What Redistricting Looks Like In Every State

At the request of seven counties, Arizona’s independent citizen redistricting commission made several small amendments to the state’s final redistricting plan. However, the last-minute tweaks — which were apparently made to correct for inconsistencies between precinct boundaries or to eliminate awkward divisions — didn’t change the partisan lean of any of Arizona’s districts.

The proposed changes come weeks after the commission voted on Dec. 22 to move forward with a map with lines that drew four solid Republican-leaning seats and two solid Democratic-leaning seats with three competitive districts, two of which are Republican-leaning and one that is more of a “toss-up” per our analysis.

Ensuring that there were competitive districts under Arizona’s new map was a requisite for getting the commission’s two Democratic members to vote in favor. And at the heart of the dispute was how to split the 6th and 7th Districts in Tucson. Notably, under this map, the Republican-leaning 6th District will become more competitive than it was in previous versions while the 7th District is a heavily Hispanic district so as to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

But despite commissioners hashing out an agreement, this map still contains a number of big shake-ups for Democratic incumbents. Outgoing Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick’s district goes from D+2 to R+7, which means in a Republican-leaning midterm environment this could end up in Republicans’ column. The situation has improved for Democratic Rep. Greg Stanton’s district, as it doesn’t swing quite as far to the right as it had in previous versions, but it still goes from D+15 to D+1, making it very competitive moving forward. Democratic Rep. Tom O’Halleran’s district also gets a lot redder under this map, going from R+6 to R+15. To be sure, Republican Reps. Paul Gosar and David Schweikert’s districts did get less safe in this map, but they still largely favor the GOP.

Overall, though, this map actually has a slight bias toward Democrats per our fairness metrics, so it’s one of the better versions of this map Democrats could have hoped for as neither party’s dominance is guaranteed in elections to come.