Redistricting Utah with four districts

[Verily]

Here's my version with projected 2010 populations. The Salt Lake City district omits the Sandy / South Jordan area which attaches to the eastern and southern counties.

Interesting; that map might actually be able to elect two Democrats, assuming Matheson runs in the larger district (which contains most of the areas with vestiges of traditional Democratic Party strength anyway such as San Juan County, Grand County and Summit County). It's very similar to his current district, essentially simply exchanging parts of Salt Lake for Summit County (and switching around some equally Republican and small counties in the south).

[Verily]

But that still won't do him any good unless it contains enough Democratic parts of SLC as well.

Like I said, Summit County is actually more Democratic than SLC. It was in his district until the 2000 redistricting, when the Utah Republicans tried to unseat him by putting Summit in a hyper-conservative district and replacing it with various extremely conservative counties in the south. (Iron County especially, which is not in the district muon drew.)

[Verily]

But that still won't do him any good unless it contains enough Democratic parts of SLC as well.

Like I said, Summit County is actually more Democratic than SLC.

But has about 1/20th of the voters.

According to the map, anyway, Matheson's not losing much of SLC anyway. And he does get a net gain in the south by losing Piute and Iron in exchange for Sanpete (which is essentially identical to Iron but with half the population.)

[Verily]

Any chance that a Kerry CD could be carved out here?  I wish SLC didn't charge for precinct data.

Depends on how badly gerrymandered you'd allow the district to be. It wouldn't be too difficult to take the Democratic areas of Salt Lake, Summit, Carbon and Grand Counties and combine them with little threads of district.