Daily Kos Elections is pleased to once again begin calculating the results of the most recent presidential election for every congressional district in all 50 states, starting with our first set of data from Oklahoma!
You can check out our detailed spreadsheet that includes county-level results, and you can also find the top-line numbers in this chart, which will ultimately include figures for all 435 districts. That’s the page you’ll want to bookmark since we’ll be updating it continuously. We’ll also be parking all of our spreadsheets in our giant data repository.
We’ll be pushing out new data on a rolling basis as 2020's results are officially certified and the precinct-level election results we need for our calculations become available. You can find out more about the process we use to calculate these numbers, as well as why it’s important to wait for final election results for each state, in our accompanying explainer post.
This is the fourth presidential election for our "pres-by-CD project," as we informally call it, but there’s one key difference this time: A new round of redistricting is about to begin, meaning new congressional districts will be used in 2022. We’re crunching numbers for the current districts, though, so that we can measure how much the new boundaries do, or don’t, change the partisan makeup of each district, which is a very useful tool for evaluating gerrymandering. We're also certain to see some special elections over the next two years that will be held using the existing district lines, so our data will help determine early on which races could be competitive.
Now, to the numbers! Oklahoma's top-lines barely budged over the last four years: In 2016 it voted 65-29 for Trump, while this year it gave Trump a similar 65-33 victory, a shift that can be attributed to weaker showings by third-party candidates. For the fifth presidential election in a row, the GOP nominee for president carried every single one of Oklahoma’s 77 counties, and Trump, unsurprisingly, also won each of the Sooner State’s five congressional districts.
While his statewide numbers didn’t shift much, Trump did see a larger collapse in the Oklahoma City-based 5th District, where his winning margin shrunk from 53-40 to 52-46—his weakest showing in the state. Democrats scored a major upset in the 5th District in 2018 when Democrat Kendra Horn unseated Republican Steve Russell, but Trump’s decline at the top of the ticket wasn't enough to save Horn, who lost her first bid for reelection to Republican Stephanie Bice 52-48. Democrats could conceivably win back a seat like this one in the future, but Republicans, who will have unfettered control over redistricting next year, may simply divide the blue island of Oklahoma City between multiple districts.
Meanwhile, Trump once again took at least 60% of the vote in Oklahoma’s other four congressional districts. Trump’s strongest margin of victory came in Republican Rep. Markwayne Mullin’s 2nd District in the eastern part of the state, which he took 76-22. This region, nicknamed “Little Dixie,” was relatively friendly turf for Democrats up until a decade ago: A previous version of the 2nd District decisively elected Democratic Rep. Dan Boren to a fourth term as late as 2010. Boren retired in 2012, though, and Mullin has had no trouble holding it against all Democratic comers during any of his five campaigns.
P.S. — After we’ve released the presidential results for all 435 House districts, Daily Kos Elections will circle back and continue our project to calculate the presidential election results for every legislative district in the country.
