Daily Kos Election’s project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for all 435 congressional districts nationwide drops by Kansas, which is now the 49th state we’ve calculated. We’re waiting for North Carolina to assign most of its absentee votes to precincts, which they told us last week should be done “in the next few days.” You can find our complete data set here, which we'll update … well, when North Carolina comes in.
Donald Trump carried Kansas 57-36, which on the surface looks pretty similar to Mitt Romney’s 60-38 win in 2012. However, there was one very noteworthy difference: Hillary Clinton narrowly carried the 3rd District, located in suburban Kansas City, by a 47-46 margin, a huge swing from Romney’s 54-44 win here. Correctly anticipating that this district would be particularly hostile to Trump, national Democrats launched an expensive ad campaign late in the cycle against GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder, aka that congressman who took a nude swim in the Sea of Galilee. However, Yoder still prevailed over Democrat Jay Sidie 51-41, though that was a darn sight better for Team Blue than 2014, when Yoder won 60-40, and Clinton’s close win here means the incumbent can’t rest easy in 2018.
Kansas’s other three seats, meanwhile, decisively went for Trump. The Topeka-area 2nd District may be vacant soon, since GOP Rep. Lynn Jenkins is considering running for governor next year. However, this district went from 56-42 Romney to 56-37 Trump, so it’s unlikely to be much of a Democratic target. Trump has nominated 4th District GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo to serve as head of the CIA, and if Pompeo is confirmed, there will be a special election to replace him in this Wichita seat. The 4th backed Trump 60-33, a larger margin of victory than Romney’s 60-38 win, so the special won’t be exciting. Finally, the rural western 1st District was little changed, going from 70-28 Romney to 69-24 Trump.
We also have two pieces of housekeeping for the Sunflower State. Mystifyingly, the secretary of state’s office still hasn’t posted official county-level election results online, even though every other state in the union has. The state finally sent us the results by email after multiple official requests, so we’ve posted them here for everyone to access, since Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach is obviously too busy chasing voter fraud ghosts to do his actual job.
The second thing to address is the results of tiny Pawnee County, which is divided between the 1st and 4th Districts. Daily Kos Elections always relies on official precinct-level results for split counties, but Pawnee has repeatedly insisted they don’t have their own election results (apparently, Pawnee placed Andy Dwyer in charge back in November), while the secretary of state has not sent them to us despite our requests.
Ninety-five percent of Pawnee (pop.: 6,971) is contained within the 1st District, and that section makes up just 0.93 percent of the total population in that district. Rather than let one very small county hold up the entire state possibly forever, we’ve simply assigned 95 percent of Pawnee’s votes to the 1st District and the balance to the 4th. (This is, in fact, more or less how we treat split precincts.) If and when we get Pawnee’s official precinct results, we’ll update our numbers and announce them in the Daily Kos Election Morning Digest, but no matter what, very little will change in either the 1st or 4th Districts.