(Part 1 can be seen here)
So for those of you who had read my previous diary, you probably know what's coming here, but for those of you who haven't, my previous map attempted to create the most Democratic-friendly states I could respecting rough population equality, for these states, population equality went out the window, and screw how unequal the populations are.
Now, I did have some goals/rules that I was shooting for with this map:
1. With the exception of the Republican sinkhole, all states must be considered "safe" for Democrats (or at worst, be a likely hold for Democrats in a wave election).
2. All states must have at least 600,000 people in them, no exceptions.
3. Minimizing the population size of the Republican sinkhole is a must (but not at the expense of severely weakening the Democratic states), this is to reduce the number of House seats the sinkhole would receive.
4. Counties should not be split unless they are large enough to support multiple states, or to put it another way, counties should have more than one state self-contained (there are two exceptions I made, the first is the Republican sinkhole, in many instances, the counties that I'm working with simply have too many heavily Republican parts to them to not add them to the sinkhole, the other exception is Nueces County, I basically split Corpus Christi and the more heavily Democratic parts outside of Corpus Christi in the county between my third state and the Republican sinkhole to fulfill goals 1, 2 and 3.)
I achieved my first and second goals pretty easily, even though it was at the expense of the fourth rule, and as for the third rule, well I did try to add as much population to the Democratic states as I could while still trying to respect not splitting counties or weakening the Democratic states, my preferred goal would have been to get at least 700,000 people in each state and to average at least 900,000 for each state. Neither one really happened, as my smallest state has a population of around 639,000 and my average state population size is 850,798.
Could I have weakened some Democratic states a bit more to up their populations (and thus take away some more House representation from the Republican sinkhole)? It's complicated, the major problem is that in pretty much every area of the state, the Democratic areas move into very Republican areas very quickly, meaning that even making relatively minor changes would probably weaken several states to an unacceptable level for me, so I took the hit.
The results? Well that's below the fold:
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