( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

As we round the corner towards 2010, the political rumor season is heating up. We've already seen the slew of names being batted around for Governor, Lt. Governor, and other statewide offices. 2010 is setting up as a year of tremendous political turnover in Vermont, and so now the question becomes this: how will we capitalize on what should be an election full of open seats and contested races.

For the past few weeks, I've been running through numbers from the Secretary of State's office, trying to compose a ranking profile that could lend hints towards potential Democratic gains, vulnerable incumbents, and district mismatches. Furthermore, with redistricting around the corner, I wanted to look at how individual towns were shaping up around the state.

Now, there are others here who are far better at describing the political culture that has resulted in our current House of Representatives. I won't claim to know the mechanics of these campaigns around the state. But what I believe I can contribute to the conversation is a look at 108 districts that cover our state, and how they stack up on a partisan scale.

To do this, I've created the Vermont District Index. Using the Cook Partisan Voting Index as a source of inspiration, I set out to create a ranking structure that would place our individual statehouse districts on the same scale, but altered to provide a little more depth given the unique balance of Vermont politics. More detail below the fold.

My ranking structure uses data from: 2008, 2004, 2000 presidential elections; the 2008 and 2006 gubernatorial elections; and the 2008 and 2006 state representative elections. The margins of victory were put through a weighted average, and then were compared to the state Democratic average.  My system finds that on average, Democrats win by a 13.5% margin.  It then ranges from R+35 Caledonia-1 all the way to D+51 Windham 3-3.

Before I begin to look at some of the observations I've made, I'll clear up a few procedural questions.

– A race where there is a Progressive Party candidate presents a problem when it comes to the model, given that it relies on the D-R margin.  Given that the purpose of this is to strengthen liberal numbers in the house, I chose to largely lump D's and P's together under one label.  In a D vs. P race, I would default to the State Senate result to find my numbers.  In three-party races, I tried to consider the dynamics of the race and use the numbers that make the most sense.  I figured the left can put aside it's partisan differences for this one.

 – State Senate results were used to provide data for uncontested races where the same party prevailed in both races.  In instances where a town had an uncontested state representative election, and then the opposing party received the majority of their state senate votes, I would use a default result from within their county as a stand-in.

 – The Brattleboro districts numbers may be slightly inflated, just because there were no Republican candidates I could use for local election numbers.  The good news is, they're not exactly swing districts, and fit right into where they would if I had a better comparative measure.

Now, with that stuff out of the way, it’s time to look at the first set of data.  Below are the 10 Democrats (and one Progressive) in the most Republican districts:

Franklin-1                    Gary Gilbert                                        R+25

Orange-Caledonia-1    Chip Conquest                                             R+25

Caledonia-3                 Bob South                                           R+21

Addison-3                   Diane Lanpher                                               R+21

Rutland-1-2                 Dave Potter                                         R+20

Orange-1                    Susan H. Davis                                  R+20

Chittenden-7-2            Kristy Spengler                                   R+18

Chittenden-6-1            Debbie Evans                                      R+17

Franklin-2                    Richard Howrigan                              R+17

Rutland-Windsor-1     Megan Smith                                       R+14

Bennington-4              Jeff Wilson                                          R+14

There are a couple of things that immediately jump out to me:

– Chip Conquest ran one hell of a campaign.  His district is a full 11 points more Republican than Megan Smith’s and Jeff Wilson’s.  This is significant in the fact that these are the only three members of this list who’ve been elected to single-member districts.

– Of the two-seat districts, it’s split about 50/50 in terms of which party garnered the most votes.

– As an Essex Junction resident, I find the results for the town’s district to be very interesting.  It is unquestionably more Republican than Chittenden 6-2 (which comes in at an even D+0), but I wonder how much of that is the Dubie/Essex Alliance factor.  I can’t help but think that Linda Myers’ seat must be winnable, given how unpopular her stance on the Local Option Tax was at Town Meeting Day.

I’ll leave you all with this information for now, and later in the week I’ll revisit some other sections of the data.  I hope the GMD community finds this information valuable.