Whenever we're talking about elections to the House of Representatives, the first questions anyone ever asks are: "Is it a red district? A blue district? And how red or how blue?" We need to know, of course, because we have to concentrate our limited resources on the seats that could be in play. And having accurate information on this score is a major reason why Democrats were so successful in taking back the House last year.
It turns out, though, that answering this seemingly simple question takes quite a lot of work—work that we spend a ton of time on here at Daily Kos Elections, so we want to give you a look under the proverbial hood.
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The most important metric for figuring out a district's lean—red or blue—is to examine the recent presidential election results within that district. That might sound straightforward, but it's anything but.
States could easily provide this information themselves, and some do (shout-out to Minnesota!). But most don't, so we have to calculate this data ourselves. And it's not easy!
Because almost every state with more than one congressional district splits counties between districts, that means you need precinct-level election results, so that you can figure out what part of each county goes in which district.
Sometimes counties post precinct results online, and some of those are in usable formats. Others are in scanned-in PDFs that are just brutal to convert. Some are even handwritten—no joke! Take a look at these results from Lewis County, Kentucky, for the elections held just last year:
Converting that into a useful format you can plug into an Excel spreadsheet is, needless to say, a nightmare.
And that's if they're online at all! With many counties, you have to call them up and ask for the results, one at a time. Sometimes they will only fax them to you. Sometimes they will only mail them to you. Some even make you pay for results. We've had counties try to charge as much as $100 for publicly available election data!
There’s a lot of work that goes into deciding which elections we should invest our resources in. Thankfully, Daily Kos has one of the smartest elections teams in the country. Support our work by giving $5 today, so that we can elect more Democrats in 2020 and stop GOP gerrymandering.
All in all, there's a ton of data collection, data cleanup, and raw calculation to be done. A ton. But in spite of all this, we absolutely love calculating presidential election results by congressional district—and we've been doing it for over a decade—because the information is so important to have. Like we said at the start, we need to know if it makes sense to target a particular district, and this data is critical to anyone's analysis. Without it, we'd be fighting blind.
And here's the best part: We make it all available for free. We don't lock it up behind some paywall or make it difficult to access. We put it right there on the internet for Democrats and progressives everywhere to make use of. What's more, we post detailed spreadsheets showing all our work. You won't find that kind of transparency anywhere else.
And we don't stop with presidential elections. We calculate results by congressional district for Senate races, gubernatorial races, and more. It's an ongoing process.
But as you might imagine, all of these efforts cost real money, and these calculations wouldn't be possible without your extremely generous support. We'd hate to have to abandon this project now, especially since Democrats will be defending their hard-won gains in the House next year. If you can donate to help keep us going, we'd be supremely grateful—and we promise all the good data will keep flowing!
Thank you so much for supporting us. Here’s to more great data—and more great victories—in 2020!
David Nir
Political Director, Daily Kos