Seattle Redistricting: A look through the lens of the 2021 election.
The Seattle Redistricting Commission has been circulating four draft maps for public comment for the last few months, and later this summer, will adopt a final map. This map will be in place beginning in 2023, and will last until 2033. The Commission has already received over 200 comments as of the time of this writing.
The comments all share a common theme, that people want to make sure that they’re represented fairly on the City Council, and that the districts do not dilute their power. Some of this can be discerned from reviewing the demographics of the districts. However, there is one thing that has been surprisingly absent from the discussion, given what we hear about redistricting in higher profile Federal and State jurisdictions — How would these districts have voted in the past?
This data is not easy to find. The Commission has posted the maps in Dave’s Resdistricting, and Dave’s Redistricting has a lot of data. But the election history doesn’t tell us a whole lot. Seattle is a heavily Democratic city at the State and Federal level. There are no precincts in the city that voted for Trump in either 2016 or 2020, and it wasn’t particularly close. Partisan election performance is not useful for evaluating these maps. So I dug into the proposed maps and looked at who would have won the citywide elections in these districts.
Despite the city’s strong Democratic lean, the city is not uniform politically. There were two very clear slates of candidates in both the 2019 and 2021 elections. One slate, a more left-leaning slate, was mostly endorsed by MLK Labor, The Stranger, Fuse Washington, the local Democratic Party organizations, and more broadly left-leaning organizations. The other slate was mostly endorsed by the Seattle Times, Downtown Seattle Association, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce (2019 only), the more conservative labor unions, and broadly more business-focused interests. The slates aren’t as clearly defined as the party line in a partisan election (for example, Debora Juarez, in her successful District 5 re-election campaign against future GOP LG candidate and City Attorney Ann Davison, had a lot of endorsements from organizations from both the left leaning and moderate slates), but it’s clear that something resembling political parties is starting to emerge.
This is not, however, a guide for how to gerrymander the districts for whichever slate you support. Besides being explicitly prohibited in the city charter (though I’m not clear how enforceable this would be), it’s likely a fools errand. The city is changing. Coalitions will shift. Even if 80% of voters voted a single slate, at least 20% split their tickets in 2021 alone. Rather, consider this a defense against an egregiously bad map.
So, how did our current maps do? We’ve taken these maps, which have only existed since 2015, as the canon. It’s a very pretty division of the city into 7 sections, mostly bounded by geography and freeways. But there was very little public input when they were first developed.
The one thing that is clear is that these maps are prone to landslides. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise, given that in 2019, the left-leaning slate (including Debora Juarez) won 6 out of 7 districts. The landslide tendency went even further in 2021: Bruce Harrell, with only 58.6% of the vote, swept all 7 districts. The same is true for Teresa Mosqueda, who with 59.4%, also swept the map. The other two winners, Ann Davison and Sara Nelson, did not get a sweep, but they each carried 5 of 7 districts, with 51.5% and 53.8% of the vote, respectively.
While something like this will certainly give the mayor a governing majority, it also likely means minority viewpoints are shut out.
The first set of consultant maps isn’t that different from the current maps. 6 of the 7 districts still cover part of either the Lake Washington coast or Puget Sound coast, with district 5 touching both coasts. The results aren’t that different, either, with one notable exception. In the new district 7, Teresa Mosqueda would have lost under the new lines. Under the current lines, she still won. The rest of the results are very similar to the current maps. Lorena González still does not carry a district, despite getting 41.2% of the vote citywide.
While this piece is mostly viewing the maps through the lens of electoral results, it’s worth noting that District 2, which is currently a majority-minority district with a narrow Asian-American plurality, retains its status as the sole majority-minority district on every map, but also becomes plurality white. However, the first consultant map is the closest one to retaining D2’s Asian-American plurality.
The second consultant map is a more significant departure from the current map. District 3 is shifted inland, taking in more areas around Lake Union, and giving up turf closer to Lake Washington. Lorena González carries this district. It also pushes the boundaries of District 6 south and east, such that Nicole Thomas-Kennedy carries this district. Like on map 1, Kenneth Wilson carries District 7, this time by a wider margin. Additionally, by stretching its northern boundary to the north, District 2 sees a notable shift to the right. It’s worth mentioning that this is the map with the smallest share of Asian-American residents remaining in District 2, though District 3, at 42.9% minority, comes closer to being a second majority-minority district than on any other map.
The third and fourth consultant maps are both hand-drawn (compared to the first two maps, which were computer-drawn), and constitute more minor changes to the existing maps. In both of these maps, Lorena González carries the new District 3 while Teresa Mosqueda loses the new District 7, but by lesser margins than on the second map.
None of these proposals is likely to become the final map, in the end. The Commission will release another proposal in July/August, and I will take a look at those maps once they have been released. You can also help shape the final map by submitting a comment.
King County Elections. 2021 results, November General Election. https://kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/results/2021/202111.aspx
King County Elections. Precinct and district data. https://kingcounty.gov/depts/elections/elections/maps/precinct-and-district-data.aspx
Dave’s Redistricting. Consultant Alternative Map 1 — Seattle City Council Districts. https://davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap::043b88e8-c52b-456b-b56f-07620fbd56d3
Dave’s Redistricting. Consultant Alternative Map 2— Seattle City Council Districts. https://davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap::043b88e8-c52b-456b-b56f-07620fbd56d3
Dave’s Redistricting. Consultant Alternative Map 3— Seattle City Council Districts. https://davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap::2074e36d-2729-437b-824d-4b86fd67eb4a
Dave’s Redistricting. Consultant Alternative Map 4 — Seattle City Council Districts. https://davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap::4b02b21a-0932-4778-b309-efa96fc7b5b3
Kelsey Jordahl, et al. (2021). geopandas/geopandas: v0.10.2 (v0.10.2). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5573592
