Redistricting RI: State House

This post is the third and final installment in my in-depth look at redistricting in Rhode Island. Today, I will cover the 75-seat State House of Representatives. I included some detailed explanations of how I approached this series in the first two posts, which I would encourage you to read here and here. The long and short of it is that I am producing 3 maps here, each of which corresponds to one of the proposed redistricting plans for this cycle. These redistricting plans prioritized different aims that I used as guiding principles in producing each map.

As you might imagine, producing 3 different 75-district maps was quite the undertaking, so I’m not going to add too much text to this post. I will restate the principles I am following for the redistricting of General Assembly seats that I described in the post on the State Senate:

• I do not consider where incumbents or challengers live and what new districts they will fall into. If I can produce fair, clean maps that avoid this obviously unfair tactic, so can RI lawmakers (more on that later).
• For partisanship information, I use a composite of statewide elections from 2016–2020 as calculated by Dave’s Redistricting App. Many, many seats in the General Assembly are uncontested, so the composite offers a fair partisan lean for all areas of the state that smooths out swings in presidential voting patterns.
• There is not necessarily any rhyme or reason to the numbering of districts, either in my maps or the current map.
• For the statistical tables, districts are classified by where a majority of the district by population is located. Safe districts are 60%+ for one party, lean districts are 55%+, and tilt districts are any in which neither party has 55%. Demographic information is based on voting age population (VAP), and the proportional totals come from DRA as well.

Current House Map

The current House map is not quite as messy as the Senate one, but it is still riddled with geographic issues, again concentrated in the East Bay and Aquidneck Island. We have several districts (D74, D71, D67) that are not contiguous by driving. D74, which includes Jamestown and Middletown but not Newport is particularly bad, and unnecessarily so. There are some ugly shapes (D29, D31) here, but nothing especially egregious. The map rates well on minority representation (21 of 21 proportional opportunity districts), and there are 16 competitive districts, split 8D-8R. As a reminder, these are classified as Tilt D or Tilt R based on a composite index from previous statewide elections, not on which party holds the seat.

Ruggerio/Shekarchi Plan (prioritizes compactness and contiguity)

The first step with the Ruggerio/Shekarchi map, which prioritizes (or claims to prioritize) contiguity and compactness, was to fix the above-mentioned districts in Newport and Bristol counties. Similar to the Senate district, D70 is oddly shaped because population needs required a jump across the Mount Hope bridge to Bristol. Doing this allows for one Tiverton/Little Compton district (D71). I have also united Jamestown with Newport in D75.

Elsewhere, Providence is neatly divided into 13 districts wholly within the city (there are a few blocks of the Silver Lake neighborhood in the Cranston-based D14). A focus on compact shapes, along with population shifts, gives Providence County (outside of Providence) 2 additional seats, taking one each from Kent and Bristol Counties.

Lean D seats decrease by 2, with one becoming Safe D and another becoming competitive. Although there is one more competitive district as a whole, compared to the current map, the competitive districts become more favorable to Democrats with a 13D-4R split. 21 minority opportunity districts and 11 Hispanic opportunity districts are preserved.

Cortvriend Plan (prioritizes minority representation)

If you read the post on Senate redistricting, I describe the deliberate process that I took to put together a map prioritizing minority representation. Because of geographic difficulties, I again started by trying to maximize Black opportunity districts. Based on percentages of overall population, DRA calls for 6 opportunity districts. Without extreme gerrymandering, this is anythwer from difficult to impossible to achieve. So while falling short of that, I sought to ensure that the top-6 districts in terms of Black VAP were all better as opportunity districts than the top-6 in the current map.

The top-6 in terms of Black VAP are numbered 1–6 in the above map, all in Pawtucket and Providence. D1 does in fact qualify as a true opportunity district with 35% Black VAP, and the rest range from 22% (D5) to 32% (D4). D2 and D3 also reach 30% Black VAP, a benchmark only reached by 1 district (D58 in Pawtucket) in the current House map. So without reaching 6 true opportunity districts, we have given the areas with the greatest concentration of Black voter-age population a greater opportunity to elect Black representatives.

Similar to the Senate map, it is impossible to achieve DRA’s proportional opportunity districts for Asian and Native voters. Again, I have drawn districts that improve upon these groups’ representation in the current maps — D7 is 22 percent Asian (the current highest is 19% in D1) and D12 is 5.4 percent Native (the current highest is 4.6% in D9).

From here, it is not too difficult to draw 11 Hispanic opportunity districts, and 22 opportunity districts overall. I did number the districts in this map a particular way — the first 21 numbered districts were the opportunity districts that I sought to draw. In the process of equalizing population, a 22nd district (D61 in Pawtucket/Central Falls) reached 40% Minority VAP as well.

The geographic balance of this map is unchanged overall from the past map. There are 17 competitive districts split 12D-5R, and one fewer Lean R district.

Euer plan (prioritizes partisan fairness)

To restate my point from the Senate post, my aim with partisan fairness is not to translate directly the percentage of votes received into seats held, as this requires extreme gerrymandering, at least in Rhode Island. Instead I match the median district to the overall partisan lean of the state (D+23 using the DRA composite), and draw 37 districts that are more Democratic than the median and 37 that are less Democratic.

Since the shapes were cleaner, I returned to the Ruggerio/Shekarchi map. I already had a district — D56 in Pawtucket/Lincoln — that matched the median of the state. However, the map was actually slightly favorable to Republicans, as there were 33 districts more Democratic than the median and 41 districts less Democratic than the median. Through moving around some precincts in districts that were only slightly below D+23, I reached the 37–1–37 balance. Those districts were D20 (Warwick/Cranston), D27 (North Kingstown/South Kingstown), D31 (Charlestown/South Kingstown/New Shoreham) and D48 (Central Falls/Cumberland).

In terms of partisanship, this map falls in between the Ruggerio/Shekarchi map and the Cortvriend map. Republicans get a 3rd lean district back, and the 17 competitive seats remain at 12D-5R. The minority opportunity districts from the Ruggerio/Shekarchi map remain the same, as does the geographical balance.

And there you have it. As I restated in my Senate post, I hope this exercise will prove useful if/when the current redistricting committee produces maps with ugly, broken shapes in it. As I have shown here, none of the purported aims of redistricting plans, nor the desire to keep a Democratic supermajority, require such ugly shapes.

The news out of the redistricting commission suggests that we will get maps sometime in mid-December. At that point, I will try to break down the proposed maps and see how they compare to what I have produced using a truly fair process here. I hope this will have shed some light about how this process truly works.

As a bonus, I will be doing a Providence City Council Ward map sometime in the next few weeks. Until next time.