With this decade’s congressional redistricting cycle wrapped up, it’s time to revisit a popular Daily Kos Elections project: actually trying to describe where each district is.
One of the myriad ways America deviates from much of the rest of the world is that, while most countries give their parliamentary constituencies a handy name that describes where they’re situated, we name our House of Representatives districts simply with a combination of the state they’re in plus a number.
For example, in the United Kingdom, outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson represents the constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, which locals would know is an affluent suburban neighborhood in the outer part of western London. Similarly, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau represents the riding of Papineau; many urban ridings in Canada are named after main thoroughfares rather than neighborhoods, but if you know where Avenue Papineau is, you know which part of central Montreal he represents.
Nancy Pelosi, by contrast, will be representing “California’s 11th Congressional District” starting next year. You probably know she represents the city of San Francisco because that’s a regular talking point in the news, and in the ubiquitous Republican ads asking if we want to bring her “San Francisco values,” nudge nudge wink wink, to the heartland. But without that outside context, how would you know whether she represents Hollywood or the Central Valley instead?
Making things even more convoluted, in previous years, she’s also represented the 5th District, then the 8th District, and currently the 12th District. But she hasn’t been moving around; her same basic district with mostly the same constituents just gets renumbered every 10 years.
We at Daily Kos Elections are out to fix that lack of clarity! We first tried naming every congressional district based on its geography in 2019, relying partly on crowdsourced descriptions. With the new decade’s maps now solidified (at least for the next two years), it’s time to revisit that effort with a whole new batch of names.
Like our previous effort, we started out with a Twitter crowdsourcing request. We supplemented that with our own research using granular data from the 2020 census; this can tell us what percentage of each new district comprises which city, which county, which metropolitan area, and the like. We then synthesized that information using something of a consensus-based qualitative process, reducing the many suggested names and all the census data into what we felt was the most useful short description of each district that would help a layperson mentally visualize where it is—without having to break out a map.
This isn’t always as easy as you’d think. The example mentioned earlier—California’s 11th District, which we sum up as “San Francisco” in our rubric—is actually one of the easiest districts to name. One-hundred percent of its residents live in San Francisco proper, and conversely, the large majority of all San Francisco residents live in the 11th. (A little more than 100,000 San Franciscans are in the new 15th, a mostly suburban district just to the south.)
Only a few other districts—like Indiana’s 7th (“Indianapolis”), Kentucky’s 3rd (“Louisville”), Washington’s 7th (“Seattle”), or Wisconsin’s 4th (“Milwaukee”)—are similar, all because they’re cities with populations in the ballpark of the ideal district size of about 760,000 (though this figure varies by state), and because these cities haven’t been badly cracked apart for gerrymandering purposes.
Okay, but what do you call this district?
It’s Pennsylvania's 9th, a dark-red district in the state’s rural hinterlands. It doesn’t contain any major or even medium-sized cities that non-locals are likely to know much about; its population centers are Williamsport (known for the Little League World Series), Pottsville (known for the Yuengling brewery), and Lebanon (known for bologna), none of which have more than 30,000 residents. The 9th even falls through the cracks if you try to use compass directions to describe it: It’s too far west to be described as northeastern Pennsylvania, which is a term that’s usually associated with Scranton anyway, and it’s too far east to be north-central Pennsylvania.
For this district, we settled on “Northern Tier and part of Coal Country.” We don’t necessarily like to use localisms for our descriptions, but these regional names are at least somewhat helpful for intuiting where the district falls on the map. (The “Northern Tier” is the row of counties along the state’s northern border, mirroring New York’s “Southern Tier” across the border.)
Or what about the district depicted in the map at the top of this article? You know it as Texas's 6th, though we call it “Parts of suburbs between Dallas-Ft. Worth to rural areas to the south.” That’s one of our wordiest descriptions; usually we like to keep them a bit more concise, but as you can see from the map, this district makes it difficult to summarize. Much of it is in the suburbs between the two major cities—most heavily around Irving and Arlington, none of which are especially well-known to non-locals or where there’s a commonly used regional name for a cluster of nondescript suburbs (like the Boston area’s “MetroWest,” for example).
But beyond that, the district then wanders to the south to pass through Dallas’ southern exurbs in Ellis County and finally into a cluster of dark-red rural counties further south. The GOP’s intent in remodeling this formerly mostly suburban district is clear: It’s to keep upper-middle-class suburbs that are turning blue from electing a Democrat to the House by watering the district down with a big helping of rural voters. The question for us, though, is: How do we describe that in 10 words or fewer?
There isn’t one correct answer to this question, so consider our list of names as just a starting point. In fact, please feel free to jump into the comments with your own suggestions; this is an ongoing project and we’re planning on further revisions. (That’s especially true because some of these states, North Carolina and Ohio for starters, may well have entirely different maps for the 2024 elections.)
And if you’re not sold on our subjective assessments of how to describe each district, we’ve provided a completely different, more quantitative framework as well. Look at the six columns on the sheet’s second tab. These columns list the three largest “places” in each new district, per 2020 census data.
So if you prefer, you can assemble those names together into more of a Canadian-style riding name. Pennsylvania’s 9th, as we’ve discussed, becomes “Williamsport—Lebanon—Pottsville,” while Texas’ 6th would be “Irving—Arlington—Mansfield.” In many cases, though, this approach will yield the names of three suburbs most folks have likely never heard of before and would have to find on the map anyway, which is why we also do the qualitative naming project.
We also include what percentage of the entire district is taken up by each particular place, which helps you assess how significant each of the three places is in relation to the whole. Williamsport, for instance, only makes up 3.6% of Pennsylvania’s 9th (one of the smallest “largest places” of any district, which also should indicate to you just how rural this district is). Irving, by contrast, is 17.1% of Texas’s 6th, which is far from a majority but still accounts for more than 100,000 residents.
“Places” include not just all incorporated cities and towns, but also “census-designated places” (or CDPs), which is Census Bureau-speak for unincorporated places, usually suburbs, that are sufficiently dense and have a commonly agreed-upon name. That’s why, for example, the most populous place in Louisiana’s 1st (or “New Orleans suburbs,” according to us) is Metairie, despite the fact that Metairie has no mayor and is just a dense but unincorporated blob of suburbia in Jefferson Parish west of the city.
You’ll note that there’s also a final column for “% ‘None,’” which reflects the percentage of people in each district who live in an area that isn’t part of any “place,” according to census definitions. Even when you include CDPs, nearly 25% of the nation’s population still lives in no “place,” usually meaning that they live somewhere exurban or rural, or, in some cases, in recently built and poorly defined suburbs. In fact, checking “% ‘None’” tells you a lot about how rural a district is; heavily rural districts usually clock in at 50% or more, and the nation’s most rural congressional district, Kentucky’s 5th (or “Appalachian Kentucky,” in our scheme), also has one of the highest percentages of “None” of any district on this measure, at 75.2%.
One other small thing to keep in mind regarding the use of “places” is that it sometimes generates results that are counterintuitive to New Englanders, since New England towns—most of which are very rural—are not counted as “places” by the Census Bureau, unless they’re dense enough to qualify as CDPs. As a case in point, the town of Hamden, Connecticut, is more populous than West Haven or Milford and could theoretically be in the second-place slot in Connecticut’s 3rd District (aka the “New Haven area”). However, parts of Hamden are rural, and it’s not treated by the census as a “census-designated place,” so it’s supplanted by the more compact and dense West Haven and Milford on the list.
One other tool you can check out is the spreadsheet’s third tab, where we also list the three largest metropolitan areas per district. As an example, when you look at Texas’ 6th this way, it turns into 73% in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as well as 8% in the Palestine area and 7% in the Corsicana area. That gives you a slightly different perspective on the district than the three largest places; it reminds you that the large bulk of it is suburban, but a significant (and decisive) portion of it is rural Texas.
Finally, you might remember one other neat feature from our 2019 version of this project: In a few major cities (specifically New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia) where many districts are entirely within the city limits, we further broke down the names by neighborhood. As an example, New York’s 7th District became “Sunset Park & Windsor Terrace—Bushwick—Chinatown & Lower East Side.” That’s something we’ll get to once again in a future revision; doing so relies on “public use microdata areas,” a census category that hasn’t been released yet for the 2020s because they, too, are still in the process of renaming things.
Again, you can find all of our district descriptions right here.
