Now that we’ve finished calculating the 2016 presidential results for all 435 congressional districts, Daily Kos Elections is formally kicking off our project to crunch those same numbers for every state legislative district in the nation, which we call by the shorthand “pres-by-LD.”
This is a massive undertaking (there are 7,383 legislators in America), and as a bit of an amuse-bouche, we’ve already released results for both chambers in a couple of states: Virginia’s state House and Senate and Wisconsin’s Assembly and Senate. There’s a lot more data to come, so here’s how you can access it all:
We’ll officially get things moving with a visit to New Hampshire, which is home to by far the most state legislators in the nation. The GOP holds the New Hampshire Senate 14-10, while Team Red controls the state House 226-174 (any vacancies are assigned to the party that last held the seat). All lawmakers are elected to two-year terms. Republican Gov. Chris Sununu’s win last fall gave the GOP complete control of the state government for the first time since 2004, and they’re already using it to try and pass anti-labor legislation, among other conservative priorities.
Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Donald Trump 47.6-47.2 in the Granite State, but the GOP-drawn Senate map allowed Trump to carry 14 of the state’s 24 Senate seats. Republicans enjoyed a similar advantage four years ago, when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each carried 12 seats, even though Obama won 52-47 statewide. But some of the ground shifted in 2016, as Clinton traded five Obama seats for three Romney districts.
Two Democrats represent Trump seats, while two Republicans hold Clinton districts. However, the two Democrats in Trump territory represent much redder turf than those two Republicans in Clinton seats. Democratic state Sen. Jeff Woodburn saw his SD-01, which includes New Hampshire’s most northern region, dramatically swing from 57-42 Obama to 50-45 Trump, though Woodburn won re-election by a healthy 55-45. Fellow Democrat Donna Soucy, whose SD-18 is based around Manchester, holds a seat that went from 51-48 Obama to 49-46 Trump; Soucy also won re-election 55-45.
By contrast, GOP state Sen. Andy Sanborn’s southern SD-09 swung from 51-48 Romney to 48-47 Clinton, and Sanborn won another term 54-46. Freshman Republican state Sen. Dan Innis, who originally planned to run for Congress in the 1st District, won an open seat even as Clinton narrowly carried the coastal SD-24. Innis’ district backed Clinton 47.82-47.78, a margin of 14 votes. Four years earlier, Romney narrowly won it 51-48. Innis himself won his first term 52-48.
New Hampshire Democrats lost control of the Senate in the 2010 GOP wave and have yet to win it back, and as we’ve alluded, the current map is not helpful. One way to illustrate the hurdles Team Blue faces is to sort each seat in each chamber by Trump's margin of victory over Clinton and see how the seat in the middle—known as the median seat—voted. Because New Hampshire has an even number of seats in the Senate, we average the Clinton and Trump percentages for the middle two seats to come up with the median.
What do the results tell us? Even as Trump was losing New Hampshire 47.6-47.2, he won the median seat 49-46. That means that, under the current maps, even if Democrats carry all of the Clinton districts, they’d still need to win some light red seats to have a shot at a majority. The good news is that New Hampshire has plenty of swing voters, and if 2018 is a bleak year for Republicans nationally, several of the seats Trump won this time may not be so friendly for GOP incumbents.
The 400-member state House, meanwhile, is a complicated beast. To start with, the state isn't actually divided into 400 microscopic seats: New Hampshire has 204 state House districts that elect anywhere between one and 11 members. To make things even more complicated, 43 of these seats are so-called “floterial districts” that overlap with other state House seats.
But New Hampshire’s districts are still very tiny (if the U.S. House had as many seats per person as New Hampshire’s, it would have something like 96,000 members), and tons of candidates run every cycle, so it's pretty hard for state representatives to establish enough personal popularity to hold on when things go wrong for their party. It’s also only a part-time body that pays peanuts, so plenty of fairly random people get elected when it's their party on the upswing, and it's not uncommon for some of them to resign to do other things, so there’s a lot of turnover.
Now, to the numbers. Even though Trump narrowly lost the state, 218 House members represent seats that backed him, while 184 hold Clinton districts. Twenty-eight Democrats represent Trump seats, while 36 Republicans are in Clinton constituencies. And as with the Senate, the median seat in the House backed Trump 49-45. Control of the chamber has bounced around quite a bit over the last decade: Democrats won it in 2006, lost it in 2010, took it back in 2012, and lost it two years later. If there’s a backlash against Trump in 2018, New Hampshire House Republicans probably won’t be immune.
Finally, we have one small bit of housekeeping for our results by congressional district. A few towns, all located in the 2nd Congressional District, have released updated vote totals, mostly for third-party candidates. Our calculations from the 2nd District change from 48.7-46.3 Clinton to 48.6-46.2 Clinton; the 1st District remains 48.2-46.6 Trump.