Back on Monday, I released the Ohio District Index, and in the article, I tried to take some guesses at what kind of blowback Republicans were looking at in response to the right-wing policy agenda they've been pushing this year. While no one is out there polling state legislative districts, given the "wave" nature of the 2010 elections, I think we can learn a lot about voter's preferences from their souring opinion on Governor John Kasich. People who bought into the Republican promises last fall have been changing their minds fast, and my guess is that the result will be serious changes in legislative preferences.
So when I published my article Monday, I looked at results from a mid-March PPP poll, where they found a 17 point swing from Gov. Kasich to former Governor Ted Strickland, if the election were held again today. While its a rather crude measurement, I took the most Democratic seat a Republican held (R+16), and said that if you tack on 17 points for Democrats, and have them win all the seats more Democratic than that, you would pretty much wipe away Republican house gains from 2010.
Well, PPP just brought new results back from the field, and they suggest that the public has turned on Gov. Kasich even more. Unlike in Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker has fired up his base with his actions, Kasich is failing to inspire anything among his party faithful, and the result is a staggering 33-56 approval rating.
What is even more interesting to me however, is that the Strickland-Kasich re-do margin has grown by another 8%. If you tacked that on to the index, then competitive seats would be ones that had a slight Republican advantage. If this is borne out in the 2012 elections, we may see that there has been a real whiplash within the electorate - in 2010, Democrats in friendly districts had to really fight to hold their seats, where as in 2012, Republicans in friendly territory will similarly be on the defensive.
Unfortunately, the scholarship on what inputs effect state legislative elections is virtually non-existant. Part of this project is about trying to improve our knowledge about how voters respond in state legislative elections, and so by getting these numbers together now, in a time that seems poised for serious political change, hopefully we will have plenty of data sets to work off of come election day. While new districts will be drawn for Ohio, by getting all the background data in place now, we'll be in a position to easily convert our data into the new boundaries, so that we can really observe the changes that occur in 2012 - what districts have moved dramatically, what indicators are driving electoral preference shifts, etc.
As I mentioned on Twitter, I had my wisdom teeth yanked a few days back and needless to say, the headaches have made staring at Excel a less than desired way of spending my time. However, I'm making headway on districting Maine, where we are going to have perfect district-by-district data to share, which I know will make a lot of people happy, and we have some other states coming up the pipeline where we'll be able to use as detailed data as possible.
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