photo by: Douglas County

The Douglas County Commission adopted this map as the county's new five-member commission districts Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022.

A liberal Democrat may be the biggest winner with the new five-district Douglas County Commission map that was approved this week.

The biggest loser may be a group of rural residents who thought they were sending a message that they didn’t care for this current county commission and wanted to see change as quickly as possible.

Those are a couple of my takeaways after spending some time reviewing the map county commissioners approved on Wednesday. There has not been much time to review. Commissioners basically have remade the county’s political landscape in less than two months’ time. It usually takes me longer than that just to figure out how to refold a map, let alone remake one. (That’s a pre-GPS joke, for sure.)

Regardless, the map is done, and residents likely will have to live with it for the next 10 years. Given that, I sought to dig up some demographics on the new map because county officials didn’t release much in terms of demographics as they were considering map proposals.

Let’s dive in, starting with that apparent winner:

• The new Second District, which is currently held by Shannon Reid, is poised to become a Democratic monster. To get demographics, I recreated both the new five-district map and the current three-district map on a website called Dave’s Redistricting. That well-respected website provides analytics on political districts by overlaying election results from 2016 to 2020 on top of the districts. With that data, the website reports whether a district leans Democratic or leans Republican and by how much.

The current Second District, in the three-district system, has about a 63% lean toward Democrats. The new Second District will have a more than 80% lean toward Democrats. That’s why I say a liberal Democrat — whether it be Reid or someone else — surely is a winner here. The current Second District is pretty safely Democratic. But the new Second District is a near lock for the Democrats. More importantly, it may produce a different type of candidate. A widely held belief is that the more a district leans to one party or another, the more likely you are to get a candidate who represents the edges of the party, i.e., a strong liberal for heavily Democratic-leaning districts or a strong conservative for heavily Republican-leaning districts. If you are a fan of moderates, you generally want a more balanced district. In fairness, I’m not trying to make commentary on Reid here. She didn’t push for this district. She proposed a different layout that would have changed the Second District less. But that change was proposed very late in the process — the night of the County Commission vote — and got no traction.

• Maybe some of the other districts, though, became more balanced and perhaps have a chance of becoming more moderate. Indeed, they did become more balanced, but whether they changed enough to alter the political environment in any significant way is unclear. The current First District, held by Patrick Kelly, has a nearly 76% Democratic lean in the three-district system. The new First District will have a 71% Democratic lean. The Third District, held by Karen Willey, has a 63% Democratic lean in its current format. The new Third District will have about a 60% Democratic lean.

The new Fourth District — which will represent parts of southeast Lawrence, Eudora and northeast Douglas County — will have about a 65% Democratic lean and about a 30% Republican lean, with the remainder leaning elsewhere. The new Fourth District is the most representative of the entire county in this regard. According to the data from Dave’s Redistricting, the entire county has a 67% Democratic lean and a 29% Republican lean.

The new Fifth District — which represents parts of southern Lawrence, Baldwin City and southeast Douglas County — may end up being the most competitive district between Democrats and Republicans. It has a 59% Democratic lean. Dave’s Redistricting considers districts where the majority has a lean of 55% or less to be competitive, so this one is only borderline competitive. In fairness, if the Fifth District is kind of competitive, then so is the Third District. The two aren’t that different in their partisan profiles.

• You will notice none of the five districts has Republicans in the majority. That shouldn’t shock anyone. There are way more Democrats than Republicans in Douglas County. But it may be surprising to some that the County Commission, if it so chose, could have created a district that would have put Republicans in the lead. That would have been the much-talked-about doughnut district — i.e., one district that surrounds Lawrence but doesn’t enter Lawrence city limits. I created that district on Dave’s Redistricting. It showed the district would lean 49% Republican, 46% Democratic and the remainder something else. The district would have assured that four of the five county commissioners would reside in Lawrence, which is a real drawback for some. But it would have created a really competitive district between the two parties.

• The data from that doughnut district is instructive in another way. It does a fair job of showing just how different Lawrence is from the rest of Douglas County. Douglas County as a whole leans Democratic by 67%. But when you look just at the area outside of Lawrence, only 46% lean Democratic. Non-Lawrence residents are more than 20 percentage points less likely to be Democratic voters than Lawrence residents. That’s significant, and can be a source of a rural-urban divide here.

• Given that difference, it seems important to understand how many Lawrence residents versus non-Lawrence residents are in each district. The county didn’t really provide much information on that front. Here’s what I came up with using Dave’s Redistricting. The new First District is entirely within the Lawrence city limits. That’s the case with the current First District too. The new Second District is basically a de facto Lawrence-only district. Only 3% of residents live outside of Lawrence. That’s very different from the current Second District layout, which represents both Eudora and Baldwin City. The new Third District has about 17,000 Lawrence residents — mainly in west Lawrence — and about 5,000 non-Lawrence residents. In other words, Lawrence residents outnumber non-Lawrence residents more than 3 to 1. But that is far different from the current district, where Lawrence residents outnumber rural residents about 5 to 1.

The new Fourth District has been called a Eudora district and the new Fifth District has been called a Baldwin City district. Indeed, the towns both get their own districts, but both districts still have more Lawrence residents than non-Lawrence residents. In District 4, there are about 15,600 Lawrence residents versus about 7,700 non-Lawrence residents. District 5 is the most closely divided in the county — about 14,700 Lawrence residents and about 9,600 non-Lawrence residents.

A quick reminder: Most people who live in Douglas County live in Lawrence, and state law requires each County Commission district to be roughly equal in population. These district numbers shouldn’t be unexpected. Once the doughnut district idea was dismissed, it was pretty clear that Lawrence residents were going to dominate every district. If people’s objective was to get more districts closely divided between Lawrence and non-Lawrence residents, I wrote a column in February that suggested a seven-district system produced more favorable math. But that idea gained no traction.

• The February column also expressed a concern that this redistricting process may splinter Douglas County between rural and urban lines. The ink is not even dry on the map, and there are signs of that already. Most of the consternation, though, doesn’t have to do with the districts, but rather the county’s decision to not hold a special election to fill the two new seats. Instead, it will wait until the regular 2024 election to fill those new seats. The governor could override this decision, but there’s no reason to think she will.

The county’s decision has real-life consequences. One is a solar farm that is possible for eastern Douglas County. It is controversial with residents who live near the Douglas-Johnson County line. If the solar farm plan comes to the County Commission before the 2024 election, there will be a real political peculiarity — none of the three county commissioners will ever have to win a vote from any of the residents who live near the solar plant. The area where the solar plant would be located is in Districts Four and Five. Those two commissioners won’t yet exist.

I’m not saying this peculiarity will impact the vote of any of the three current commissioners. They may well vote their conscience with no regard to how it plays politically. But, if the county approves a massive solar farm without having a single commissioner who will represent the area in the future even hearing the matter, it is going to create a perception problem, at a minimum.

The other problem here is that voters were caught off guard by the possibility that these new commissioners wouldn’t be chosen until 2024. The County Commission left an awful lot uncertain and unsaid as the voters went to the polls on this issue. County commissioners could have started making a map publicly before the November election. No such map would have been binding, but the county commissioners could have made a political promise to abide by the map. They weren’t interested in making that promise. That left county commissioners with less than two months to create a map that the county will live with for 10 years. That’s because state law says the map has to be done by the beginning of the year.

But set the timing of the map issue aside. The County Commission certainly could have told voters prior to the election that it intended to make everyone wait two years before these new seats would be filled. That would have been information voters would have liked to have had.

The fact they didn’t get it — full disclosure, I wish the Journal-World had asked commissioners about it in the campaign, but it never occurred to me the county may wait two years — has created hard feelings. It may well create the splintering rural-urban divide.

Based on the conversations I’ve had with people, it is certain there is a group of rural residents who will hold that decision against the County Commission for a long time to come. The only question is how big that group becomes.