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:

Updated hPVI by Senate district

Last week I began rolling out new hPVI's with the county edition, this week the Senate districts are up.

Way back in November of 2010 Nate Silver wrote an article about the recently concluded elections entitled "2010: An Aligning Election," where he laid out the case that the 2010 midterms were a correction of Democratic gains in Republican territory in 2006 and 2008.

The same case can be made about the 2010 Minnesota legislative elections.

Below is a graph of the Senate district hPVI's, those colored red are held by GOPers and those colored blue are held by DFLers.

Updated hPVI by County

Over the next few weeks I'm going to be rolling out the new hPVIs, starting today with the counties and then moving on to the Senate and House districts. Because of redistricting the Senate and House hPVIs will be mostly irrelevant as soon as a new map is approved, but they will nonetheless provide some interesting information on partisan trends within the state.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about; hPVI is a bastardization of The Cook Political Reports PVI metric. PVI (which stands for partisan voting index) is simply the average margin of victory of a parties presidential candidate in a congressional district.

Here is the explanation from Cook's website:

A Partisan Voting Index score of D+2, for example, means that in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, that district performed an average of two points more Democratic than the nation did as a whole, while an R+4 means the district performed four points more Republican than the national average. If a district performed within half a point of the national average in either direction, we assign it a score of EVEN.

County hPVI Map

After making the map of the counties Mark Dayton won in the DFL primary I got a little map making crazy and made a bunch of maps. One of them is a map of the County hPVI list I posted awhile ago.



The way the color coding works is any county with an hPVI of D+5 to R+5 is white, any county with an hPVI of D+6 to D+20 is light blue and any county with an hPVI greater than D+20 is dark blue. The GOP counties followed the same parameters, so light red is R+6 to R+20 and dark red is R+21 and greater.

How to read the Minnesota Legislative hPVI Chart

I've had a couple requests to further explain the Minnesota Legislative hPVI Chart I posted on Monday, so here goes.

Here is one district in isolation:



Going left to right, the first cell is blue with an 8 in it. The 8 means that this cell represents Senate district 8, the blue represents the fact that this seat is held by a DFLer. The next two cells, A and B, represent house districts 8A and 8B and the blue, again, represents that these two seats are held by DFLers. In the first three columns the color coding will either be solid blue or solid red, a district cannot be partially held by a DFLer or GOPer so there is not any shading of these cells.

Moving on to the fourth cell from the left, this is where we get into the hPVI information. The heading "SD" means that this cell represents the Senate district of the row, which is 8. The 8 in the first cell means that this entire row is referring to Senate district 8. So we can see that SD8 has an hPVI of D+6, that's because the way I've formatted the hPVI information a positive number means a Democratic lean and a negative number means a Republican lean. So a positive 6 means that SD8 is 6 points more Democratic than the State as a whole. I did it that way to make doing the math easier, not to imply that somehow a republican district is a negative thing. When you see a -10, it should be read as R+10.

This cell is also shaded slightly blue, for the hPVI information the cells are not solid blue or red, they are shaded depending on how the hPVI number relates to the others. So the cell representing the hPVI of SD8 is shaded slightly blue, because it's slightly more Democratic than average. You can see that the cell representing house district 8A is a deeper blue, this is because it has a higher hPVI and is more Democratic.

The column at the very end is the hPVI difference between the two house districts, how much of a partisan divide there is within the Senate district. SD8 has the largest divide of any Minnesota Senate district which is why it's solid green if the divide was smaller the cell would be less green and more white.

Here's another district in isolation:



So here we can see that all of the seats in district 56 are held by DFLers even though the hPVI of all the districts has a Republican tilt. And you can see in the last column that the two house districts have basically the same hPVI.

Here's another example:



Here you can see that SD57 and 57A are held by DFLers and 57B is held by a GOPer. SD57 has no partisan tilt, A is slightly Democratic and B is slightly Republican.

I hope that helps anyone who was confused.

hPVI in visual form

This is my attempt at putting all the hPVI information into an easy to understand graphical format, preferably one with pretty colors.

First I'll take you through the individual elements of the chart; the legislative seat chart, the hPVI chart and the house district spread chart, then combine those into one easy to understand Minnesota Legislative hPVI Chart With Pretty Colors.

What initially got the ball rolling in this direction was Joe's request for some sort of graphical chart of legislative seats.

…I wonder if there's a graphical way to show who controls the house seats in each of those districts.

This was the result of that:



Each cell represents a legislative seat, the numbers are Senate seats, and the corresponding letters are House seats. Blue means that seat is held by a DFLer, and red means it's held by a GOPer. The headings at the top are shaded blue because both chambers are controlled by the DFL; if one were controlled by the GOP the cell would be red.

Joe liked that chart but I wasn't quite satisfied, I wanted a way to integrate that chart with hPVI, which lead to the next chart, a way of formatting the hPVI information in a graphical way:



In this chart the headings at the top refer to the seat type, SD for senate district, A and B for that house district with the numbers along the side referring to the district number. The numbers in the cells are the hPVI numbers and the cells are color coded so that neutral districts are white, and the more Republican a district is the deeper shade of red it is, the more Democratic the more blue.

To that we can add a column for the district spread, the difference between the hPVI's of the two house districts, color coded from white to green.



Now we have two sort of similar looking charts that can be combined into one:



In one graphic we can see what party currently holds the district, what its partisan tilt is and how big of a difference in hPVI there is between the two house districts.

hPVI; House districts, sorted

Below is the Minnesota House district hPVI list.

As with the Senate district list the most democratic districts are significantly more partisan than the most republican districts. This is not surprising; as the house districts are further segmentations of the Senate districts we would expect them to retain some of the same partisan tendencies. You can see this in the graph, which looks very similar to the Senate hPVI graph.



And I've said it before, but I'll say it again, SD61 is really, really liberal. Really. For reals.

Here's the house hPVI list:

hPVI; Senate districts, sorted

Below is the entire Minnesota Senate district hPVI list, but before we get to that let's first take a look at some information about the list.

As you would expect the most democratic districts are significantly more partisan than the most republican districts. In fact a full 16% of the districts are Democratic districts that are more partisan than the most republican district. Conversely there are relatively few Democratic districts in the +10 - +20 range, while there are lots of republican districts in that range. You can see the trend more easily when the list is graphed.



The republican districts are more plentiful, but less partisan while the exact opposite is true of the democratic districts. The other interesting feature is just how many +10 republican districts the DFL currently holds. Even if you exclude Lisa Fobbe in her R+24 district there are six districts with an R+10 score or greater that are held by DFLers while the most Democratic district currently held by the GOP is SD41 with an R+5 score. This is to be expected in a Senate dominated by the DFL, but it's still somewhat surprising to see how far into GOP land the DFL incursion has penetrated.

And SD 61 is really, really liberal.

Here's the entire Senate hPVI list:

Top 5 House districts by hPVI

Last week I posted the top 5 most partisan Senate districts in the state, according to hPVI, this week we'll look at the House version of those lists. First the top five most Democratic House districts:



Just like its Senate counterpart the Democratic list is all Twin Cities districts. In fact, the top 15 most Democratic house districts are located in the Twin Cities. And if you needed any more proof, SD 61 is really, really liberal. Really.

Here are the top 5 most Republican districts:



There's Tom Emmer, hailing from the fourth most Republican district in the state. The flip side of that is Margaret Anderson Kelliher, whose 60A is the seventh most Democratic district in the state at an hPVI of D+50. It's entirely possible that the two major party candidates for Governor will be from two of the most partisan house districts in the state, with a full 80 points of spread between their constituents.

I'll post the complete lists for both the house and senate soon.

More fun with hPVI

Last week I introduced hPVI, hybrid PVI, and posted the scores of the 87 counties in Minnesota. For anyone who hasn't ever read one of my posts, those who have must think I suffer from PVI turrets, PVI is short for Partisan Voting Index. It's a metric, created by The Cook Political Report, for measuring how partisan a congressional district or state is. I've adapted it for use at the statewide level and added a letter to the front of it to distinguish it from its predecessor, as is all the rage now among baseball statisticians.

Today we're going to look at the top 5 most partisan Senate districts in the state. First the top 5 most Democratic districts:


Those are some huge scores and not surprisingly they all come from the Twin Cities, in fact the top 9 most democratic senate districts are all in the Twin Cities.

Now let's take a look at the other side of the spectrum, the top five most Republican districts:


Notice something that's different from the previous chart? The third most Republican senate district in the state is occupied by a DFLer; the Republicans, on the other hand, don't occupy a single Democratic leaning district. Additionally the most Democratic senate district is more than twice as partisan as the most Republican district.

That's it for now but I'll have more on these numbers in future posts, including the full list for both the Senate and House.

PVI breakdown by county

As part of a continuing effort to generate some objective tools for better understanding and analyzing the politics of the state I've created a county level PVI index, what I'm calling hPVI. For those of you unfamiliar with PVI, it's a tool created by The Cook Political Report for evaluating the partisan makeup of congressional districts.

In formulating a congressional district's PVI, the results of the last two presidential elections are used. But should that be what we use for formulating a county's PVI? The whole point of this exercise is to get a better idea of the partisan makeup of the state at a local level; in that case would the results of the last two gubernatorial elections be a better way to go? How about a hybrid of the two, using the last presidential election and the last gubernatorial election? What about Senate races, should those be included?

In the end I went with the hybrid method and did not include Senate races, this means the county level PVI is arrived at by averaging the Democratic vote share of the 2008 Presidential election and the 2006 gubernatorial election and subtracting from that the average of the Republican vote share in those two races. This is than compared with how the state voted to arrive at the county level PVI, or what I'm calling hPVI.

So for example, in Beltrami county the average Democratic vote share for 2008 and 2006 was 52.5% and the average Republican vote share was 43.4%, when you subtract the GOP average from the Democratic average you get 9.1, when you than subtract the PVI of the state as a whole (with this method it's 5) you get 4.1, for an hPVI of 4 (PVI is rounded to the nearest whole number).

Here are the top 5 most Democratic counties according to hPVI:

Here are the top five most GOP counties:

Keep in mind that the hPVI is telling you how Democratic or Republican a county is compared to the state as a whole. Since Minnesota itself has a hPVI of 5, a county with a -1 hPVI is 1 point more Republican than the state, but is still a baseline D+4 county.

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Here's the complete list: