Daily Kos Elections' project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for every state legislative seat in the nation hits Indiana, the 47th state we've released data for. 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.
Indiana has usually been a reliably red state in presidential elections, though Barack Obama pulled off a narrow win here in 2008. However, the state quickly snapped back to the right in 2012 as Mitt Romney carried it 54-44, and Donald Trump took it 57-38 four years later. However, there's historically been more ticket-splitting down-ballot. While the state Senate has been in GOP hands since the 1978 election, the state House was a bit more volatile. The lower chamber flipped back and forth several times in the last decade, and Team Blue won narrow majorities as recently as 2006 and 2008.
However, both chambers look like they'll be very red for the foreseeable future. The 2010 GOP wave turned a 52-48 Democratic majority to a 60-40 GOP edge in the House, and Team Red got to draw the lines for the next decade. Today, Republicans have a 41 to nine edge in the Senate, and a 70-30 supermajority in the House, and the GOP should have little trouble drawing the lines for the next decade. Even if Democrats succeed in taking the governor's mansion in 2020, it would only take a simple majority of both houses of the legislature to override a veto and craft another GOP gerrymander.
Now let's get to the numbers. Donald Trump's 19-point win allowed him to carry 40 of the 50 Senate seats and 75 of the 100 House districts. The entire House is up for election every two years while only half of the Senate is up every cycle, so we'll start with the lower chamber. There was a little bit of ticket-splitting in 2016, and it mostly aided Democrats. Six Democrats sit in Trump seats, while just one Republican holds a Clinton seat. That lone Republican is Sally Siegrist, whose Lafayette-area seat moved to the left from 50-48 Obama to 50-43 Clinton. However, Siegrist won her first term 53-47 despite that.
The handful of Democrats on Trump turf are few in number, but they represent some decidedly red territory. The Democrat in the Trumpiest seat is Terry Goodin, whose southern Indiana seat went from 55-43 Romney to 65-31. Goodwin won his ninth term 60-40, and he became minority leader last year. Not far behind is Melanie Wright in the Muncie area. Wright's seat went from 56-42 Romney to 64-31 Trump, but she won her second term 52.5-47.5. All three Obama/ Trump seats are represented by Democrats, while Trump carried all of Romney's seats.
To get a sense for how bad this map is for Democrats, we can sort every district in each legislative chamber from Clinton's greatest margin of victory to Trump's biggest edge and take a look at the seat in the very middle, known as the median seat. (Because there are an even number of seats in the House and Senate, we average the two middle seats' presidential results to come up with the median point in the chamber.) We have also published a handy spreadsheet listing the median seat for every other state chamber where we have data.
In Indiana, the median point in the chamber backed Trump 62-33, 10 points to the right of his 57-38 win. This means that, even if Indiana votes like it did in 2008 when Obama pulled off his historic 50-49 win, Democrats would still be at a huge disadvantage if they wanted to take a majority again. And even a more pro-Democratic climate may not be enough. In 2012, Democrat Joe Donnelly beat Republican Richard Mourdock 50-44 in the Senate race, but Mourdock still won 53 of the 100 seats.
We'll turn to the Senate, where there was a bit less ticket-splitting. One seat went from Obama to Trump and two went from Romney to Clinton; those also happen to be home to the only Democrat in a Trump seat and the only two Republicans on Clinton turf. Senate Democratic Leader Timothy Lanane who won without opposition in 2014; Lanane's Muncie-area seat went hard to the right from 57-41 Obama to 50-45 Trump.
On the other side, Republican state Sen. Mike Delph, a conservative hardliner and notorious pain in the rear for the party establishment, won re-election in 2014 54-46. Delph's suburban Indianapolis seat went from a narrow 50.0-48.5 Romney to 53-41 Clinton. The one member of this group who was up in 2016 was Republican John Ruckelshaus, who won his first term 51-46 as his seat, which neighbors Delph's, swung from 49.3-49.0 Romney to 56-38 Clinton.
The median point in the Senate backed Trump 59-35, about 5.5 points to the right of the state. That's not quite as bad as the House, but it's still quite a challenge. In 2012, Donnelly and Mourdock each took 25 seats; the median point in the chamber backed Mourdock 47.9-47.7.