I drew this map upon release of the new Census data for Iowa. I paid no attention to partisanship and tried to correlate each district with a geographical area of the state. Starting with Des Moines, I drew a district around it, then drew a district for the southeast, northeast and western Iowa. My goal was to have each district within 1,000 persons of the ideal district population. Amazingly, my configuration worked out on my very first try (which means there’s probably many possible combinations to how the state can be drawn). Nevertheless, I kind of like the map here because I think it does a good job in keeping the different regions of the state together (in that respect, I think it’s better than, for example, the 1990’s Iowa map which had one district run from Des Moines to the western border).
The population numbers are as follows:
blue – 762,255
green – 761,010
purple – 760,876
red – 762,214
ideal pop. is 761,589
I originally posted my map as part of a comment on another diary , http://www.swingstateproject.c… and reader OGGoldy crunched the partisan numbers for the map as follows:
blue – 55.3% Obama, 44.7% McCain
green – 58.8% Obama, 41.2% McCain
purple – 58.9% Obama, 41.1% McCain
red – 46.3% Obama, 53.7% McCain
I hope this redistricting ends Tom Latham’s career… it would be nicer for Steve King to go but I doubt he can lose a primary that’s a race to the right.
I think its an interesting map and suggested that it was not as favorable as the democrats would like. For those who did not see my points on the other thread here they are.
1. CD1 in which Braley won by 49-48 in 2010 is kept intact. He keeps every county in his seat. So can you competitive? So the question is does the addition of these 10 rural counties help him? In 2010 Braley lost every rural county but one and now he gets 10 rural counties that went strong for Latham and Brandstad. I suspect given his narrow 2010 win Braley would have loved to have been given Linn or Cedar or Muscatine county rather then these 10 counties. These ten counties are the heart of the corn belt in Iowa. McCain did poorly in the corn belt as he was against tax breaks for Ethanol. In 2010 the corn belt went strong against democrats as prices have dropped. Braley, under this map, gets the worst area he could get and keep his old seat intact.
2. How about Boswell? He gets Latham and Story county under this map. A proven vote getter, money raiser, a guy who will unite the GOP party. Boswell has faced weak GOP foes with party unity problems who have been so so money raisers. Latham is top tier foe. In addition Dallas and Warren counties are counties Latham has won by big margins in the past. Dallas county is fast growing and has been a GOP strongehold. Marion county has been strong for GOP as well. Boswell was fairly weak in the other three smallish rural counties so he gets no huge breaks there. If you have to put Latham and Boswell in a fair fight seat this is about the best combination of counties the GOP could hope for.
3. As a side note CD2 remains in tact, Loebsack won 51% in 2010. He picks up a slew of rural counties that were won by either Latham or Zaun in 2010. His seat is noticeably more rural and less democratic. For a candidate who won 51% in 2010 he did not gain a single reliably D county. So this map does not do the democrats any favors. In fact the incumbents will take a tums after seeing this map.
is that Boswell was seen as the weakest Dem in Iowa, but he ended up winning by a bigger margin than the other two.
2 rural districts along the Mississippi River
1 centered around the capital city
1 in the most Republican part of the state
from that thread. But he was trying to minimize population variance between the CD’s (and managed to get within an amazing .03%).
Yor way is very close to my way for redistring Iowa. They are some difference because I do it with the old numbers, but very few.
I think it is the right way. If you find a balance between the urban areas, and if you find to keep in the same district every metropolitan area, you would have a map very, very close to this.
Maybe you would have Grundy county in your purple (IA-01), Jones county in your green (IA-02) and Madison and Guthrie counties in your blue (IA-03) with few more chance for balance the map.
Since I do a map very close to this, I obviously think it is a good way for redistricting Iowa.