Daily Kos Elections' project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for every state legislative seat in the nation comes to Kentucky, a red state where the GOP took full control of the state government last year for the first time in generations. You can find our master list of states here, which we'll be updating as we add new states; you can also find all our data from 2016 and past cycles here.
While Bill Clinton narrowly won Kentucky in 1992 and 1996, it's been dependably Republican in every presidential election since then. In 1997, several rogue Democrats joined with the GOP minority to put Democrat Walter Blevins in control of the chamber, and Republicans took their first-ever outright majority a few years later. (Interestingly, Blevins remained in the Senate until 2015, when he resigned to become Rowan County judge-executive.)
Then-Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear tried to flip the Senate in 2009 when he appointed several Republicans to state positions and opened up their seats to Democrats in the following special elections. Team Blue came fairly close to retaking control but still fell short, and today, Team Red holds a 27-11 edge.
The state House stayed blue much longer, even through the 2010 GOP wave, Mitt Romney's 61-38 win, and another GOP wave in 2014. But Trump's 63-33 victory was just too much, and the state House went from a 53-47 Democratic edge to a 64-36 GOP majority. This gave Republicans the House for the first time since the early 1920s. Republican Matt Bevin won the governorship in 2015 (oddly, the legislature and the governor are elected in different years), giving the GOP full control of the state government.
We'll start with a look at the state House, which is up every two years. Trump won 82 of the 100 House seats, swapping two Romney districts for two Obama seats. The one Republican in a Clinton seat is Phil Moffett, whose Louisville district swung from 55-43 Romney to 47.4-46.7 Clinton, but won his second term without opposition. Nineteen Democrats, which represents just a little more than half the caucus, hold Trump seats.
The Democrat in the reddest district is Chris Harris, who holds Trump's fifth-best seat in the state. Harris' HD-93, which is located in Eastern Kentucky, went from 76-23 Romney to 83-15 Trump, but Harris won his second term 51-49. So many of Harris' colleagues weren't so lucky. Speaker Greg Stumbo, who represented a nearby seat, lost to Republican Larry Brown 53-47 as HD-95 shifted from 67-31 Romney to 73-23 Trump.
Including Harris, seven House Democrats remain in districts where Trump took at least 70 percent of the vote. Harris' seat isn't quite the reddest Democratic-held seat we've found anywhere in the nation, though it's pretty close. The distinction belongs to Louisiana's HD-54, where Trump won 86-11.
We'll turn to the Senate, where half the chamber is up in presidential cycles and the other half is up in midterm years. Trump carried 34 of the 38 seats, flipping one Obama seat. That district is SD-37 in Louisville: Obama won 50-48 but Trump prevailed 50-45; Democrat Perry Clark won last year with no opposition.
Including Clark, seven Democrats sit in Trump seats, which again is more than half the caucus. The reddest-Democratic held seat is SD-31, another Eastern Kentucky seat. This district went from 72-26 Romney to 80-18 Trump, but Senate Minority Leader Ray Jones also won last year without a GOP foe.
During the 2012 round of redistricting, Democrats held the House and the GOP controlled the Senate. After the legislature's original maps were struck down, both chambers agreed to a plan in 2013. To get a sense for how much these maps favor either party, we've sorted every district in a legislative chamber from Hillary Clinton's greatest margin of victory to Trump's biggest edge, and taken a look at the seat in the middle; because both chambers have an even number of seats, we average the two middle seats' presidential results.
The median point in the Senate backed Trump 67-29, about 9 points to the right of his 63-33 statewide win. The House was almost the same, with the median point backing Trump 68-28. We've published a spreadsheet to keep track of each chamber's median seat, and we'll be updating it as we roll out new states.