Mississippi Redistricting 2012

My main intention was this: Protect Childers and create a district favorable to moderate, old school state Democrats for a long time to come. I think, looking at the districts above that I wildly succeeded.

Now, my is not as professional or high tech as otehrs that have been posted, for that I apologize. I did have to use a free paint download plus Wikipedia's map of the counties and even then it was a buttload of work to get the districts the right size.

As you see I chose to keep it simple and not cut counties because to do so would make it much more difficult and I did not know or want to find precinct level data for Mississippi. I'm sure the legislature will have maptitude.

Now considering my lack of technical device or drawing skills, as my lopsided line connecting Tate and Desoto to Central Mississippi proves, I did an excellent job and I hope and think the final map might look something like this, though not as aggresive of course. So to start I took the most recent MS census estimates and divided it in four, and getting 734,654 people a district. I obviously didn't get that, but with more advanced techniques and equipment the minor adjustments could easily be made to my map.

First let me explain what I did to Childer's district. The most important thing to me was to get rid of DeSoto and Tate. Though Childer's narrowly won Tate 49-48 I've been there recently and seen the sprawling subdivisions of lavish mansions and suburbs popping up everywhere there. Its growing fast and trending Republican. But the 500 pound Gorilla in the whole redistricting mess, (and the redistricting was entirely centered on protecting Childer's), was DeSoto County. Its growing at a rate of nearly 40% a decade now and it is dominated by wealthy white families from the Memphis burbs. Its wealthy and sprawling and one of the most conservative places I've ever been. I don't see how a Democrat could crack 45% here, even if he was running against a libretarian. Any Republican would be assured 60% of the vote if not more and therefore a more than 7000 vote margin right there.

Its destructive for Childers because it means he has to rack up tons of votes in his base of rural Northeastern Mississippi and win almost every other county in the district to get a victory. That's where the danger of someone like Sen. Nunlee of Tupelo comes in. Lee is the population center of Northeastern Mississippi and he has more local appeal. Say someone like that runs against Childer's. His balance is offset by possibly losing Lee and that puts him in a 50/50 from his 2008 margin and he has to rack up some votes in other parts of the district to win. Now I'm assuming he will either win or lose, if loses I've drawn the perfect district for him to stage a comeback in, but I'm feeling strongly that he'll win.

So, as you can see by my primitive drawing I took out DeSoto. What I basically did was pack all the most Republican areas into one big super district, a spaghette monster trying to reach its tendrils to eat Memphis. As you see I tried to make the connecting strand as thin as possible and ideally it would be placed in rural farmland that way as to abosrb as few Democratic votes as possible. So now DeSoto is in a district it belongs; with other super conservative white suburban Republicans in the Jackson area counties of Madison and Rankin, which continue to dominate it. To replace DeSoto and Tate, I took from MS-03, which thankfully had some heavily black and Democratic counties just bordering Childer's district and begging to be taken in by a Democrat. I took in Oktibbeha, Nouxbee, (where the Supreme Court actually ruled that the local party chairman was discriminating against whites and that the VRA applied to all races in minority of certain areas), Kemper and Winston and Lauderdale counties, (Lauderdale isn't Dem per say but its got a large black population and with Childer's greater appeal to conservative white Dems it should be a solid county for him).

So basically I pumped the black population up in the new MS-03 and took that black population from the current MS-03, now MS-02, what I'd give up? the most conservative portion of the state. I knew the key to being able to institute a Democratic gerrymander would be to put forth a map acceptable to the black Democratic state legislatures and the VRA, which prevented my most ambitious gerrymander which would have had the Delta abosrb DeSoto and Tate while Giving Harper most of Hinds County making all 3 north MS districts very competitive for Dems. However even a mild dilution of Thompson's district's black population would probably be a big NO! So I actually tried to make it more black. I cut out Carroll and Attala and north Madison County and replaced them and the districts lost population with the counties of Adams, Wilkinson, Amite, Franklin, Pike and Walthall. Pike is majority black, as are Adams and Wilkinson, both used to be in the old MS-03.

So I took almost every black area out of Greg Harper's district. I was pretty pleased by that. Gene Taylor's district remains as Republican as ever, but still a little less so, especially since I took Jefferson Davis County and the other half of Jasper County out of Greg Harper's district and put them in Taylor's, (more black votes I took out, that will be one of the most strongly conservative district in the country, I promise you), it wasn't hard. My basic thoughts though are that his district is gone regardless when he retires. It's the most Republican in the state, (though it won't be anymore, hehe), and was Trent Lott's district back in the 1970s and remained the bastion of Republican votes afterwards, carrying Lott to victory in 1988 and Thad Cochran in 1978. Taylor is lucky to hold it all, he lost it first then the Harrison county Sherifff who won it died in a plane crash and he won it. In 1994 and 1996 he just barely held on but he's established himself since then and he's young, despite having been in the house for nearly 2 decades he's only in his mid-fifties so we might hold this district for sometime to come.

So here are my rough and imperfect breakdowns for the various districts, (in the final version they'd have to be modified a bit):

CD-01: 738,296, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D)

CD-02: 732,507, Rep. Greg Harper (R)

CD-03: 731,280, Rep. Travis Childers (D)

CD-04: 737,560, Rep. Gene Taylor (D) I'm

Sorry for the lack of Demographic or vote figures, it was just too much trouble to add up for thirty or forty counties apiece. I can give you rough estimates though.

I'd say the new MS-01 is now about 68% black, the new MS-02 is probably about 18% black, though that's a tough guess, down from 33%. The new MS-03 improves from 27% black to around 33% in order to help Childers, and the new MS-04 goes up about 5 points to about 27% black, I'd have to say according to my best guestimates.

As for the political leanings? I'd put them like this, (and I swear I am pretty good at guestimating, I looked at CO-04, did some rough calculations in my head and said 49-50, McCain, the actually result almost on a head):

MS-01: 70-29 Obama

MS-02: 30-69 McCain, tenative estimate

MS-03: 43-56 McCain

MS-04: 32-65 McCain, tenative estimate

While much of Childers new territory may not look like much it makes him unbeatable failing a major scandal. Considering the sort of pass he has in his old yellow dog dem territory in Northweastern Mississippi you see how this district is his. His big margins in super-Republican territory, (nationall), like Alcorn, Tishimongo, Itawamba, Prentiss, Union and Tippah and Lee make him a juggernaut in this new district considering the various new Democratic leaning areas I placed in it that he should be able to win easily, Lauderdale, Oktibbeha, Nouxebee, Kemper, Winston, and the territory I took out…prominent Republicans won't even want to bother challenging him anymore.

And the fact is such a redistricting plan may not be as unlikely as you think. While it is true that last time conservative Dems and black Democrats screwed Ronnie Shows by putting him a super Republican district with Chip Pickering and placed all the black voters in the state in MS-02, this time around I've thought of everything. For one Democrats have both houses of the legislature, which is usally enough to overrule a Governor in the case of a deadlock, (but the Dems really need to win the Governor's race), and the Conservative Dems that messed up last time gave control of the Senate to Republicans only to be defeated and for Democrats to gain it back with better Democrats, and this map would go far to placate the black legislators and it appeasese the VRA.

Anyway, this is basically the ideal dream map for us in MS, the best we can hope to get there. Any thoughts, suggestions? Criticisms? I have some interesting ideas for PA and NY but I'll get to those some other time.

P.S. Please vote in the poll, I'm using it as a counter to see how many people read a diary. Oh yeah, and just for the heck of it, so you can match up counties and see where I'm refering to, here's a county map of MS:

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