Sanders Leads All Challengers in Vermont

Occasionally I'll step out of the sphere of state legislative politics to comment on what is going on in Vermont - partially because there aren't that many places in Vermont where that type of commentary is occurring. So when I heard last week that Public Policy Polling was going to be heading into the field in Vermont, I was incredibly excited.

Their first batch of results is out today, and it is all about Senator Bernie Sanders. The results are fairly unsurprising - Senator Sanders is safely over 50% against all challengers, despite the fact that Vermonters have positive views of all of his possible opponents.

What I was more interested in seeing was the favorability ratings among Vermont republicans, compared to the advantage for Democrats in state. In the following chart, I have the favorability data from the PPP poll, and then I took their net favorability and added it to the Democratic margin of victory in the state. My rationale for doing so is that the most votes a Republican can expect to receive are all of those of their own party, and all the votes of Democrats who have a positive opinion of them.



I think that's a pretty accurate representation of the respective candidate's current ceilings - had Anthony Pollina not been in the 2008 race, I wouldn't have been surprised for Douglas to rack up something near that total (though never all the way - there are plenty of people who like Douglas but would never vote for him - there are also just a LOT of people who like him and WILL vote for him.

I'm surprised to see Brian Dubie's numbers so high given how damaging the last campaign was to his reputation. I think this really leads credence to the idea that Dubie could get in the race again, and be competitive, by running a Vermont-centric campaign, as opposed to outsourcing everything to national consulting groups that were totally tone deaf.

Phil Scott remains is good position, but not an unbeatable one - it would be really great to see a strong Democrat come in and put him up against the ropes - Steve Howard could have done it last cycle, but nobody seemed to provide his campaign with the support he needed when he needed it most.

Finally, it is nice to see Lauzon underwater, even at really low recognition levels. The idea of a Lauzon candidacy as anything more than a sideshow has always been funny to me - he really lacks the appeal to expand to a broader audience, and if Republicans are serious about him, then they are wildly overrating the Barre Mayor's office as a stepping stone for statewide politics.

As PPP releases more data throughout the week, we will be sure to follow up - keep your fingers crossed that we'll get some great numbers on the Governor's race, and maybe the Treasurer contest.

Finally, today I'm helping out a friend who is exactly the kind of legislator that gives me hope - the kind of person you want to discover when doing projects like this one. Vermont Rep. Kesha Ram is turning 25 today, and I wrote a diary over at Daily Kos about the incredible work she is doing. As a birthday gift, I'm encouraging people to donate $10 today - please read the diary or click the flyer below, and consider helping out one of the progressive leader's of the future.

Windsor 6-1 (VT) Should Not Be Cause for Concern

For all the horrible choices governors tend to make when it comes to filling vacant Senate seats, they appear to fare much better when it comes to replacing state legislators. Today, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin named special educator/filmmaker Teo Zagar to finish the term of former Representative Mark Mitchell, who had resigned for health reasons. Zagar is relatively young, and his knowledge of special education issues could be useful when the legislature takes up some systemic education issues in the not-so-distant future.

Any time an established incumbent is replaced with new blood, the other side is bound to be licking their lips, but in this case, Republicans are likely to come up empty. Below are the Vermont District Index scores for the past three cycles - not only does Windsor 6-1 sit at a healthy 57-43 Democratic edge, but it has also been trending away from Republicans by roughly 3% a cycle.



Representative Mark Larson also stepped down from his seat in the legislature to accept an appointment in the administration. Rep. Larson's seat gives Democrats even less to worry about, as you can see below. However, it isn't every day that an open seat shows up in Burlington, and you would have to imagine that a handful of people are going to want to be involved. It also happens to be the only single members district in the city of Burlington, which might avoid some of the ugly complications that have plagued races in that area. Hope for the appointment to be a good one, as this seat is blue enough that the person selected should be safe for a long while.

We Were Featured in the Burlington Free Press!

I have some really exciting news for all of our readers - in today's Burlington Free Press, there is a front-page feature on the LDI, and my work in getting the project started.

He applied for a research grant from Yale, but said that when he didn’t get it, he faced a choice: “Abandon it or just do it anyway. If I don’t do it now, when in my life would I have the time? I just decided to do it. If I make nothing out of it, at least I completed the project, which to me has value in itself.”

He has completed 15 states.

“It isn’t easy,” he conceded. The biggest challenge hasn’t been the six hours it takes on average to organize a state’s data from six elections to produce his index. Rather, he said, it has been the variable accuracy, detail and availability of state election data.

Breuer identifies himself as a Democratic activist but said he is sharing his index with anyone who is interested. “Everyone, whether a tea party activist or a progressive activist, should have information,” he said.

The article is a great look at what goes in on the backend of the project, and the effort it takes to release new states every week. I'm incredibly excited to share this work with a broader audience, and welcome all of our new readers. Below, I've provided quick links to all of my work on Vermont, but I hope you'll expand out and check some of the other states we have released as well - the data tells such interesting stories in every state we come across. Lastly, I just want to thank all of the people who have been reading from the start - your support means a lot to me.

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.

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.