You are on page 1of 5

Susan Williams

GEOG 586
October 2013

Project 1: Converting and Manipulating Spatial Data

Figure 1: Choropleth map showing the Republican Majority in the November 2002
Texas Congressional Voting Districts. The integer value indicates the Republican
candidates winning margin, which is colored red; a negative integer indicates the
Republican candidate lost, which is colored blue. Lighter colors indicate smaller
majorities. Large cities are indicated by yellow dots. Map created with Esri ArcMap
10.1. Used here for educational purposes only.

As shown above in Figure 1, Republicans and Democrats each won 16 of 32


Congressional districts. In general, it appears that the Republicans won more
suburban and rural areas while the Democrats won majorities in the more densely
populated urban areas. The Republicans won a majority in districts near the states
of New Mexico and Oklahoma. The eastern-most districts near the state of
Louisiana seemed to command a Democratic majority, as did the southern and
western districts near major border crossings from Mexico.

Figure 2: Map showing the new boundaries after the October 2004 Texas Senate
Redistricting plan as overlaid on the November 2002 Republic Majority election
results. The thick black lines indicate the new boundaries of each district. Map
created with Esri ArcMap 10.1. Used here for educational purposes only.

At first glance, the redistricting plan does not seem dramatically different from the
previous district boundaries. Some districts have been elongated, resulting in
oddly-shaped districts where constituents may not reside anywhere near one
another. Upon closer examination, one can see that the new districts appear to
take small pieces of Democratic-leaning areas and incorporate them into
Republican-dominated districts, thereby lowering the overall winning Republican
margin but absorbing and basically nullifying the Democratic votes. The
redistricting plan seems to favor Republican votes.
To predict the 2004 electoral outcome, I chose Option 2: Kernel Density Estimation
(KDE) to create a continuous field layer that represents the voter distribution across
space. Due to the huge variation in populations across the state of Texas, I felt that
KDE would be a satisfactory method. Some experts feel that KDE is one of the most
useful transformations in GIS due to its ability to detect local density hot spots

and linking points to other geographic data (OSullivan and Unwin, 2010).

Figure 3: Choropleth map displaying the predicted Republican majority in the 2004
Texas electoral outcome based on the new districts. Red areas indicate a
Republican majority while blue areas indicate a Democrat majority; darker colors
indicate higher majorities. Map created with Esri ArcMap 10.1. Used here for
educational purposes only.

Whereas the 2002 map shown in Figure 1 displayed an even split with Republicans
and Democrats tallying 16 districts each, this 2004 predictive map reveals that the
redistricting plan favors the Republicans. In the 2004 predictive map, the
Republicans tally 22 districts, a gain of 6 districts under the new redistricting plan.
The Democrats do not gain any districts under this plan but rather lose the majority
in several previously-Democratic districts.
The new districts are so jagged and non-uniform that they do seem to indicate that
they were constructed with a partisan advantage in mind. District 19, for example,
is such an odd shape that many peninsulas have been created, resulting in pockets
where voters are surrounded by other districts on three sides. Furthermore, the
elongated and especially jagged boundaries of districts in the southern portion of
the state do not seem to follow any particular natural boundary other than to favor
gerrymandering.
A potential problem in the Kernel Density Estimate method is that the radius used
in calculations needs to be chosen thoughtfully. If the chosen radius is too large,
more points may fall within the area causing less densely populated districts to be
skewed by more densely populated districts.
Additionally, this method (indeed, all of the methods) do not take into account
variations in candidates and campaign issues that will affect how individual voters
may cast their ballot.

References
O'Sullivan, David. (2014). GEOG 586: Geographic Information Analysis, Lesson 1:
Why Spatial Data Are Special Problems and Opportunities. The Pennsylvania State
University World Campus . Accessed October 2013 at https://www.eeducation.psu.edu/geog586/l2.html
O'Sullivan, D., & Unwin, D. J. (2010). Geographic Information Analysis. (2nd ed.).

Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.


4

You might also like