See below for Virginia political analyst Chaz Nuttycombe’s renditions of what he considers to be “a fair House of Delegates map” for Virginia. Note that Chaz has been working on this for around a year now, so it’s not like a rush job or anything. 😉 Also note that, according to Chaz, the “current R gerrymander has 56 Clinton – 44 Trump districts, 61 Kaine – 39 Stewart districts.” So these maps would increase that by four Clinton districts, to 60 Clinton-40 Trump. This seems a bit high to me, because I view Virginia as a purplish-blue state, which Obama and Clinton won by an average of about 5 points. On the other hand, I’m not the one who spent untold hours pouring over these maps, as Chaz did. 🙂
BTW, I asked Chaz a bunch of questions about his maps. Here are a few Qs and As:
- I asked, “by ‘fair’ you mean compactness, communities of interest, etc? Chaz’s response was “correct,” based heavily on the criteria of “communities of interest and compactness.”
- I asked how he defined “communities of interest,” and he said it’s hard to come up with an exact definition, but that it’s “really the compactness helps with that community of interest…because there’s no long-looking weird districts…Example, look at Lynchburg on the R map and the one on my map…it cracks Lynchburg in two combining both halves with rural areas…whereas mine is all of Lynchburg + 1 suburban (though deeply red) precinct in Campbell.”
- I asked when he thought the Supreme Court was going to rule on the new, racially “unpacked” districts. He said, “early June to mid June.” I said that’s so ridiculous, given that our primaries are on June 11. He said “it’s very unlikely they save the R map, don’t worry…the R map is dead.” I hope he’s right, but I don’t trust this SCOTUS as far as I can throw it. Which isn’t far.
Anyway, with that, here are Chaz’s maps. What do you think?
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