive district, bringing the number of competitive seats to 8 (5D vs 3R). However, the House adds a competitive district to bring the total to 17. Both the House and Senate are made up of about 55% safe Democratic seats and 22% competitive seats.
Some have charged that the maps are partisan gerrymanders, citing the metric of proportionality, which says that Republicans should in theory hold somewhere between 30% and 40% of the GA seats, a near impossibility given the geography of the state. As I said in a past post, I prefer to compare the median state to the partisan lean of the state. In theory, a map would be fair if the median district roughly matches the overall lean of the state.
The median seat in the House is D72 (Tiverton, Portsmouth) and has a partisan lean of D+24. The two median seats in the Senate are SD4 (North Providence, Providence) and SD31 (Warwick, Cranston), which have partisan ratings of roughly D +21. Using the composite measure, Rhode Island as a whole is D +23. So by this way of looking at bias, the new Senate map is slightly biased toward Republicans and the House is slightly biased toward Democrats. But overall, neither are far off.
Minority Representation
Neither map provides ideal representation for minority voters. For no reason in particular, the Senate map has one fewer Hispanic opportunity district (defined as > 35% minority voting age population) than the prior maps. The Senate partly makes up for it by maintaining its 9 total minority opportunity districts (still one short of proportional). The House map loses a minority opportunity district, dropping it below proportional, and it remains below proportional for Hispanic opportunity seats.
As I have covered in past posts, drawing opportunity seats for other demographics is difficult to impossible. But for reference, here are the seats with the greatest percentage of VAP for other demographic groups.
Black:
HD 58 (Pawtucket) 31% & SD 6 (Providence) 26%
Asian:
HD 1 (Providence) 19% & SD 3 (Providence) 17%
Native American:
HD 7 (Providence) 5% & SD 7 (Providence, Johnston) 4%
Pacific Islander:
HD 12 (Providence) 1% & SD 2 (Providence) 1%
Compactness, City-Splitting, and population deviation
Dave’s Redistricting App, which I use for all redistricting content, provides a measure of district compactness that analyzes the shapes of the districts and provides a score of 0 (not compact) to 100 (most compact). The same is done for city-district splitting, which measures how frequently cities or towns are split up into different districts. Splitting cities cannot be avoided totally due to rules requiring districts to be as close in population as possible, which brings me to my final measure, the aggregate deviation (in percentage terms) of the districts from equal population.
On compactness, disappointingly, the new House maps score slightly worse (62, down from 65), while Senate improves from 59 to 66. There are some particularly awful districts, which are shown below. It is important to know that many of these districts were awful in the former maps too, and they were deliberately not fixed here. The Senate scored one point better on city-district splitting (57), but the House dropped to an abysmal 37 (from 44).
Of course, the point of redistricting is to use new census data to divide up the population into districts that are as close to equal as possible. Rhode Island grew, but not evenly across the state, since the 2010 census, leading to high deviation in the former maps — 23% in the House and 15% in the Senate. The new maps are closer to equal, but still do quite poorly in reaching equal population. The new House maps have 9.75% deviation and the Senate has 12.92%. It is possible that the new practice of counting some inmates at the ACI in Cranston in their home districts is not properly accounted for here, which has increased the deviation. I am working on confirming.
The reason I group these three metrics together is that they are all reflected in the horribly ugly and disconnected districts drawn in the new maps. The consultants in charge of drawing the state’s maps claim that certain decisions, including ugly districts, are needed because of difficulties making the populations equal. Leaving aside the fact that I have done it myself many times, this claim falls flat on its face when looking at these statistics. If we needed ugly shapes to get below 5% deviation, that might be a tradeoff worth making. But the new maps aren’t even close. Here are some of the worst offenders.
The East Bay and Newport County is really bad. SD12 is separated by almost 20 minutes by driving, with two other districts in between its two parts. SD10 is also not contiguous by driving and contains parts of Tiverton, Bristol, and Warren, but not all of any of them. There are similar issues in the House with HD71 and HD74 — although Jamestown is in a Senate district with Newport, it shares a House district with Middletown for no reason. Also inexplicable is the placement of Prudence Island, which is technically part of Portsmouth, in a district centered in Bristol.
The worst example of city splitting in my mind is the division of Central Falls into three house districts, as opposed to 2 in the prior map. While Central Falls is a fast growing city, it is small enough to have one standalone district and another district overlapping Pawtucket, which shares many common interests with CF.
Moving East to West, the next area with major issues is the Smithfield-Lincoln area. HD44 is a badly deformed district that winds from Lincoln to Smithfield to Johnson. And on the Senate side, there was a lot of reporting and debate around SD22, which had a clean border on the Smithfield-Lincoln line in the former maps and in all the draft maps, until a sliver of Lincoln was moved out of SD17 and into SD22 at the 11th hour, leaving it with horribly misshapen borders.
Similar reporting was done regarding East Greenwich, where residents pushed back against a draft House map that separated certain neighborhoods. Rather than uniting EG under one district by removing parts of West Greenwich from HD30, the map puts about 1200 EG residents into HD24, which is primarily in Warwick and now not contiguous by car.
Lastly, we have South County, which is carved into oblivion in the Senate map. In the former maps, SD35 was the famously ugly district that stretched from the coast to the EG-Warwick border. Now, both SD 35 and SD36 are long, irregular districts that go from Narragansett to the border of Kent County and beyond. South Kingstown, a town of only 31,000 residents, is split into three districts. We have another mismatched island, with Block Island being moved into a Senate District with Narragansett but remaining in a House District based primarily in South Kingstown and Charlestown.
There’s not much left I can say to drive home my points: these maps are disastrously bad by any of these objective measures. There will never be agreement about what measures should be prioritized in the redistricting process, but these maps have the distinction of failing on pretty much all of them. When you analyze the maps from a high level and find flaws all over the place, it leaves you wondering what the point of all of this really is. The answer, as we know, is simple — in the new maps, not a single incumbent lawmaker was drawn into the district of another incumbent.
General Assembly redistricting this year was an incumbent protection racket. The state’s hired consultant and the redistricting committee was more than willing to stick their fingers in the eyes of voters with this ridiculous product, and it was all simply to protect their friends. As far as I can tell, all this proceeded with pretty much no substantive pushback, and nobody has been made to answer for it.
Thanks for following, and stay tuned to my Twitter feed at @hutch_blog for a district-by-district look at the new maps in the coming weeks and months.
