Greenealogist
Well-known member
Hi, I'm Greenealogist and am pretty new to this whole cartographical business, but without much else to do at the moment, I've started making some, and now I've made a few, thought it might be an idea to keep them consolidated somewhere easy to get at. Also, I figure if I make a thread, I'll be more inclined to try and fill it with stuff instead of just dropping back into lurking. For the moment, three Deep Southern OTL state legislative maps cross-posted from the American Politics thread.
I wasn't sure where to put this, but this seemed as good a place as any: I pulled together a quick map of the Alabama State Legislative elections based on the AL Sec State website. Alabama was compelled to redraw its districts in 2017 because the old districts were found to be inappropriately racially gerrymandered - which makes a nice change from Deep South states redrawing their districts mid-decade in order to inappropriately racially gerrymander. There was no overall change in seat numbers in the Senate, but the Democrats lost five seats in the House, leaving them effectively reduced in both the Senate and the House to effectively the Black Belt, Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville. There are a couple of exceptions in the House, with Dexter Grimsley holding the 85th district in Wiregrass Country and 24-year incumbent Barbara Boyd being re-elected in the Talladega-to-Anniston 32nd district, but other long-term Democratic seats were lost, like the Tuscumbia-based 3rd district where long-term incumbent Marcel Black retired and the peripheral Black Belt seat of the 65th district, where incumbent Elaine Beech has been unseated. These losses are really the tailend of the re-alignment of white Southerners to the Republican Party, and it's hard to see the Democrats falling much further as the vast majority of their remaining seats are unopposed African-American majority districts - although as can be seen from the map there are also a horrific number of unopposed elections in Republican seats. Despite their spectacular Senate win in 2017, there doesn't seem to be a corresponding resurgence on a state level.View attachment 6499
I'm not sure it's really fair to call what happened in South Carolina this year an election, but it can nonetheless be mapped. A whopping 68 of South Carolina's 124 State House seats were uncontested, and a further 11 were only contested by minor parties, including two from the surprisingly resilient United Citizens Party, who date back to the end of Jim Crow as a vehicle to try and elect black people in response the Democrats refusal to nominate them. The result of this was that only just over a third of voters had a Democrat-Republican contest on the state legislative ballot. Very noticeable on the map is the Charleston area, home of the 1st Congressional District which the Democrats unexpectedly managed to gain after former South Carolina Governor and centre of one of the strangest political disappearances since John Stonehouse, Marshall "Mark" Sanford Jr., was primaried by Trump-backed Katie Arrington, which has a lot of very pale majorities on both sides and saw two seats change hands - which cancelled each other out. In fact, all changes cancelled themselves out at this election and the balance remains 80 Republicans to 44 Democrats. The Democrats are contained to the Black Belt, Charleston and city centre districts in places like Greenville and Spartanburg. Unlike in Alabama, there is a clear path for Democratic gains here in Charleston and its environs in the future, but this is another state where politics have largely ossified, with even contested races returning huge majorities. With neither party seemingly bothered about fighting elections - and frankly, this is a state where I kind of understand why given the results when they do try - there doesn't even seem to be a possibility of things changing substantially.View attachment 6520
I moved away from South Carolina to Georgia thinking it couldn't possibly be worse. After all, Georgia is a competitive state, with high-profile races for governor and the US House. Surely, surely, there would be fewer unopposed elections here, of all Deep South states.
Oh how wrong I was.
70 of the 180 seats in the Georgia State House of Representatives saw contests of any sort - just over a third. Similarly, 22 of the 56 State Senate districts saw challengers. Astonishingly, this is an improvement on 2016, when only 13 Senate and 32 House districts had more than one candidate. Those seats that actually saw elections tended to be very competitive, with 17 seats in the house probably changing hands - 11 from the Republicans to the Democrats, plus four more where the Democrats lead in but are yet to be called, all in the Atlanta metro, but two seats in Athens (the 117th and 119th districts) won by the Democrats in special elections narrowly returning to Republican hands. 2 northern Atlanta Senate seats also flipped to the Democrats. Some of these swings were huge - some necessarily, because one of the state senate seats and five of the state house seats returned Republicans unopposed in 2016, others as a consequence of good campaigning. Of note were the eleven point swing in the 40th Senate district and the twelve-point swing in the 54th House district.
These pickups were concentrated overwhelmingly in the 6th and 7th House districts. The white-majority 6th was the home of the most-expensive ever special election last year, when Jon Ossoff, probably grown in a lab somewhere to be the DNC's ideal White Moderate Suburban Candidate, failed to gain the seat by a few percentage points, but has now been gained by Lucy McBath, an African-American gun control activist. Create your own arbitrary narrative about what this means for Democratic presidential candidates in 2020. In next-door's 7th, now only a white plurality seat, Republican incumbent Rob Woodall leads Professor Carolyn Bourdeaux by only 900 votes and the race is still yet to be called. All in all, these results are a real sign of the meteoric shift in the Atlanta Metro - the aforementioned 6th and 7th districts voted for Romney by over 20 points and for Trump by two and seven points respectively. The good news for the Democrats wasn't limited entirely to Atlanta, however, seeing big swings towards them in the suburban Savannah 164th district, the rural south-western 151st and 154th districts, located within Sanford Bishop's congressional district, and the 147th district in Warner Robins, as well as the two aforementioned Athens districts which returned to the Republicans. All this on a house map that was partially redrawn in 2015 and a senate map in 2014 to try and shore up potentially vulnerable Republican incumbents in the Atlanta metro - and with yet another House redistricting plan currently proposed.
With the breaking of the Senate supermajority, substantial gains in the House and a potential pickup in the Secretary of State race, which would neutralize the frankly banana-republic levels of shenanigans committed by until-very-recently incumbent Brian Kemp, who is also the probably-successful Republican candidate for governor, the Democrats have reason to feel good about the future in Georgia, but the map looks very, very different to when Clinton narrowly carried the state in 1992. Whether the Democrats can consolidate their Atlanta gains in 2020 is going to be one of the many, many interesting questions of that election cycle.
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