Daily Kos Elections' project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for every state legislative seat in the nation comes to Maryland, one of the few states where Democrats controlled the redistricting process this decade. You can find our master list of states here, which we'll be updating as we add new data sets; you can also find all of our calculations from 2016 and past cycles here.
Maryland is usually a reliably blue state, and Democrats have controlled both the state House and state Senate for close to a century. Maryland's legislature is only up in midterm cycles, and members were elected under the Democratic-drawn map for the first time in 2014. However, Team Blue got a nasty surprise that year when Republican Larry Hogan won the governorship. It takes three-fifths of each house to override a governor's veto, and Democrats still won a 33-14 Senate supermajority and a 91-50 edge in the state House, both above the minimum numbers. However, Republicans hope that if Hogan is re-elected in 2018, he'll help elect enough Republicans to the legislature to break the Democratic supermajority in at least one chamber and keep his vetoes intact.
Maryland has 47 state Senate districts, with one senator per seat. However, the state House is quite complicated. Each of the 47 state Senate seats gets three state delegates. In some cases, the state Senate seat is divided into three smaller House seats, which are lettered A, B, and C. In other cases, parties can nominate up to three people for a state House seat, and general election voters can vote up to three times. A few places have a hybrid approach. For example, House seat 03B has just one delegate, while 03A has two.
Before we drill into the numbers, note that we don't have 2012 presidential numbers to compare 2016 to. Unfortunately, Maryland redrew many of its election precincts between 2012 and 2014. As a result, matching 2012 precincts with the current legislative seats is incredibly difficult, and it's even tougher in cases where the 2012 precincts fall into one or more districts.
We'll start with the state Senate. Clinton carried Maryland 61-34 and won 33 of the 47 seats. Even though the Senate was last up during the 2014 GOP wave year rather than in 2016, Democrats hold all but one of the Clinton seats, while the GOP lost just one Trump district. The one Republican on blue turf is Gail Bates, whose Howard County-based SD-09 backed Clinton 51-44. Bates won a promotion from the House to the Senate 66-34 in 2014. Her Democratic counterpart is state Sen. James Mathias, Jr. Mathias' SD-38, which is on the southern tip of the Eastern Shore, backed Trump 59-38. In 2014, Mathias won a second term 52-48.
One way to illustrate how much the map favors Democrats is to sort each seat in each chamber by Clinton's margin of victory over Trump and see how the seat in the middle—known as the median seat—voted. In Maryland, the median Senate seat backed Clinton 65-31, about 7 points to the left of her statewide win.
Perhaps the better question to ask is what seats the GOP would need in 2014 to take the Democrats down to a 28-19 majority, which would allow a united GOP minority to sustain a veto. Assuming Team Red unseated Mathias and held Bates' seat, they'd need to take four more districts. If they went on to win the four Democratic-held seats where Clinton's margin over Trump was the weakest, that magic fourth seat would be SD-03 in Frederick County. Clinton won the district 56-38, while Democratic incumbent Ronald Young won his second term 51-49.
We'll turn to the state House, where 141 members are stuffed into 67 districts. Ninety-eight members represent Clinton seats, while 43 delegates are on Trump turf. No Democrats represent Trump seats, while seven Republicans are in Clinton districts. The Republican with the bluest seat is Bob Flanagan, the sole delegate from HB-09B; not surprisingly, his seat makes up a portion of Bates' Senate seat. HD-09B backed Clinton 64-30. The median point in the state House backed Clinton 67-27, about 13 points to the left of the state.
If the GOP wants to sustain a veto without Democratic help, they'll need a minimum of 57 seats, seven more than they currently hold. Trump's 57th-best seat in the chamber is HD-30A, which has two members. And as it so happens, this 60-35 Clinton Anne Arundel County seat has one Democratic representative and one Republican. However, the Democrat is Michael Busch, who has been speaker of the House since 2003. If the GOP wants to break the Democratic House supermajority under this map, they'll need to win some very blue turf.