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.
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