Washblog || Analyzing the Washington Legislature: The LDI

Analyzing the Washington Legislature: The LDI

By TheLDI
Sun Jun 05, 2011 at 10:58:16 AM PST
Section: Diary Topic: Alternative and Community Media

Author's Note: This posted has been reposted from my official blog, which can be linked to above. The reason I started this project was so that activists and bloggers looking at state politics will have an extra tool for analysis. It is written for a broader audience however, so I just wanted to post a little disclaimer as to why it talks about Washington from an outside perspective.

Hope you guys find this not only useful, but an accurate representation of what you see on the ground. Feel free to contact me with questions.

For today's post, we head back to the shore of the mainland, and tackle Washington. Washington is unique, for a few reasons. Washington remains one of the only states to still use multi-member legislative districts. In Washington's case, the Senate and House use the same map, but two representatives are elected from each district, compared to one senator. Now, there are a lot of issues with multi-member districts that I find problematic, but those will be saved for a later post, because in the case of Washington, they've instituted them in a way that is about as fair as possible, as all districts elect the same number of representatives. Secondly, they are the first state with a Republican Secretary of State, Sam Reed, who has put up a lot of awesome data online, bucking a trend that I had observed up to this point.

Because of Washington's quirks, there isn't separate data for the Senate and House - and instead of using House results as the state legislative portion of the index like usual, I've used Senate results, as otherwise I would've been averaging the performance of candidates in the two races in each district. Also, for the first time this week, I'll be including 50/50 numbers in my post. LDI scores are always relative to the respective state, but the 50/50 data measures every district compared to one that is evenly split by Democrats and Republicans. This will hopefully allow people to more easily understand where districts stand compared to other states, and the country as a whole.

Washington fits somewhere in the middle of the states investigated thus far. Democrats hold a 54-46 generic edge, but both sides hold fairly strong bases of support to rely on. Unlike some of the midwestern states I've looked at, Washington Democrats remain in a strong position, still holding majorities in both chambers. There was some talk during the height of tea party fanaticism that for whatever reason, that fervor wasn't taking over the West Coast, and so far as Washington is concerned, that seems to be true - unlike in states that have come before, Washington Republicans don't hold any outrageous seats that look like obvious Democratic pickups - seats are split just about where you would expect them to be - Democrats hold all but one seat that are more Democratic than the state on average, as well as 11 past that mark. They've let one seat slip on the Senate side, but again, things are much more evenly distributed here than in the other states released thus far.

The last graph here below uses the 50/50 numbers to plot out the 6 states released thus far. States are listed from left to right in order of generic Democratic performance. The line stretches from the most Democratic to the most Republican district, with the bar covering the middle 50% of districts. Washington's closest relative seems to be Wisconsin, which has just a slightly larger range of districts, but otherwise remains very similar.

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