Utah has 4 congressional districts. We’ve generated 5,000 sets of randomly simulated districts according to the relevant criteria. Three of these plans are shown here, along with the actual enacted map.
Partisan Features
In Utah, Democrats win about 33% of the vote in a typical statewide election. Proportionally, that would translate to 1.3 Democratic seats out of 4 total.
But proportionality isn’t guaranteed, even in a fair redistricting process. In our simulated plans, Democrats won anywhere from 0.0 to 0.9 seats on average, with 0.4 being the most typical. In contrast, we expect the enacted plan to yield 0.0 Democratic seats on average, which is less than 74% of all simulated plans.
The graph below breaks this down in detail, showing how each district of the enacted plan compares to the set of simulated districts.
Gerrymandering metrics
There are other ways of measuring the partisan skew of redistricting plan. The graph below shows two these metrics. The deviation from partisan symmetry measures the expected difference in each party’s share of seats if they each won 50% of the statewide vote. The efficiency gap is calculated as the difference in the number of wasted votes for each party. These metrics may be misleading for a strongly Republican state like Utah. Learn more about these metrics here.
Traditional redistricting criteria
Factors other than partisanship are important for redistricting, too. The graph below shows the geographic compactness and the number of counties which are split into multiple districts. As far as compactness, Utah’s enacted plan scores a 0.34, more than 66% of all simulated plans (a higher score means more compact). It splits 5 counties, compared to an average of 2 counties for our simulated plans.
Political Geography
These two maps show the partisan lean across Utah in a typical statewide election, and the share of minority voters around the state.
More information
Learn more about our methodology.
Elections included in analysis:
- President 2016
- US Senate 2016
- Governor 2016
- Attorney General 2016
- US Senate 2018
- President 2020
- Governor 2020
- Attorney General 2020
Redistricting requirements
Our algorithmic constraints used in simulations are in part are based on some of these requirements and discretionary criteria. See full documentation and code for the complete implementation details.
In Utah, districts must, under legislation code 20A-20-302:
- have a total population deviation of less than 1% (where total population deviation is calculated by adding together the percentage deviation of both the most populous and least populous districts from the average, or “ideal,” district)
- not be drawn with race used as a predominant factor
- be contiguous and reasonably compact
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to the extent practicable
- preserve communities of interest
- follow natural, geographic, or man-made features, boundaries, or barriers
- preserve cores of prior districts
- minimize the division of municipalities and counties across multiple districts
- achieve boundary agreement among different types of districts
- prohibit the purposeful or undue favoring or disfavoring of incumbents, candidates or prospective candidates, and political parties