I was playing around with Utah in Dave's Redistricting App, and I was noticing there were scores of voting districts which gave Obama less than 10% of the vote, something almost never seen elsewhere, and that gave me a crazy idea. I've seen other people's renderings of pretty 55%+ Obama districts, but I wondered how close a 34% Obama state could come to a 2-2 delegation. As it turns out, two plurality Obama districts are possible, given the utilization of the 5% allowed population variance (the purple and red districts are underpopulated by 32k and the blue and green districts are overpopulated by 32k). A few caveats apply this year, however. First, Romney is almost certain to win by a larger margin than McCain did (the one poll so far showed a 42% margin, as opposed to a 28% margin), so it is extremely unlikely that these will be Obama 2012 districts. Other things of note from Wikipedia on the 2008 race: Obama raised twice as much as McCain did from the state, and spent 300k there as opposed to McCain's $250 (lol).
Read on for the beauties and a few tables...
The state:
Closer state:
Salt Lake Area:
Its roadmap:
# |
Color |
Pop. |
White |
AA |
Hispanic |
Asian |
Nat. Am. |
Oth. |
Obama |
McCain |
1 |
blue |
724063 |
84.1% |
0.4% |
10.8% |
1.6% |
1.2% |
1.8% |
19.6% |
77.0% |
2 |
green |
722772 |
89.5% |
0.5% |
6.4% |
1.7% |
0.3% |
1.6% |
22.9% |
74.2% |
3 |
purple |
658582 |
66.0% |
1.8% |
23.7% |
5.5% |
0.8% |
2.2% |
49.2% |
47.7% |
4 |
red |
658461 |
80.7% |
1.1% |
11.9% |
2.7% |
1.6% |
2.0% |
48.7% |
48.6% |
Utah is certainly one of the few places that a sub-20% Obama district can be drawn; it's quite likely that Kerry and Gore didn't break 15% in this 1st district. I don't know what to think of Dems' chances of winning these districts; Matheson's old district is 39% Obama, so perhaps a non-liberal Dem could win each of these seats, even with Romney on the ballot. Of the four seat states (Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Utah), it's possible to create four Obama districts in Iowa, and two in the other four. Of those, a Dem can easily win a 50% Obama district in AR or MS, but not IA or KS; the question is which category UT fits into. Matheson obviously finds a way to win in a much worse district, but how much of that is due to his family legacy?