This is a quick attempt at South Carolina with 7 seats and 2 Minority Majority districts.
SSPers speculated that there should be a second VRA seat in South Carolina, as there is a substantial black population. Personally I do not think South Carolina should have gotten another seat, the data on Daves App shows South Carolina at 4.5 Million or so, and 2010 Census showed it at 4.6 M or 663,710 per district. I however feel that as long as the US House stays with 435 seats and the size of each constituency rises with each census apportionment, the utility of VRA seats are going to collapse onto themselves.
We see instances like Mel Watt (NC), Corrine Brown (FL), and Sanford Bishop (GA) that getting 50% of their districts Black is a hard order when trying to make a district that has at best moderate gerrymandering.
South Carolina has a large African American population 30% in the 2000 Census; however the population is way too spread out to make a coherent congressional district within a state. As seen here
And my map seen here
It just is too agressive to get a 50% district and a 49% district. Also notice that the 4th district (yellow) is just barely contiguous. This gerrymander will only see Clyburn, Scott and Dowdy keep their seats I believe. It does really put Joe Wilson into a very strange district.
interesting map, but i don’t think it relates completely to ur post
Is South Carolina under any legal obligation to create a second minority-majority district? I’m not sure who is in charge of their State House/Senate but if its the GOP why would they have any incentive to make a second one?
The new district in SC is projected to be anchored by Horry County on the coast and include the Pee Dee region! It will be a Lean R district! I have alread seen a map at Cook Political on what SC will look like! SC 2 and SC 5 will be made safer by removing a few black majority rural counties! Am anticipating a 6-1 map, I think it has already been discussed that SC would not be required to add a second AA district!
is what has been called for generations “The Black Belt”. The term has a double meaning as it a swath of land with dark soil that is very productive. In NC & VA and SC its land that was rich in Tobacco and Cotton farming. In Georgia the Black belt was cotton and later peanuts. From Georgia to Miss it was King cotton.
The other meaning is that this area of rich farmland is where you will find the highest % of rural black population in the USA. In old days they were as planation slaves and then after the war sharecropping and today you see the highest concentration of black owned farms in this belt.
The Black belt rules into the Delta and now either side of the Mississippi from New Orleans to Memphis you see rural counties with a high % of black population. The old saw was that the Mississippi Delta started in the lobby of the Peabody hotel in Memphis. These rich farming areas of the Delta and Black belt was where you needed many people to work the farms. Tobacco farming is very labor intensive. Until the mechnical cotton picker-WWII era you had to pick cotton by hand. You needed a large cheap workforce to that type of farming.
The majority of Black belt counties are still majority AA to this day. Not all.
What’s the implication of the black belt? Do a topographic map of SC. The Belt belt wraps arounds that mountain range that starts up in Maine and runs down the spine of the Eastern part of the USA. In the hills and plateaus of these hills plantation farming did not occur as the land was not suitable so even today the AA population is much lower in the peidmont area of SC.
I might add that in portions of NC-VA-TN in hills where the land was not suitable for cotton farming slavery nothing really took root. This is where you find many historically republican counties.
What’s fascinating about parts of the South is that you can see what type of farming was done in 1840 and then see the political effects up to the current time.
Assuming actual population counts are not litigated, there isn’t any room for debate when it comes to which states earn additional seats and which states don’t, nor are pre-census estimates involved.
Determining the apportionment of seats – given the population counts of states – is a pure mathematical exercise in optimization.
Virginia and South Carolina seem to be in the same situation; as shown, it’s not terribly hard to draw two black majority districts in South Carolina, and on a parallel track, it’s pretty easy to draw two black majority districts in Virginia as well (one centered on Richmond, the other based out of Norkfolk). Both have the demographics do back up a second minority seat in each state as well. Bottom line is that what happens in one will likely affect the other.
FWIW, here is a full SC map with 2 compact minority-majority districts. The yellow & green districts on this map are both 52% minority. I’ve actually endeavored to make them even more compact than in my quick initial map.
By my calculation the yellow Columbia-based district would’ve been 59% Obama in ’08 and the Green Charleston-based district would’ve been 57% Obama in ’08.
It’s funny that there is an argument about having a second VRA District when South Carolina already has two black congressmen.
How far should he push the VRA — and if he does, will that affect his efforts to be seen as a moderate, or otherwise PO constituencies to which he is trying to appeal?
While I would rather have the gains associated with additional VRA seats in states like SC, as that’s more tangible than the supposed gains he might make by not pushing this issue, I’m not sure that President Obama sees this in the same way.