| If you read national political blogs, you're familiar with something called the PVI, or Partisan Voting Index. It's a rating system created by Charlie Cook that gives an idea of how Democratic or Republican a specific congressional district is, created by averaging the vote in a specific district in the last two presidential elections compared to the national vote in those elections. It's a useful metric, and gives a quick at-a-glance way of figuring out how competitive a specific district may be come election day. For example, Maryland's 8th congressional district is very Democratic at a PVI of D+20, or 20% more Democratic than the nation as a whole. I've created a version of the PVI for the Maryland General Assembly, for a couple of reasons. First, it is a useful way of measuring how successful the Democratic Party has been in getting moderate Democrats elected in districts that lean Republican. It's also useful if progressives are going to get serious about targeting Democratic incumbents who are too conservative for their district. It will make it easier to quantiatively define where conservative Democrats can be challenged in safe Democratic districts. Rather than using the last two elections as the basis of the index, I've used an average of the results from the last gubernatorial (O'Malley v. Ehrlich) and Senate (Cardin v. Steele) races. I didn't use 2002 results because the data is not as easily accessible on the state elections website. The results are laid out in a spreadsheet located here (Excel) or here (csv). And because I'm a visual person, I also created a map of Maryland's house districts based on the data: 
More after the fold...
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At first glance, the patterns seem pretty obvious. Core Democratic areas of support include most of Baltimore City, Prince George's County, and southern Montgomery County. Less strong Democratic support exists in northern Montgomery County and parts of Howard and Baltimore County. Republicans are strongest in the southern part of the Eastern Shore and in northern and western Maryland. Slimmer Republican support exists in southern Maryland, the northern shore, Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties, and more urban centers in rural areas like Salisbury and Frederick. This data also shows that Democrats are at a bit of a statistical disadvantage under the current districting. The court mandated plan that created new districts in 2000 resulted in far more districts with a low Republican PVI than a low Democratic PVI. Specifically, there are 13 District with a PVI lower than R+10 and only 5 below D+10. An ideal redistricting map would have maximized the number of Democratic districts aroung D+5 and pushed as many Republicans as possible into districts at R+10 and above. However, Democrats have done well in many districts despite the challenging map. When you compare the PVI map above with the map below that shows the party affiliations of current Delegates, you get some idea of the extent to which Maryland Democrats have outperformed this PVI, especially in Southern Maryland and the Baltimore suburbs. Democrats have been elected in nearly every district below R+7.5, which bodes well for the Democratic Party and speaks to the weakness of Maryland Republicans. 
The next step is to find a way to measure how progressive Maryland's Senators and Delegates are in order to have a point of comparison for electoral targeting. I'm going to be working on that over the next few weeks. My initial idea, and I welcome feedback here from anyone who is interested, is to use the data progressive groups have already collected in the form of legislative scorecards and report cards. An averaging of the scorecards of multiple progressive groups would result in a sort of broader progressive scorecard. I'd start with the following: Maryland LCV for the environment, MSTA for education, Progressive Maryland for labor and clean government issues, NARAL for women's issues (though NARAL's focus is limited to reproductive rights, so if there's a better option I'd love to know about it), and Equality Maryland for GLBT issues. The big gap right now lies in civil rights and immigration issues and in health care. To my knowledge, groups like NAACP and Casa de Maryland do not do scorecards, since they try to maintain neutrality in the electoral process. Hopefully, I'll be able to compile something by mid-July. In any case, fighting Excel wore me out, so I'm done for now. But have at it, because getting feedback and making these metrics more accurate will only make them more useful. |
