So 2013 elections are almost upon us so I thought I'd upload my data on presidential results for New Jersey's 40 legislative districts. Of particular note, the Republicans hold down district 7 in south-central New Jersey which gave Romney only 35.7% of the 2-party vote last year. As for the upcoming elections, I suspect the Democratic seats most in danger in the senate are 1, 2, and 38 though 3, 14, and 27 could also possibly be at risk. It is possible that by Republicans winning 4/6 of these seats, that the senate could become split next year and that with 5/6 wins, the Republicans could take over. However, the state house is a tougher climb for Republicans since they don't hold the district 7 house seats and would be unlikely to pick them up in November. Now for the data see below.
So details for reading the chart. The first two columns indicate which party controls the house seats. Red/pink for Rep and Blue for Dem. The middle section is color coded based on who controls the senate seat. The percentage given is the percentage Romney got of the two-party vote. The last section on the far right is what I rated the seats by in terms of their natural political lean. For reference, Obama got about 52% of the two-party vote.
Strong-rep indicates more then 10 points to the right of the USA as a whole.
Mod-rep is 5-10 points to the right.
Lean-rep is 2-5 points to the right.
Toss-up is 2 points plus or minus of the middle.
Lean-dem is 2-5 points to the left.
Mod-dem is 5-10 points to the left.
Strong-dem is 10 or more points to the left.
Also note that I could not find data down to the precinct level for two cities that were split between legislative districts (Newark and Jersey City) so I just calculated the districts over which the cities were split as if they were one district. This was done for districts 28/29 (Newark), and 31,33 (Jersey City). However since all 4 districts are strongly democratic it doesn't make a big difference.
In the pages following the chart, I have broken down which districts contain which cities. Sorry but some of the supporting data for the cities has been combined since I was using excel as my calculator when I created this chart 5 months ago so some of it won't make sense. I did not really intend to post the file originally, it was just for my personal interest but thought many of you might be interested also. Also some of the supporting data for the lower number districts is missing as I deleted it before changing my mind to save it for the later districts.
I don't have much knowledge of New Jersey politics so if some of you have more insight please feel free to use this data for filling us in. Sorry I don't know how much I will be able to follow the comments but will try. This is all new to me.
Edited Sunday night: to fix a couple spelling/grammar errors in the first paragraph.
new jersey 2012 legislature1.xlsx by minnesotagopher7