Way-too-early 2022 Minnesota Redistricting analysis (Part 1)
By: David Brauer
Tags: GOP, Dfl, Redistricting, Democratic Party, Minnesota

This month, DFLers didn’t take the Minnesota Senate, and saw their House margin trimmed. Some are saying, “Just wait until 2022! We’ll have better maps! More DFLers!”

As a certified DFL Twitter shitposter, I lean into this. But as an anal-retentive with too much time on his hands, I wanted to chart & map it as soon as 2020 election data was available. This might help you think about redistricting! But, a big caveat: Redistricting pros make maps like this …

Whereas my maps are more like …

Jesus is in there somewhere

Not quite as granular. The maps below are only down to the House District level — precincts are beyond even this retired guy right now. They use Secretary of State pre-canvass (but 100% in) results, overlaid with Minnesota Demographic Center 2018 population estimates.

These aren’t the Census results, upon which redistricting depends. Stuff can change! For example: if the Trump administration excludes undocumented Minnesotans. So this is really a first draft of history.

DFL hopes rest on this thesis: the central cities and firmly blue suburbs have grown a lot, while rural Minnesota GOP strongholds have shrunk a lot. Here’s how the (clickable! zoomable!) House map looks:

The pinker, the worse from a redistricting standpoint. Those districts will have to get bigger and fewer. Green is growing (population); thus shrinking and more of them.

So how do parties fare? Here are the 64 districts House Republicans won in 2020:

There’s a whole lot of pink in the Red Zone: 19 of the 23 fastest-shrinking House districts are GOP. But if you zoom in on the metro, you’ll notice some green, too. Seven of the 8 fastest-growing districts are GOP.

If southwest Minnesota is leaking Republicans, you could say exurban Minnesota is there to sop those Republicans up. DFLers see that southwest beet juice and salivate, but Republicans may hold a napkin. (I’ll stop with the food stuff now.)

If judges — who in divided government inevitably draw the lines — keep the contiguous GOP southwest/exurb zone Republican, I estimate the DFL could gain approximately one House seat. (Again, refer to smudgy Jesus above.)

Might as well look at the DFL map:

If you zoom in on that teeny tiny metro, you’ll see that Minneapolis rocks! This is the source of great DFL hope. Smudgy Jesus calculation is that Ds will gain nearly a full House district in Minneapolis alone, and there’s growth in St. Paul and surrounding suburbs, too.

However, the DFL has its own beet juice problem: look at northeastern Minnesota, which percentage-wise is 6.1% below district average — even more than the southwest GOP zone (-4.8%). There are only 7 DFL seats up north compared to 24 southwest Minnesota Republican ones, but depending on how judges line-draw, the losses there and a couple other DFL non-metro districts attenuate the gains.

Overall, I estimate a 70–64 DFL House would be a 71–63 with redistricting. Again, I want to refer to smudgy Jesus — I’m analyzing entire districts, not individual cities, subdivisions, or blocks like the pros do. It’s possible there are blue parts of exurbs closer to the metro, so maybe that GOP napkin won’t absorb as much southwest beet juice. Localized effects are what makes redistricting.

Down the road, I’ll take a look at the Minnesota Senate (spoiler: I don’t think the statewide story is very different) and possibly dive into individual legislative districts to see about those micro-effects.

Comments welcome! I’m https://twitter.com/dbrauer on Twitter and https://www.facebook.com/dbrauer on Facebook.