One thing we do a lot of at Daily Kos Elections during the odd-numbered years is think about who might run for office in the next even-numbered year: who might challenge an incumbent, or who’s going to seek a promotion when there’s an open seat. This kind of speculative naming-of-names in the political media is such a well-established tradition that there’s even a term for it: the Great Mentioner.
The Great Mentioner is sometimes pure guesswork by pundits about which candidates seem like up-and-comers, but just as often, it’s the result of behind-the-scenes prodding by consultants or potential contenders themselves trying to float names into general circulation through media allies and see what sort of a bite they get. You might recognize this as part of what’s called the “invisible primary,” which gets a lot of coverage in the presidential context but happens in all manner of downballot races too, at the congressional and even legislative and municipal levels.
But we can improve on this process by adding a quantifiable layer to it. For starters, it helps to know which potential candidates actually have connections to a given district: Do they actually live there, and more generally, how big is their base of local supporters? And if, say, a member of the state legislature is looking at a bid for Congress, how much turf does their present district share with the one they might seek?
After years of wishing for some sort of table that might illustrate these overlaps, in 2019 we finally did something about it and built those spreadsheets ourselves! But thanks to the decennial redistricting process that followed the 2020 census, those versions are now out of date, so we headed back down into the Excel cave to produce fresh data.
After a whole lot of number crunching—and waiting for the last straggler, Montana’s legislative redistricting process, to cross the finish line—Daily Kos Elections is pleased to announce new versions of our data detailing the overlaps in all 50 states between:
Read More