Updated hPVI by House district

I conclude the roll out of the 2011 hPVI's with the House edition. If you missed them or just want to go back and see them again, here are the county and Senate versions.

Some of this post may sound like a repeat of the Senate post from last week and that's because, as most of you know, House districts are nested within Senate districts, meaning any changes in the partisan makeup of the Senate districts has a direct effect on the makeup of the corresponding house districts.

This means that all of the same stuff applies that was discussed last week; the DFL leaning House districts are top heavy, and the GOP leaning districts are middle heavy. The DFL has almost thirty districts with a D+21 tilt or greater, while the GOP has only 20 such districts. The GOP, on the other hand, has 38 districts with leans between five and twenty while the DFL has only 15. For those of you not doing the math as we go; that's 58 R+5 and greater districts for the GOP, to only 44 D+5 and greater districts for the DFL.

Before we get too much further let's take a look at the seat graph:

Races to watch on election day: MN House edition

This is the first post in a series about what races will be the most interesting to follow on election day. If you are looking for early indications about who's going to have a good night, these are some races you'll want to pay attention to.

A few notes about the metrics I'm using.

When I refer to the amount of money raised by a candidate, I talking about the amount raised in individual contributions this year, not total amount raised. This metric give us an idea of how much support a candidate has in the absence of polling.

This is by no means a perfect measure, but it has decent predictive power in that incumbents who raise significantly more than their opponent rarely lose, and those who raise significantly less, are in danger of losing.

The other metrics I'm using are; 2008 vote shares and hPVI.

With that out of the way, let's get on with the Minnesota House edition of "Races to watch."

Minnesota House Race Ratings

Due to the dearth in information about the competitiveness of the Minnesota state legislative races I decided doing race ratings for the house and senate would be a good idea. If you don't know what I'm talking about when I say race ratings, I mean something along the lines of this. While Cook and some of the others who do this sort of thing on a national level usually use four tiers of rankings, I'm only going to use three; Safe, Tilt and Toss-up.

A Safe rating implies a very high confidence level, approaching 95%, so unless it's an upset of Weltian proportions, the chances of another outcome are not good. A Tilt rating is still likely to go in that direction, but there may be a red flag or two that is cause for hedging. A Toss-up means just that, it's a wide open race.

Quick Overview

First off, let's quickly go over the bottom line numbers before getting into the minutia of how the ratings were made and the actual ratings.



If these ratings are close than control of the house is in play this election, but all Democrats need to do is win a third the toss-ups to retain control and since most of the toss-ups are currently held by Democrats it's likely that they will. And if 32 seems like a lot of toss-ups, it's less then 25% of the total seats. I'll do an update to these when we're closer to the election that will likely push some of the Toss-ups out to Tilt status.

The GOP's missed votes

While looking at missed votes for my earlier post on Tom Emmers missed votes there was something else I noticed, Tom Emmer wasn't the only Minnesota House GOPer who missed a lot of votes. The member that missed the second most votes was a Republican, Slayton Rep. Doug Magnus. Third most was also a from the GOP, Jim Abeler. Fourth most, you guessed it, Republican Paul Kohls. Fifth was Paul Thissen, the first Democrat on the list.

It gets worse though. The DFL has 87 members in the house the GOP has 47, the DFL missed a total of 1,194 votes, the GOP missed 1,370. The DFL has 85% more members in the house and yet the GOP still missed 15% more votes. Even excluding Mr. Emmer and his gargantuan 147 missed votes the GOP still missed more votes than the DFL. To further an analogy, if Tom Emmer is the Babe Ruth of missed votes, the house GOP are the New York Yankees.

I suppose when you're as deep in the minority as the Minnesota GOP is in the house you can get kind of discouraged about voting, but really, is there any excuse for this kind of systematic failure to show up and do your job?