( – promoted by Jack McCullough)

(Cross-posted from The Legislative District Index.  Content is written for a national audience, so there are some basic Vermont things to skim over, but the data is what I figure people will be interested in.  Look for Part 2 Monday, where I’ll have some more data to share, including those legislative scorecards for the Vermont Senate).

Back in the fall of 2009, I was looking for some metric to evaluate the risk posed to legislators by their vote on marriage equality the previous session.  The result was the Vermont District Index, my first attempt at making any sort of metric for measuring partisanship in state legislatures.  Two years later, that project has turned into the Legislative District Index.

Because of the time I have had to work with Vermont’s data, today’s post is going to be a little different than the states that have come before – I want to illustrate the real potential of this data over a longer period of time.  For Vermont, I not only have 2010 data, but I also have data from 2008 and 2006, which I’ve made available for download here. For now though, we will just stick with the 2010 data – and I’ve included which party has held each seat for the past three sessions.

For those not familiar with the state, Vermont’s legislature has some interesting quirks.  The Vermont Constitution allows for house districts to be drawn for either one or two members, and makes no limit on how large a Senate district may be.  The result is a six-seat Senate district covering most of Chittenden County – which is quite frankly deserving of a post dedicated to itself.  Since I haven’t had to publish a state with different sized districts yet, I couldn’t figure out how I wanted to publish the Senate list, but the way I’ve done it below I think is the clearest to understand.  Just understand that senators are elected at-large from county-sized districts.

The other thing that stands out immediately is that the generic margin isn’t nearly as Democratic as some might expect.  On the national level, there is no question that Vermont is the safest of territory.  But when it comes to state politics, a relatively weak Republican party has managed to perform well on the back of a few public figures.  Consider this – a Democrat has not received over 50% of the gubernatorial vote since Howard Dean in 2000, when he captured 50.5% of the vote.  Republicans have held around 1/3 of the seats in the state house for most of the decade, nothing like the absolute shutouts we’ve seen in some of the more Republican chambers in the country.  That said, Vermont still comes in as the 2nd most Democratic state we’ve looked at so far, just behind Hawaii.  The graph below shows the raw 50/50 scores of all the states surveyed thus far, with the line stretching from both extremes, and the bar covering the middle 50% of districts.

If you read our Maine article, we talked about the importance of a relatively stable ideological continuum within a party.  If there are large ideological gaps, it becomes easy for the party to be either anchored to the safest of areas (Nebraska) or wind up promoting the growth of a third party (Maine).  With strongholds in Burlington and Brattleboro, the Vermont Progressive Party seems to fit very well into this framework.  Similar to the steep slopes we saw in the above states, there is a rather sharp drop off from the 8-10 most Democratic districts compared to the rest of the Democratic leaning territory. The below graph illustrates that, overlaying the distribution of VT-DI scores on top of the LDI scores of the other states surveyed.

Born out of Sen. Bernie Sanders campaign for Mayor of Burlington in the early 80’s, the Progressive party started with seats on the Burlington City Council, and grew to a statewide party that has held a handful of house seats, garnered a significant chunk of votes in heavily contested statewide elections, and naturally, been the source of plenty of tension amongst the Vermont Left.  With that in mind, 2010 was something of a unification of the Vermont Left, as Progressives chose to not nominate a candidate for governor, and former gubernatorial candidate Anthony Pollina ran as a D/P fusion candidate in his successful bid for Vermont State Senate.  Furthermore, a generic Vermont Democrat performs significantly better than Democrats in Maine, which has allowed for the party to maintain strong control over the legislature, despite having a successful third party contesting otherwise safe seats. Despite being home to a much wider range of ideological diversity than Hawaii, Democrats still maintain comparable supermajorities.  

In addition to doing my usual recap, I wanted to use my home state as an example of some of the other things we can think about using LDI data.  When redistricting seasons rolls around, suddenly people become a lot more interested in state legislatures, and while Congressional redistricting draws the most attention, there are plenty of major fights playing out over local district lines.  Vermont doesn’t draw districts until 2012, but all ready there have been very different proposals put forth by the tri-partisan redistricting committee.  But those plans have little meaning given the Democratic supermajority, and so any decision about new districts are likely to be made within the party.

As I mentioned before, Vermont’s current districts are highly irregular – I’m represented by more states senators (6) than anyone else in the country.  In a district that big, campaigns become incredibly expensive undertakings, even in a state as small as Vermont.  Additionally, there is considerable scholarship that shows the notion that different sized districts with the number of legislators they elect proportionate to the number of voters within the district does not make for equal representation.  Rather, a voter in a large district has a much smaller chance that their vote will be decisive in an election compared to a voter in a regular single-member district.  Couple all this with the fact that population growth means Chittenden is in store for another Senate seat, and it becomes clear that something has to change.

The problem for Democrats is that virtually any solution weakens the strong position the six-seat district puts them in.  The most common “solution” is to take the town of Milton (R+25), and add it to the Grand Isle/Colchester Senate District, upping the number of senators elected to 2, and maintaining 6 in the rest of the Chittenden County district.  In that plan, Democrats in the six-seat district remain safe, and the Grand Isle district becomes slightly more conservative.  Someone like Republican House Minority Leader Don Turner, who has been a visible presence lately, might be inclined to run for the seat, and it would certainly prove a close contest.  But that solution still leaves you with a six-seat district.

Below I’ve put together a chart of two possible alternatives to the status-quo plan from above, which will illustrate exactly why Democrats have their hands tied.  First is a plan that would divide the six-seat district into two three-seat districts – one containing Burlington and South Burlington, the other containing the rest of Chittenden County.  In the second plan, only the city of Burlington is in a two-member district, with South Burlington as part of a larger four-seat district with the rest of the county.  Using 2010 State Senate election results, I’ve estimated who would be elected from these hypothetical new districts.

While the Burlington based districts will be strengthened (a result Progressives would likely prefer), the district covering the rest of the county becomes toss-up territory, with a LDI score similar to Washington County, where all three parties have found success.  The only way Democrats could break up the six-seat district and retain their advantage would be to split Burlington in half, which goes against the entire reason Vermont has multi-member districts to begin with – maintaining full communities (and in the Senate’s case, counties) as best as possible.  

I think I’ve all ready hit you all with a lot of content for one update, but I’m not quite done with Vermont.  Check in soon for Part 2 of my Vermont coverage, where I’ll illustrate some other calculations we can look at through the lens of VDI: measuring legislators issue positions relative to the ideology of their district.