Coloring Districts & Precincts

Use the “Colors” pane, to choose how your map is colored.

The choices for coloring districts and the choices for coloring precincts interact and are described below.

Coloring Districts

By default, districts are shown with map coloring, to make the them visually distinct.¹

Districts shown with map colors

Partisan Lean Option

You can choose the “Partisan Lean” option instead, to color districts by partisan lean.

Districts colored by partisan lean

When you choose this option, each district is colored using this logic:

• If the Democratic vote share² for a district is less than 40% or greater than 60%, we color those districts dark red and dark blue, respectively. See the color swatches below. These are arguably “packed” and have no chance to be anything but Republican and Democratic wins.
• If instead the Democratic vote share for a district is 40–45% or 55–60%, we color those districts lighter but still dark red and blue, respectively. These are solid Republican and Democratic districts, respectively, and are very unlikely (<10% chance) to flip.

Those four solid colors let you look at a map and quickly assess the districts that aren’t competitive.

• For districts where the Democratic (and Republican) vote share is in the 45–55% competitive range, we colors the districts using a red-to-white-to-blue gradient that reflects how competitive the district is — the more white it is, the more competitive it is.

Coloring districts by partisan lean

Looking at the sample North Carolina map (above) and the district-by-district partisan lean (below), you can see how this works:

• Districts 1, 4, and 12 are all above the 60% Democratic threshold, showing packed Democratic districts
• Districts 3, 10, and 11 are all above the 60% Republican threshold, showing packed Republican districts
• Districts 5–9 are in the 55–60% solid Republican category, and
• Only districts 2 and 13 fall in the 45–55% competitive range, both leaning Republican

District Statistics

Only Current Option

You can also just color the district that is currently chosen in the District Selector. Visually this treats all other precincts as unassigned. This is helpful in conjunction with the coloring precincts options described below.

No District Coloring

You can turn off district coloring altogether, by unchecking both the “Map Coloring” and “Partisan Lean” options. This lets you color all precincts, using the options described in the next section, e.g., see a whole state colored by partisan lean or a demographic category.

Custom Coloring

If you want to color the districts in your maps differently, you have two options:

1. Change the map color used for each district manually — Footnote 1 explains how to do that.
2. Export the district shapes GeoJSON and use another tool, such as Flourish, to color the shapes.

Coloring Precincts

By default, precincts that haven’t been assigned to districts yet are not colored.

Unassigned precincts

To help you decide which precincts to assign to what districts, you can color unassigned³ precincts by:

• Partisan Lean, or
• Demographics

where the demographic categories are the same ones in district Statistics.

Partisan Lean Option

When you color precincts by “Partisan Lean,” unassigned precincts are colored using a red-to-white-to-blue gradient that reflects the relative two-party vote in each precinct, from 100% Republican (red) to 100% Democratic (blue).

Precincts colored by partisan lean

You can hover over a precinct and see the specific values in the “Precinct Details” pane. The Election dataset you choose in the Data Selector determines what election or election composite is used to gauge partisan lean.

Demographics Options

When you color precincts by “Demographics,” unassigned precincts are colored using a white-to-black gradient that reflects the relative share of the voting age (or citizen voting age) population of the selected minority group in each precinct from to 0% minority (the color white) to 100% minority (the color black).

Unassigned precincts colored by Black demographic

The demographic options are the same ones in district Statistics:

• Hispanic
• Black
• Asian
• Native
• Pacific, and
• Minority — all minorities combined

Again, you can hover over a precinct and see the specific values in the “Precinct Details” pane, and the VAP dataset that you choose in the Data Selector determines what demographics data — voting age population (VAP) or citizen VAP — are used to gauge the demographics.

Only Current Option Revisited

Sometimes it can be helpful to only color one district with its map color and color all other precincts — whether they are assigned to another district or not — by partisan lean or a demographic category. This can help you focus on which precincts to add to that selected district.

Only Current district with precincts colored by partisan lean

In other words, the “Only Current” district coloring option treats all precincts not assigned to the currently selected districted as if they were unassigned.

Footnotes

1. You can change the default map colors used in your map, by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right, then clicking on “Map Settings,” and then clicking the color you want to change. You’ll get a color picker.
2. We use Democratic vote share by convention, but you can do the same with Republican two-party vote shares which are just the complements of the Democratic shares.
3. “Unassigned” here has two distinct meanings. See the “Only Current Option Revisited” section for details.