Starting the Decade Right: New Jersey, Round 2

After some work over the weekend, I've put together the preliminary data for the 2011-2020 New Jersey legislature. While this is a good start, it will be much more valuable to look at after fall elections, when there is some real data to kick around, but I wanted to present this with a few notes:



- Some readers had suggested that the 40th district appears too Democratic by my measurements, and I'm inclined to believe that - however, updating the districts moves it closer to where it should be. It was originally the 13th most Democratic district, now it is the 19th, but the real change is in LDI score, moving from D+10 to D+4. The 50/50 numbers indicate that a generic Dem would have a 56-44 advantage, but I'm hoping that the static goes away after 2011.

- Because the previous map was so solid for Democrats, they haven't really be able to do much to shore up their more vulnerable members. The real legislators at risk are those who broke with their party and voted with Christie recently - as there is virtually no justification for voting like a Republican if you're a Democrat when no one is representing strongly conservative territory.

- The big mover? District 4, which shot up from the 18th to 13th most Democratic, making it the most blue territory where a Republican still holds office. With an expected generic result in the neighborhood of 58-42, that should be an easy pick-up that would quickly counter Republicans winning any of their friendlier targets.

New Jersey: Before or After the Storm?

Today begins the first of a two part series looking at New Jersey - first as how the districts have existed for the past decade, and then as the districts will exist following this fall's election. This is the first chance I've had to look at a state before and after redistricting, which offers a lot of exciting opportunities.



Like several states before it, New Jersey's legislature is configured in 40 districts that elect one senator and two representatives. What stands out immediately as unique about Jersey is the fact that only one two-member district split their vote between the two parties, unprecedented compared to the other multi-member states we have looked at so far.



In fact, in terms of competitiveness, the map New Jersey has been using for the past year is certainly unique, in that it is hardly competitive. In fact, when you graph out the distribution of scores compared to the other states we've surveyed, New Jersey is entirely different - with large numbers of safe seats, a sharp drop into the handful of competitive areas, and then another drop into safe Republican territory. But it isn't just the data that tells the story, as Rutgers professor Ingrid Reed has remarked that in any given year, only three to five legislative races are truly up for grabs.



This is the very reason why the 2011 election is shaping up to be so challenging for New Jersey Democrats. The election of Chris Christie wasn't all that unique given the abysmal reception Democrats were receiving back in the fall of 2009 - what was different, however, was that Democrats maintained control of the legislature, thanks to an incredibly friendly map. Even though the New Jersey redistricting commission ultimately approved the Democratic drawn map for the next decade, what is revealing is that while not happy by any stretch, Republicans recognize that this map is a significant improvement for them over the status quo.

2011 isn't 2009 - there are plenty of things that have changed, and the environment isn't nearly as Republican as it was back then. That being said, Democrats aren't out of the water. Chris Christie's popularity may have fallen, but it's not clear that it has come to the benefit of New Jersey Democrats, and this time, they'll be waging that defense on a less friendly map. How less friendly will be the subject of our next update, which I hope you all check out.

Vermont, Part 2: Scoring the State Senate

For the second installment of my Vermont series, I want to illustrate one of the ways that LDI scores can be useful in non-electoral analysis. One of the the biggest issues citizens face when it comes to state government is that they often know very little about what the people they are voting for support - especially in a state with districts as small as Vermont, where campaigns for state legislature aren't high-spending ultra-partisan affairs. While the recall will be the true barometer, if Wisconsin residents knew what the legislators they were electing really wanted to do with state government, would they have ever had the numbers to take such destructive acts?

In order to combat this lack of information, third party groups often try to inform voters about candidate positions on their individual issues, and this is helpful, to a point. Scorecard scores tend to be intentionally divisive, looking to paint one party as against their issues, and another for it - furthermore, on something like environmental issues, a Democrat with a far from perfect record on the environment might be a considerable improvement over someone who will vote against environmental interests 100% of the time.

By using these third-party scorecards, and plotting them against the District Index scores for the districts these legislators represent, we have better context to evaluate which legislators are pulling their weight on which issues, and to what degree a legislator might be deviating from the rest of his party.

Below I have taken four scorecards that cover the 2009-2010 members of the Vermont Senate, and plotted them against the index score for the Senate district they represent.



Chamber of Commerce scores tend to be balanced in favor of Republicans, with Democrats much more likely to receive lower scores. Unlike some below, these scores are just based on the 09/10 session, and the full list of bills included can be found on the Vermont Chamber of Commerce website. The black line is a simple linear regression of the data. The results speak to the amount of ideological diversity within the Democratic party. Take the Chittenden Senate district (D+10) for example: Sen. Diane Snelling (50%) only receives the third highest score in the district, behind Doug Racine (56%), and Sen. Hinda Miller, whose 79% score is tied among Democrats only by Bob Starr, whose Essex-Orleans seat (R+16) is one of the most Republican districts in the entire state.



The VPIRG scores also only cover the last session, and are significantly less partisan, with all but five senators scoring 80% or higher. The underachieving six? Democratic Senators Dick Sears and Dick Mazza, both just hovering above 50%, and then Republicans Randy Brock, Kevin Mullin, and then-Sen. Phil Scott, whose 44% is only higher than Peg Flory. Sen. Flory's score is artificially deflated however, as she did not have a full session's worth of votes to be recorded on.



The League of Conservation Voters release lifetime scores, which are even better indicators to really get a grip on where legislators stand. Again, Sen. Flory brings up the rear at 13%, but just as significant is the fact that the second lowest score again belong to Sen. Starr. Also worth a mention is Sen. Alice Nitka's score of 67%. While it's not as low as some other members of the Democratic caucus, it is notable for the fact that among the cluster of Democrats in districts comparable to her own, it is significantly lower than her colleagues.



Finally, the AFL-CIO also releases a lifetime scorecard. The only word of caution I would give is that they are incredibly selective about what votes are counted, and as a result, for first-term senators, the only scored vote was their decision to close Vermont Yankee as planned, which they scored as a "bad" vote. That is why someone like Progressive Senator Tim Ashe, who you would expect to see near the top of this graph, is instead on the bottom line. It's also worth noting the Republican scores on this one: Sen. Snelling's score is 2nd in her Caucus to Sen. Vince Illuzzi. Effectively, the two most pro-labor Republicans come from the two Republican Senators whose districts are farthest apart.

If this data is interesting to you, it is worth checking out a post I made on Green Mountain Daily a while back, looking at these same scores for members of the Vermont House. With Vermont behind us, I'll have more states on the way shortly.

Alcohol, Grand Theft Auto, and Idaho Politics

Out in Idaho, State Senator John McGee has found him in a little bit of trouble with the law after a late night excursion went awry. Talking Points Memo has the full story, but a fair summary would be to say that Mr. McGee had a bit too much to drink, decided stealing a Ford Excursion was a good idea, and wound up being found by the police asleep in the back of that car at 3:00 AM.

TPM also made mention to the fact that Sen. McGee is seen as a potential candidate for higher office. He currently serves as the Majority Leader in the Idaho State Senate, and prior to entering the Senate, he had worked closely alongside former Idaho Governor and Senator Dick Kempthorne.

That being said, for a relatively entrenched incumbent, his numbers weren't anything magical. Looking back at our Idaho numbers, Mr. McGee's 10th District is R+7, where you would expect a generic result to be 69 - 33 for the Republican. In the past two elections, McGee has averaged a 72-27 victory. He's outperforming his district slightly, but comparatively, Sen. Russel Fulcher in the 21st District (R+7) brought home nearly 75% of the vote last time out. He may have been an insider, but when you are not some otherworldly popular figure, and you find yourself in the position Mr. McGee is in (namely, in jail), then you can probably kiss the rest of your political career goodbye, no matter how strongly your territory leans in your favor.

Diving Into Vermont: Part 1

Back in the fall of 2009, I was looking for some metric to evaluate the risk posed to legislators by their vote on marriage equality the previous session. The result was the Vermont District Index, my first attempt at making any sort of metric for measuring partisanship in state legislatures. Two years later, that project has turned into the Legislative District Index.

Because of the time I have had to work with Vermont's data, today's post is going to be a little different than the states that have come before - I want to illustrate the real potential of this data over a longer period of time. For Vermont, I not only have 2010 data, but I also have data from 2008 and 2006, which I've made available for download here. For now though, we will just stick with the 2010 data - and I've included which party has held each seat for the past three sessions.

For those not familiar with the state, Vermont's legislature has some interesting quirks. The Vermont Constitution allows for house districts to be drawn for either one or two members, and makes no limit on how large a Senate district may be. The result is a six-seat Senate district covering most of Chittenden County - which is quite frankly deserving of a post dedicated to itself. Since I haven't had to publish a state with different sized districts yet, I couldn't figure out how I wanted to publish the Senate list, but the way I've done it below I think is the clearest to understand. Just understand that senators are elected at-large from county-sized districts.


Ed. note: Wash-Chit 1 should be listed as D/D for the 11/12 session



The other thing that stands out immediately is that the generic margin isn't nearly as Democratic as some might expect. On the national level, there is no question that Vermont is the safest of territory. But when it comes to state politics, a relatively weak Republican party has managed to perform well on the back of a few public figures. Consider this - a Democrat has not received over 50% of the gubernatorial vote since Howard Dean in 2000, when he captured 50.5% of the vote. Republicans have held around 1/3 of the seats in the state house for most of the decade, nothing like the absolute shutouts we've seen in some of the more Republican chambers in the country. That said, Vermont still comes in as the 2nd most Democratic state we've looked at so far, just behind Hawaii. The graph below shows the raw 50/50 scores of all the states surveyed thus far, with the line stretching from both extremes, and the bar covering the middle 50% of districts.



If you read our Maine article, we talked about the importance of a relatively stable ideological continuum within a party. If there are large ideological gaps, it becomes easy for the party to be either anchored to the safest of areas (Nebraska) or wind up promoting the growth of a third party (Maine). With strongholds in Burlington and Brattleboro, the Vermont Progressive Party seems to fit very well into this framework. Similar to the steep slopes we saw in the above states, there is a rather sharp drop off from the 8-10 most Democratic districts compared to the rest of the Democratic leaning territory. The below graph illustrates that, overlaying the distribution of VT-DI scores on top of the LDI scores of the other states surveyed.



Born out of Sen. Bernie Sanders campaign for Mayor of Burlington in the early 80's, the Progressive party started with seats on the Burlington City Council, and grew to a statewide party that has held a handful of house seats, garnered a significant chunk of votes in heavily contested statewide elections, and naturally, been the source of plenty of tension amongst the Vermont Left. With that in mind, 2010 was something of a unification of the Vermont Left, as Progressives chose to not nominate a candidate for governor, and former gubernatorial candidate Anthony Pollina ran as a D/P fusion candidate in his successful bid for Vermont State Senate. Furthermore, a generic Vermont Democrat performs significantly better than Democrats in Maine, which has allowed for the party to maintain strong control over the legislature, despite having a successful third party contesting otherwise safe seats. Despite being home to a much wider range of ideological diversity than Hawaii, Democrats still maintain comparable supermajorities.

In addition to doing my usual recap, I wanted to use my home state as an example of some of the other things we can think about using LDI data. When redistricting seasons rolls around, suddenly people become a lot more interested in state legislatures, and while Congressional redistricting draws the most attention, there are plenty of major fights playing out over local district lines. Vermont doesn't draw districts until 2012, but all ready there have been very different proposals put forth by the tri-partisan redistricting committee. But those plans have little meaning given the Democratic supermajority, and so any decision about new districts are likely to be made within the party.

As I mentioned before, Vermont's current districts are highly irregular - I'm represented by more states senators (6) than anyone else in the country. In a district that big, campaigns become incredibly expensive undertakings, even in a state as small as Vermont. Additionally, there is considerable scholarship that shows the notion that different sized districts with the number of legislators they elect proportionate to the number of voters within the district does not make for equal representation. Rather, a voter in a large district has a much smaller chance that their vote will be decisive in an election compared to a voter in a regular single-member district. Couple all this with the fact that population growth means Chittenden is in store for another Senate seat, and it becomes clear that something has to change.

The problem for Democrats is that virtually any solution weakens the strong position the six-seat district puts them in. The most common "solution" is to take the town of Milton (R+25), and add it to the Grand Isle/Colchester Senate District, upping the number of senators elected to 2, and maintaining 6 in the rest of the Chittenden County district. In that plan, Democrats in the six-seat district remain safe, and the Grand Isle district becomes slightly more conservative. Someone like Republican House Minority Leader Don Turner, who has been a visible presence lately, might be inclined to run for the seat, and it would certainly prove a close contest. But that solution still leaves you with a six-seat district.

Below I've put together a chart of two possible alternatives to the status-quo plan from above, which will illustrate exactly why Democrats have their hands tied. First is a plan that would divide the six-seat district into two three-seat districts - one containing Burlington and South Burlington, the other containing the rest of Chittenden County. In the second plan, only the city of Burlington is in a two-member district, with South Burlington as part of a larger four-seat district with the rest of the county. Using 2010 State Senate election results, I've estimated who would be elected from these hypothetical new districts.



While the Burlington based districts will be strengthened (a result Progressives would likely prefer), the district covering the rest of the county becomes toss-up territory, with a LDI score similar to Washington County, where all three parties have found success. The only way Democrats could break up the six-seat district and retain their advantage would be to split Burlington in half, which goes against the entire reason Vermont has multi-member districts to begin with - maintaining full communities (and in the Senate's case, countries) as best as possible.

I think I've all ready hit you all with a lot of content for one update, but I'm not quite done with Vermont. Check in soon for Part 2 of my Vermont coverage, where I'll illustrate some other calculations we can look at through the lens of VDI: measuring legislators issue positions relative to the ideology of their district.

A Tale of Two Dakotas

After a brief hiatus, we are back today with two states to share: North Dakota and South Dakota. Once again the Legislative District Index found itself in presumably Republican territory, but the big question was - are there substantive political differences between these two neighbors?

Both states are currently dominated by massively popular incumbents - South Dakota Sen. John Thune was the only senator up for re-election last cycle to not face a challenger, and former Gov. John Hoeven managed a >50% victory over his token Democratic opposition to claim a seat that Sen. Byron Dorgan had held for two decades.

In addition to being fairly red at the presidential, the states are also known for their surprisingly blue Congressional delegations - it was not long ago that the Democratic caucus included Sens. Dorgan, Tom Daschle, Kent Conrad, and Tim Johnson - after 2012, it may be that only Johnson remains.

So what is happening on the ground in these states, and how do they stack up to the states we've looked at before? Both states feature legislature that use the same districts for both their House and Senate - the only exception being that two South Dakota house seats are divided into individual districts to better assure representation of Native American tribes - those divided districts are noted by the designation "A" or "B" at the end.





The end result is four legislative chambers dominated by Republicans, where Democrats seem to have no natural foothold, and are losing their local popularity. The LDI methodology places North Dakota slightly more Republican than South Dakota, with that gap largely thanks to huge victory margins for Gov. Hoeven. North Dakota will really be a state to watch next time around, as there is a chance that the Republican strength has been inflated to to the former governor's popularity, but the Democratic bench in North Dakota appears noticeably weaker than that of their southern neighbors, which might really be the factor separating the two states.

While we've seen these sort of electoral margins before (especially North Dakota, which is extremely close to Idaho and Nebraska), the way the numbers come together is very different than their ideological neighbors. Below is a chart of 50/50 values for all the states surveyed so far, with the bar representing the middle 50% of districts, the line stretching from the most Democratic to least, and the states arranged from most Democratic on the left, moving more Republican as you move towards the right. You'll notice that unlike Idaho and Nebraska, neither North or South Dakota have any sort of urban area for Democrats to tap in to votes - in South Dakota, two of the three most Democratic districts are on Indian reservations.



To me, this graphic is incredibly important in understanding some of the ideological differences we've had amongst Democrats in the past few years, especially in the Senate. An overwhelming majority of Democrats in the Senate rely on urban populations to push them to victory - without urban voters, they wouldn't be able to fight off rural Republican majorities. But in a rare few cases - North Dakota, South Dakota, I expect Montana as well - those traditional Democratic strongholds don't exist, and so what it means to be a Democrat becomes a significantly different thing as a result of the vastly different audience. Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer has long been an online favorite for the Democratic nomination in 2016, and I can't say I'm not aboard that train, but he's won his elections speaking to an electorate that is very, very different from the kind he would face in a Democratic primary.

As always, these numbers are more easily downloadable from the homepage, where they are available in Google Spreadsheet format. Expect one or two more states being released this week, including my homestate Vermont, where I'm going to go beyond my usual recaps to illustrate the kind of analysis that I think the LDI allows us to perform.

My Clothes Are Packed and I Want to Go, Idaho, Oh, Idaho

After tackling Washington on Sunday, today I look toward a neighboring state whose legislature is similar in structure to that of Washington, but where Democrats find themselves in much less fertile territory - Idaho. Idaho's 70 legislators are divided into 35 multi-member districts, with each district also elected one state senator. Because of the overlapping districts, I'm again presenting these results as one chart, and will continue to include the 50/50 rating so that everyone can better piece together where these districts fall in comparison to their own states of interest.



Idaho's results are very similar to what we found in Nebraska - a lot of territory outside of Democratic reach, with an urban hub that could support legislators who were not just Democratic in name, but on policy as well. There has been lots of mention on Daily Kos Elections about the possibility for a Boise-based Congressional District if population trends continue through 2022, and from my data, I would not be surprised to see something very similar to what we have in Nebraska today - an urban centered district that is competitive territory, coupled with two seats that would be incredibly difficult to contest. Below I have constructed a graph of both states LDI, and 50/50 scores - not only do they track each other incredibly closely, but as 50/50 shows, even when you don't center the indexes around the state average, they still produce incredibly close results.



We've looked at a couple of states where Democrats have struggled - Maine and Nebraska in particular - and noted that the steeper the dropoff from the Democratic vote centers, the more problems the party seems to have. To this effect, Idaho might actually be in a better position than the other state - despite being incredibly conservative territory to start out with, the 50/50 scores show that first quarter of Democratic-leaning seats, the party remains competitive with Republicans, with performance only tailing off towards the end. You can see this on the graph, in the area where the red dotted-line first crosses the blue dotted-line until they cross again.

Now, granted, we are only talking about 25% of the legislature, and that is certainly no majority. But given the current composition, that isn't a bad benchmark to aim for. Growth in the Boise area will be conducive to stronger Democratic performance, and the 2008 election should have offered a bit of hope to Idaho Democrats, as Obama outperformed Kerry's numbers across the board, following the national swing. Picking up these seats will grow the bench, encourage others to run, and hopefully expand the playing field even further.

Finally, as a housekeeping note, I have been sorting out the remaining states and organizing them by how good their available information is. So far, the one state that I can find only abysmal data for is Massachusetts. Any readers able to link me to solid election results provided by the state? In return, I'll share with you my favorite Idaho song:

Back to the Mainland: Tackling Washington

For today's post, we head back to the shore of the mainland, and tackle Washington. Washington is unique, for a few reasons. Washington remains one of the only states to still use multi-member legislative districts. In Washington's case, the Senate and House use the same map, but two representatives are elected from each district, compared to one senator. Now, there are a lot of issues with multi-member districts that I find problematic, but those will be saved for a later post, because in the case of Washington, they've instituted them in a way that is about as fair as possible, as all districts elect the same number of representatives. Secondly, they are the first state with a Republican Secretary of State, Sam Reed, to put up solid data, bucking a trend of better performing data from Democrats up to this point.

Because of Washington's quirks, there isn't separate data for the Senate and House - and instead of using House results as the state legislative portion of the index like usual, I've used Senate results, as otherwise I would've been averaging the performance of candidates in the two races in each district. Also, for the first time this week, I'll be including 50/50 numbers in my post. LDI scores are always relative to the respective state, but the 50/50 data measures every district compared to one that is evenly split by Democrats and Republicans. This will hopefully allow people to more easily understand where districts stand compared to other states, and the country as a whole.



Washington fits somewhere in the middle of the states investigated thus far. Democrats hold a 54-46 generic edge, but both sides hold fairly strong bases of support to rely on. Unlike some of the midwestern states I've looked at, Washington Democrats remain in a strong position, still holding majorities in both chambers. There was some talk during the height of tea party fanaticism that for whatever reason, that fervor wasn't taking over the West Coast, and so far as Washington is concerned, that seems to be true - unlike in states that have come before, Washington Republicans don't hold any outrageous seats that look like obvious Democratic pickups - seats are split just about where you would expect them to be - Democrats hold all but one seat that are more Democratic than the state on average, as well as 11 past that mark. They've let one seat slip on the Senate side, but again, things are much more evenly distributed here than in the other states released thus far.

The last graph here below uses the 50/50 numbers to plot out the 6 states released thus far. States are listed from left to right in order of generic Democratic performance. The line stretches from the most Democratic to the most Republican district, with the bar covering the middle 50% of districts. Washington's closest relative seems to be Wisconsin, which has just a slightly larger range of districts, but otherwise remains very similar.

Large Margin with a Narrow Range: Why Hawaii Is Not Your Average Blue State

After spending the bulk of my time so far looking at areas where Democrats have been met with their fair share of struggles, I figured it was an appropriate time for a little pick me up - today I am releasing data for Hawaii, the strongest Obama state in 2008 and where Democrats took back the Governor's office in 2010.

Democrats hold huge majorities in both chambers, controlling all but 16% of the House and 4% of the Senate. Continued Democratic dominance in these races is tremendously problematic for Republicans, as it threatens to completely cut off their bench for higher office.



That might seem like a fairly obvious conclusion in all states - where wouldn't Democrats want to hold down every seat? But it is especially relevant in Hawaii, which has displayed dramatically different results than any of the other states the LDI project has looked at so far. While Hawaiian Democrats possess a 58-42 edge on the generic ballot, the state is ideologically far more homogenous than any other state we've surveyed thus far



The above graph is a plot of the five states released thus far. The x-axis is a measurement of where the district falls in comparison to others in the state. For example, 0% is the most Democratic district, 100% the most Republican, 50% in the middle. The y-axis displays how Democratic and Republican those districts are. Keep in mind that this graph is not comparing the political preference of allt he states, but rather the distribution of political preferences within each state. So D+0 for each state does not mean that each party has the same chance of winning that seat in each state, but rather it means that every D+0 district is the average result for that respective state.

What the graph shows is a remarkably small range in political preference for Hawaiians compared to the other states released thus far. The range between the most Democratic and most Republican seats is only 42 - compare that to Maine (80) or Ohio (88), and the contrast is clear. Hawaii's legislature is smaller, which may lead to less partisan districts as they have to cover more ground, but even in Nebraska, where the Unicameral is roughly the same size, the range is a whopping 130.

What this means for Hawaii Democrats is that voter satisfaction can shift fairly quickly, based on the popularity of those in office. There simply aren't Democratic or Republican strongholds that the party can count on regardless of the candidate or climate. These small shifts in favorability can translate into large shifts in electoral preference - I believe this was the case in Governor Linda Lingle's continued success. Gov. Lingle didn't manage to turnout Conservative pockets to overcome the institutional strength of the Democratic party - across the state she simply flipped voters, and then maintained popularity through re-election. But you can't take advantage of those situations unless you have elected officials who are ready to move up through the ranks - and one look at the Senate composition should signal that the Republican bench is dwindling.



It's still hard to pull much out of the Hawaii data, given the lack of states to compare it against (we will have more blue states coming in the next week). But one thing I am curious about is that it would seem to me that Hawaii may provide a case where competitive primaries can have a seriously negative effect on a party's general election prospects.

My rationale is as follows: the Hawaiian electorate is unusually homogenous, at least in comparison to what I've seen so far. Thus, Room for large ideological differences amongst the electorate is much smaller. Unlike in Maine, where there was a huge contrast between the kind of Democrats that would win in Portland as opposed to the rest of the state, there are no big chasms in preference. Thus, this leaves less room in a primary for exchange about different ideas and policies, and forces them to become more personal affairs. The 2002 Ed Case- Mazie Hirono primary seems to be an example of this - while Mr. Case is fairly well known online as a sort of conservative boogeyman of Hawaii Democratic politics, that primary campaign was not about ideology, but was much more about the perceived "old boy network" that Mr. Case tried to cast then-Lieutenant Governor Hirono as a member. Gov. Lingle, still popular from her 1998 campaign, didn't face the same kind of character attacks, and the result was an almost universal swing towards Republicans.

Either way, the results from Hawaii are very different than what we've come across thus far. It makes me more excited to looking at some other states with smaller legislatures, such as Alaska, to see if size is playing a role in shrinking the partisan range. Have a pet theory on why the difference exists, or something else jumping out at you? Let me know in the comments.