Redistricting RI — State Senate
After a brief hiatus, today’s second installment of my series on redistricting in Rhode Island turns to the General Assembly, specifically the redrawing of the state’s 38 senate districts. For a more detailed explanation of how I am approaching these maps, I encourage you to read my first post, which covered the state’s 2 congressional districts but also broke down the various redistricting plans that will be referenced in this piece. The short version is that I will be producing 3 maps, each of which corresponds to a proposed redistricting plan. These various plans all prioritize different aims, which leads to maps drawn in different ways.
A few more caveats that apply to the drawing of General Assembly districts:
- 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.
With that out of the way, here is what the current Senate map looks like:
A few comments. Obviously, the map is a kind of a mess. The East Bay and Aquidneck Island have districts that are not contiguous by driving. There are some really ugly shapes in rural western Rhode Island. District 35 goes in the gerrymandering hall of fame as far as I’m concerned.
Looking at the statistics, there are 9 competitive districts (tilts of one way or another), with all but 1 (D23) of the non-competitive districts favoring Democrats. The map does pretty well for minority representation, although it could be improved as there are 9 minority opportunity districts when 10 would be considered proper representation. Hispanics do have an extra opportunity district in the current map.
Before moving on to new proposals, obviously the populations of the current districts are out of whack with the new census information, which is the whole purpose of the redistricting exercise. This helpful map which was presented to the actual redistricting committee is a good look at where things will need to change to make the districts equal in population.
Ruggerio/Shekarchi Plan (prioritizes compactness and contiguity)
The first thing I did to meet the priorities of this plan was to fix all areas that were not contiguous by driving. Districts 11 and 12 are very clean, but 13 is not as clean as I would like, as it has to cross a second bridge into Bristol to meet population requirements. While not perfect, there are no water-only connections (except for actual islands with no road access) , which is already an improvement over the current map. You’ll see that I leave these districts the same for the next maps. There really isn’t a good reason why these areas should not be drawn this way in the final map.
As far as other changes, Providence picks up another seat which is unsurprising given population increases, and my effort to make more compact shapes within the city. This comes at the expense of another district outside the city but within PVD County. Kent County takes a seat from South County, which is again mostly attributable to better shapes (sorry D35). Although not a focus of this plan, this map adds another minority opportunity seat to meet the 10-seat proportional target.
For partisanship, it turns out that fixing the ugly shapes drawn by Democrats in the current maps gives some help to Republicans. Of the 8 competitive seats, 5 would tilt to Republicans. The map is less competitive as a whole and still plenty friendly to Democrats, as the lost competitive district becomes an extra safe D district.
Overall, I am pretty proud of this map. If I were to put more time into it, I might work on shaping up D32 and D37 a little more, or trying to draw another Pawtucket-only district.
Cortvriend Plan (prioritizes minority representation)
You’ll maybe notice that so far, I have not made mention of the 3 Black opportunity seats that DRA says should be drawn for proper representation. I left that discussion to the Cortvriend plan, which would prioritize accomplishing this over other aims. I first set out to create a 35% Black district, identifying the North End of Providence and Pawtucket as the best area to accomplish this. What I got was this:
Obviously, this was much too mangled to accept. Drawing the above to reach 35% (it does, barely) is not an acceptable trade-off compared to a slightly less representative district that is not so gerrymandered. So I lowered my threshold to 30%, which doesn’t quite reach DRA’s standard as an opportunity district but would be better than any current district as far as Black representation (the current D15 in Pawtucket is 26.5% Black by VAP). So what I landed on was D1 in the zoomed image above — a compact, all-Pawtucket district that is more than 30% Black by VAP. Success.
Since the target is 3 opportunity districts, I set out to find 2 more. Because I had not used any of Providence, I set out for a district connecting the South Side and North End, similar to the current D6. The result was this:
Again, too ugly to go through with. So I lowered the threshold once more, to 25%. Doing this allows us to sever the link between South and North Providence, and set up the pockets of Black voters in these neighborhoods in their own districts — D2 and D3 above. D2 reaches 28% Black VAP, and D3 is 25.6%. So while not meeting the targets set out by DRA, we have 3 districts each with a higher Black VAP than the current highest Black VAP district. With the challenging geography, I think this is a modest success.
The reason to start with Black opportunity districts is that it is much easier, even when drawing D1, D2, and D3 first, to meet the targets for Hispanic voters. Districts 2, 6, 7, 8 and 10 qualify as Hispanic opportunity districts and range from 35.5% Hispanic VAP (D6) to 69.8% Hispanic VAP (D7). Altogether, we hit our target of 10 minority opportunity districts and restored the 6th 60%+ minority district that was lost in the Ruggerio/Shekarchi plan.
As for Asian and Native representation, DRA calls for opportunity districts for these demographics based on their proportion of VAP. It simply cannot be done based on geography. The best districts for representation of these groups are D4 (15.4% Asian VAP) on the East Side of Providence and D5 (4.2% Native VAP), a Downtown/Federal Hill District.
Partisanship wise, we keep 9 competitive districts with the Same 6D-3R balance as the current map. Two districts move from Lean D to Safe D, bringing this category to a high of 21. The geographic balance is the same as the Ruggerio/Shekarchi map.
Euer plan (prioritizes partisan fairness)
If you read the post on the congressional districts, I mentioned that I would be approaching the issue of partisan fairness in a different way for General Assembly maps. There were a few to consider. DRA likes the notion of proportionality — ie the percentage of votes for a given party should translate directly into the proportion of seats it holds. When using the composite vote measure, that would mean 24 seats for Dems and 14 for Republicans. Needless to say, it takes some extreme gerrymandering to get anywhere near 14 Republican seats. It involves districts that run horizontal from the rural parts of the state all the way across to the urban core. I choose not to do that here, and so the maps I create score poorly on DRA’s measure.
Instead, I like the idea that the median district should match the overall partisanship of the state, with half of the districts more favorable for Dems and half better for Republicans. So in Rhode Island’s case, with an even number of districts, we would create 2 median districts that match the D+23 partisanship of the state as a whole (using the 16–20 composite). Of the remaining 36 districts, 18 would be more Democratic than D+23 and 18 would be less.
As it turns out, I was very close to accomplishing this in the last map. D37 in South County was very close to D+23, so I shifted a few blocks around to make that the first median district. The next closest was D19 in North Providence, which needed a few sections of Providence added to it to reach D+23. Once this was done, it turned out that I only needed one more district to move from below median to above median (in Democratic share). I chose D29 in Warwick, which I snaked into more Democratic parts of Cranston to push it over the top.
You’ll notice that in the statistics provided, this map isn’t actually “better” for Republicans, which a map that achieved proportionality obviously would be. There are still 9 competitive districts, split 7D–2R. The ability to make all of the above-median Democratic districts safe, while many of the below-median districts can still be safe D or lean D, is the luxury that you have in a D+23 state. A fair map in a state this one-sided is still one in which one side dominates. Not too hard to understand.
So what are the takeaways here? First and foremost, the idea that Democrats need to draw ridiculous shapes to ensure they keep a super-majority in the GA should be disproven by the maps here. No matter what plan you choose to follow, there are no overly-hideous shapes here, and yet I have drawn no maps with fewer than 20 safe Democratic seats. If you see ugly shapes like the current D35, or districts connected by water only, you will know that it was done to protect an incumbent from a challenger (likely a primary challenger) rather than than simply maximizing one party’s seats or achieving any of the other priorities discussed here.
Last but not least, I would like to offer myself up to join the RI Redistricting Commission, which was unable to reach a quorum of 10 members (out of 18) to meet this week. Shame on everyone involved, particularly the Republicans who complain about being steamrolled in the GA every year, but decided a fundraising event was more important the oversight of the already one-sided redistricting process.
Next time I will cover the R.I. House maps. Since that is a taller task, it will likely be a post with less text. I think I have explained my rationale and approach in this post and just will get down to business in the next one.
