House: 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. We've now completed that effort thanks to a major crowdsourcing assist from loyal readers like you, so you can bookmark our complete set of descriptions for all 435 districts right here.
While many countries, including our neighbor to the north, give names to their election districts that reflect their geographic location, in the Unites States, we simply take a state's name and slap on a number, like "California's 11th Congressional District." It's concise, but it doesn't tell you anything about where in California you'll actually find the 11th District.
That turns out to be a straightforward one: This is Nancy Pelosi's seat, and she represents almost the entire city of San Francisco. Virginia's 8th, for instance, is "Inner D.C. suburbs," while Georgia's 1st is "Coastal Georgia." Many other districts, though, are quite a bit more difficult to pin down, especially since our aim with this resource is to provide useful short description of each district that would help a layperson mentally visualize where it is—without having to break out a map.
Take 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 in any case is a term that's usually associated with Scranton, 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 generally try to avoid localisms, 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 edge, mirroring New York's "Southern Tier" just across the border.)
Of course, there isn’t one correct answer for any district, so consider our list of names as just a starting point. And if you prefer a more quantitative approach, we've also included the three largest "places" (as defined by the Census Bureau) in each district on our spreadsheet. We mentioned those three places for Pennsylvania's 9th just above, to take one example, but they combine for less than 9% of the district's population. In fact, fully half of all residents in the 9th live in locations that aren't part of any census-identified "place," showing just how rural this district is.
For a detailed walkthrough of our methodology and data, please check out David Jarman's new post, and be sure to bookmark our spreadsheet that houses all of this new information in one place. And if you have suggested refinements to our geographic descriptions, please let us know!