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* We’ve all seen this type of goofy ploy…
* Some standard retorts…
* At my behest, a friend crafted this one using AI: “Non-Contiguous Cartogram by Population (2020) Areas scaled to share of state population; county shapes preserved; adjacency not preserved”…
Click the pic for a higher resolution version. Same goes for this next one: “Illinois County Dorling Cartogram (Population, 2020 Census)”…
* And the pièce de résistance: “Illinois Counties - Contiguous Population Cartogram (2024 presidential winners)”…
Feel free to use them.
posted by Rich Miller
Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 10:55 am
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Thanks. The third and fourth seem very intuitive and easy to understand.
Comment by H-W Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:00 am
As usual, the GOP strategy is the play to the lowest common denominator in terms of nonsense rather than actually trying to make a point. The only thing surprising about her tweet was that she didn’t toss in a dog whistle for good measure, too.
Comment by TJ Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:06 am
That “pièce de résistance” graphic is going to give me nightmares for a while.
Comment by NIU Grad Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:06 am
Texas Dems are returning to the longhorn state in another misstep for Pritzker and co.
Eagerly awaiting the linked article and your thoughts.
Comment by LP-Dad Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:13 am
Generally speaking, and I mean this fairly seriously: to be a conservative basically requires you to either (1) not understand how anything works or (2) understand how things work, but lie to the people in category 1 to rile them up to get them to vote.
Comment by Homebody Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:15 am
I think we need an IQ test for people running for congress. Mary Miller would fail miserably.
Comment by Stephenson County Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:16 am
the last one..but but all together the red is bigger, say the fools
Comment by Amalia Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:17 am
Reader added context to the tweet sums it up nicely:
The blue area to the northeast is the Chicago metropolitan area, whose population is about 9.5 million people.
The population of the entire state of IL is about 12.5 million people, which means the blue area contains approximately 3/4 of the state’s population.
Comment by Irma Gerd Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:19 am
You could also do the amount of taxes paid, value of property, life span and more and graph it with similar results.
Mary Miller doesnt seem to understand there are more people in most Chicago neighborhoods than several downstate counties put together.
Thats the truth my friend.
Comment by low level Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:29 am
Do you think Pritzker’s “kindergartners” comment will come back to hurt him? It was a flippant response, but I’m not sure that helped make his case on the matter.
Comment by Downstate Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:31 am
===Mary Miller doesnt seem to understand===
She’s not a stupid person.
Comment by Rich Miller Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:32 am
== She’s not a stupid person. ==
To be fair, sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s an act and what’s actually for real anymore. I would agree with you that Miller’s acting here, but someone like Boebert I’d totally see them thinking they were making a really good point, for instance.
Comment by TJ Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:34 am
==She’s not a stupid person.==
If been in a few meetings with her, and I would absolutely dispute this.
Comment by So_Ill Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:38 am
The data is always interesting and both parties know how to use it selectively to convey their message. The key for the voter is to ask the right questions to understand what is underneath the data used for the message. The voter who fails to ask the questions and get the answer is the bigger problem. Politicians are always going to spin.
Comment by illinifan Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:41 am
== Do you think Pritzker’s “kindergartners” comment will come back to hurt him? ==
No. If the IL GOP was moderate and effective as it was 30+ years ago then yes but it is no longer functioning as it once did.
Comment by low level Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:42 am
One of my favorite facts to illustrate this point is that almost 80 percent of Illinois’ 102 counties are smaller than a single Chicago ward.
Comment by Telly Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:47 am
“Mary Miller would fail miserably.” Whether that’s true or not doesn’t matter when she runs unopposed.
Comment by Skeptic Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:50 am
If we could gerrymander MM out of existence I’d regard that as a huge win for Illinois.
Comment by Morty Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:53 am
I am disappointed that anyone would think that Mary Miller isn’t intentionally spreading misinformation and trying to undermine our Democracy.
She knows how many people live in her district and she knows it is about the same as every other congressional district in the state.
Comment by Candy Dogood Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 11:59 am
To Skeptic: Mary Miller will have a Democratic opponent. So I assume you mean she doesn’t have an opponent in the Republican primary.
Comment by Yooper in Diaspora Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 12:07 pm
Adding to Telly, but like 12 of those 20 counties larger than a Chicago ward voted for Harris.
I’m also not going to claim that our maps are not gerrymandered. But the fact of the matter is that the residents of cities like Peoria, the Quad Cities and Rockford probably have many more similar needs for their communities when compared to Chillicothe, Geneseo or Pecatonica. And since we no longer have 19/20 Congressional districts, grouping cities like that (as well as Springfield, Decatur, Champaign) is probably the only way that the interests of those mid-size urban areas in our state would ever get meaningful representation in Congress.
Comment by Juice Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 12:07 pm
==The voter who fails to ask the questions and get the answer is the bigger problem.==
I heartily disagree with this sentiment. I think it’s pretty bad when sitting members of Congress deliberately spread misleading information. Politicians can’t get away with something just because voters don’t bother to ask questions about it.
Comment by I-55 Fanatic Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 12:11 pm
== grouping cities like that (as well as Springfield, Decatur, Champaign) is probably the only way that the interests of those mid-size urban areas in our state would ever get meaningful representation in Congress.==
Excellent point. I never thought of it like that. Thank you.
Comment by low level Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 12:23 pm
Put another way, “people live in cities.”
Comment by Horace Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 12:32 pm
NIU Grad- they all gave me acid flashbacks for sure, esp the last one.
Comment by Loyal Virus Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 12:42 pm
Given today’s GOP seems to be fully onboard with having a king, it’s not entirely surprising for them to have feudal notions of power going with land rather than people.
Comment by ChicagoVinny Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 12:45 pm
=Mary Miller doesnt seem to understand there are more people in most Chicago neighborhoods than several downstate counties put together.=
Oak Park born and Naperville Central grad Mary Miller?
She knows. She is just trying to find something to get a rise out of her local constituents. Nothing more.
Comment by JS Mill Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 12:46 pm
“Mary Miller will have a Democratic opponent.” Good, because she didn’t in 2024. She had a token opponent in 2022, but he didn’t get much (if any) support from the party.
Comment by Skeptic Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 1:02 pm
The 7 seven smallest counties in Illinois combine to have about the same amount of people that live in 1 ward in Chicago.
Comment by Cool Papa Bell Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 1:12 pm
===but he didn’t get much (if any) support from the party===
Trump won that district last year by 35 points.
Comment by Rich Miller Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 1:15 pm
JS Mill
is.right as usual
Comment by walker Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 1:24 pm
I love me a good cartogram
Comment by Michael McLean Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 1:34 pm
Interestingly, Mary Miller’s map looks to be by township, rather than county, which sort of supports the opposite of what she is suggesting. All the of urban spots are blue, while rural is red. Urban population > rural population. Simple math, but I agree she’s not dumb, she does know where her bread is buttered, and that butter is a deep shade of orange.
Comment by Steve Rogers Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 1:50 pm
===but he didn’t get much (if any) support from the party===
=Trump won that district last year by 35 points. =
I get that, and I understand the Dems don’t want to throw money down a hole. But at the same time you can’t say “Mary Miller bad” wring your hands and hope it gets better (not referring to you, Rich.) Maybe there’s enough non-Trump R’s (especially ones who wouldn’t vote for Harris) plus D’s to agree on someone else. To paraphrase Wayne Gretzke, you lose 100% of the elections where you don’t run a candidate.
Comment by Skeptic Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 1:54 pm
New Illinoisi at its finest. Does Miller support them seceding or does she realize NE Illinois is supporting the red parts?
Comment by low level Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 1:54 pm
Candidly, I think the gerrymandering issue by Illinois D’s is a bit of a distraction.
Do we seriously think that having an all D delegation in DC will dramatically alter the trajectory of the debt, out-migration, and educational challenges that face the state and the City of Chicago?
After all, our congressional delegation isn’t preventing Chicago from enacting a head tax to garner more revenue, or Illinois schools from improving test scores. And I don’t think people are moving out of state because they are frustrated that we still have 3 republican representatives.
Just sayin.
Comment by Downstate Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 2:08 pm
===Maybe there’s enough non-Trump R’s…plus D’s to agree on someone else===
Those Ds would need to pull an R ballot in the primary. We need 65k of Ds, Is, and non-Trump Rs to vote for the most conservative anti-MAGA candidate that can be found. And the state Ds need to fund that candidate to the max to primary Miller. It may be counterintuitive for Ds to swallow their pride and support a strong conservative R, but it is best for the country which means it is the best for the Ds as well.
Comment by thechampaignlife Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 2:44 pm
== Maybe there’s enough non-Trump R’s (especially ones who wouldn’t vote for Harris) plus D’s to agree on someone else.==
I live 15 miles from Mary Miller and no, there aren’t.
Comment by Gruntled University Employee Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 2:45 pm
==our congressional delegation isn’t preventing Chicago from enacting a head tax to garner more revenue==
Maybe if we were able to keep more of our money instead of sending it downstate we wouldnt need to raise revenue?
Comment by low level Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 2:54 pm
The last one looks like it is screaming “it’s not a tumor!”
Comment by Boone's is Back Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 3:01 pm
Mary Miller is my congressperson. Please pray for me.
Comment by Sir Reel Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 3:05 pm
===Those Ds would need to pull an R ballot in the primary. We need 65k of Ds, Is, and non-Trump Rs===
lol
259 people took Democratic ballots in that entire district last year.
259.
Y’all need to stop this nuttiness.
Comment by Rich Miller Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 3:07 pm
That last chart/graph is 100% fire LOL
Comment by Frida's Boss Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 3:23 pm
If you don’t live in Mary Miller’s district, any fixation on her is analogous to me decrying the policies of Chuy Garcia. I align with few if any of his positions. As a result, I spend little if any time worrying about him being in Congress.
Comment by Downstate Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 3:24 pm
Are Pritzker and Newsome engaging in “one-upmanship” to their own detriment?
They’ve both vowed to consider gerrymandering to counter efforts of Texas Republicans. And while that will play well to the presidential primary voters, it can come off as “reactionary” to the independents in the general election.
But now that JB and Gavin have thrown down the gauntlet, not following through carries another set of risks.
There’s a possibility that they’ve both, voluntarily, stepped into an issue they’d probably prefer not to carry long term.
Comment by Downstate Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 3:33 pm
IL-13 has been mentioned specifically in several recent WaPo articles as an extreme example of gerrymandering. But as pointed out by commenters, grouping like-minded cities together to achieve representation is a sensible thing to do, especially when the GOP would dilute them out of existence in their own gerrymander.
Comment by Jibba Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 4:08 pm
==I align with few if any of his positions. As a result, I spend little if any time worrying about him being in Congress.==
Right. Just earlier in the thread you were focusing on the fiscal policies of the City of Chicago.
Comment by low level Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 4:27 pm
As they used to say on the Boers and Bernstein show on 670 the Score, who you crapppin, Downstate?
Comment by low level Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 4:30 pm
- 259 people took Democratic ballots in that entire district last year. -
It’s amazing to me that I know for certain at least 4% - 5% of that total.
Comment by Excitable Boy Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 4:30 pm
“grouping like-minded cities together to achieve representation is a sensible thing to do”
I’m not sure that logic explains 1, 9, 11, 16, and 17. But I’m admittedly not as well versed on the similarities between the communities in those “spider-like” districts.
Comment by Downstate Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 4:32 pm
- If you don’t live in Mary Miller’s district, any fixation on her is analogous to me decrying the policies of Chuy Garcia. -
That’s an odd thing to say, since members of Congress decide issues on a nation wide basis.
Comment by Excitable Boy Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 4:32 pm
“Right. Just earlier in the thread you were focusing on the fiscal policies of the City of Chicago.”
Great point! Although my lack of interest in one congress person in the state (not my representative) isn’t really akin to not having an interest in the largest city in the state.
But more to the point, I’m fascinated by Chicago in that the multi-generational control by one party of Chicago allows for the full manifestation of that party’s policies to be implemented and realized. If anything, Chicago is the showcase for Democrat principles and ideals.
That’s why I support them implementing a head tax, income tax or whatever other reforms they believe can work. I look forward to them demonstrating that their policies when it comes to education, safety, and economic development are the best. /s/
Comment by Downstate Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 4:39 pm
Rich, I do not disagree with your broader point.
But the 259 is how many votes there were for the candidate (who I think was a write-in?). You have to pull the excel file to see how many dem ballots were pulled. And that number is 22,894, with most of those being under-votes/blank ballots.
Comment by Juice Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 4:52 pm
@Downstate, going backwards, the 17th is what I had started with. That includes Peoria, the QC, Rockford. All river community urban areas that have faced similar challenges since the 1980s.
The 16th is admittedly just what was left over.
The 11th is made up almost entirely of exurban/outter ring suburbs.
For the Chicago districts, you have to start with the VRA. When the black and brown populations in a state are segregated as they are in Chicago, in order for the communities to have representation in proportion to the population, the districts are going to get weird unless the State wants to go through a messy packing allegation. Which a map drawn by democrats is not likely to do. (Also why the old third district was in essence eliminated. Every talks about two GOP members being “drawn out ” of their districts. But we tend to forget that one dem member was as well, to avoid a lawsuit on illegal packing of latino voters.)
Comment by Juice Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 5:07 pm
“I live 15 miles from Mary Miller” Keep in mind her district runs well west of Springfield.
“259 people took Democratic ballots in that entire district last year.” There’s no point in pulling a ballot if there’s no one to vote for.
I’ll concede we’re stuck with her, but it is frustrating
Comment by Skeptic Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 5:08 pm
Overall population is not the problem. Districts are close in population. The problem is the “compact and contiguous” which the Democratic Illinois Supreme Court continues to ignore. The current districts are drawn to dilute the minority out of existence in many cases.
Comment by From the middle Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 5:34 pm
Best I could find on this overall topic.
Rucho v. Common Cause, 139 S.Ct. 2484 (2019)
Significance: While state courts, Congress and state legislatures remain free to regulate partisanship in redistricting, claims of excessive partisanship are beyond the capacity of federal courts to resolve.
Summary: Ending the line of partisan gerrymandering cases that began with Davis v. Bandemer, a majority of justices held that because of the difficulty in ascertaining how much partisanship was too much, the question was too difficult for federal courts to answer—rendering such claims “non-justiciable” in federal courts. The majority opinion noted that this ruling applied only to federal courts, and that Congress, state legislatures and state courts may be better equipped to handle such questions. This ability to regulate partisanship in redistricting extends to ballot measures that circumvent the traditional legislative process.
Comment by Mason County Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 6:08 pm
==The current districts are drawn to dilute the minority out of existence in many cases.==
Which the GOP would take advantage of as well, such that few downstate districts would be Dem. The lines can be drawn either way for exactly the same reasons…like-minded people are not spatially well distributed.
Comment by Jibba Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 7:20 pm
@from the middle
The districts are all contiguous.
There is no way that the 15th can be “compact” in the sense of “packed tightly together” because there just are not enough people.
It does, however, meet the mathematical definition of “compact”, which is what matters.
I think a lot of folks in politics are confused on this point because they do not understand that contiguous and compact are mathematical terms.
Could it be more compact? Sure. But that’s not the court’s job.
I think more telling than comparing downstate counties to Chicago wards, is to start comparing them to suburban towns and villages.
The majority of Illinois counties are smaller than Round Lake Beach, Illinois. A town the vast majority of Illinoisans have never heard of and even fewer have visited.
If you live in a town of 25K people, your town is bigger than most Illinois counties.
Comment by Yellow Dog Democrat Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 7:55 pm
And even the last graph, still not over 70%
Comment by maybe Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 8:05 pm
===There’s no point in pulling a ballot if there’s no one to vote for.===
Um, that’s how many votes the Democratic candidate received.
Comment by Rich Miller Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 8:56 pm
==multi-generational control by one party of Chicago allows for the full manifestation of that party’s policies to be implemented and realized.==
You need to pay closer attention. As we speak, Mayor Johnson is having difficulty getting his revenue proposals passed, not due to the oppostion of Republicans but rather other Democrats both in Chicago and the General Assembly. This is very frustrsting for the 5th Floor.
Comment by low level Monday, Aug 18, 25 @ 9:19 pm
===And even the last graph, still not over 70% ===
That is for sure true. But it’s also true that Illinois is not a “red” state, as Rep. Miller exclaimed.
Comment by Rich Miller Tuesday, Aug 19, 25 @ 12:02 am
Yellow dog—it is not much justification that the Republicans would do it too. The point is that no one should be doing it.. everyone understands that but the die hard partisan politicians. Unfortunately they keep drawing the maps like this is their playground. Everyone should have an objective commission.
Comment by From the middle Tuesday, Aug 19, 25 @ 12:17 am
Returning late to the conversation, but the elephant in the room across all these gerrymandering claims is that our representation is far too diluted.
We should have at least 690 representatives in Congress per the cube root law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law), about 26 from Illinois which could look something like the 1949 map (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/United_States_Congressional_Districts_in_Illinois%2C_1949-1952.png). Some argue we should have 5470 or more representatives (https://thirty-thousand.org/), about 211 from Illinois. In either case, smaller districts limit the ability to manipulate boundaries, increase voter participation, amplify the influence of small demographic groups, and yield Electoral College results that more closely mirror the national popular vote.
This is not something that Illinois can fix on its own, but it can adopt a resolution calling for a US constitutional convention to address the issue and advocate for 33 other states to join the effort. Given the disgust most of us have with gerrymandering and especially with the current shenanigans, but our inability to unilaterally disarm, this could have strong bipartisan support in the current environment.
Comment by thechampaignlife Friday, Aug 22, 25 @ 12:42 pm