A Tweak for the Fair Districts PA Senate Map
View Map on Dave's Redistricting (https://davesredistricting.org/join/144b56f6-10a9-4cce-8151-5eba213e3db4)
The FDPA State Senate Map is an improvement over the current senate map. One important change could lead to major improvements for Montgomery, the Lehigh Valley, Berks, and Schuylkill Counties. Problem: On the FDPA map, the extra population from the Bucks County senate districts spills into the Lehigh Valley and Montgomery County. This spillover leads to a ripple effect that causes extra splitting of Montgomery, Northampton and Berks. It also leads to 4 districts (11, 15, 35, and 41) that contain more than 2 non-whole counties. Further, there are several townships that are split on the FDPA Senate Map. Split townships provide extra challenges for municipal governments and for the senators who represent them. Recommended Change: Revise the map to send the spillover of Bucks County into Northeast Philadelphia. Benefits: If Bucks and NE Philadelphia share a senator, one can draw a map that limits the splitting of Montgomery, Berks and Northampton. One district (15) that incorporates >2 non-whole counties will persist, but it doesn’t stretch as far into Schuylkill County and the remaining portion of Schuylkill county can spill completely into Berks. The Bucks spillover into Northeast Philadelphia also presents an easy opportunity for an extra majority minority district to be created and, with a little bit of tinkering, 2 additional majority minority districts can be created. Both of these additional districts can be drawn to have a 37% race specific Black VAP. While there is a difference of about 1.5 percent for the Hispanic population for Senate 28 (Lehigh County) that is caused by the decision not to split Bethlehem, the Hispanic population in the tweaked version Senate 33 (Berks County) is virtually identical to that in the FDPA version. The tweaked map revises SE PA while sharing many features of the FDPA map. Outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, there are no known split townships. There are 6 majority minority districts. A similar map (with 7 majority minority districts and some additional differences from the FDPA map in the NE and SW) was also submitted as part of my comment from Nov. 5th: In addition to the 7 majority minority senate districts, the November 5th map was slightly more compact and had less partisan bias than the FDPA senate map or the tweaked version. A link to that comment with the map can be found here: https://www.redistricting.state.pa.us/comment/submission/457