Analyzing the "Non-Partisan" Legislative Districts in Mecklenburg County

With the approval of the proposed North Carolina State House and State Senate 'non-partisan' legislative maps, the North Carolina General Assembly is close to meeting its court-ordered redrawing of legislative districts for review by the three-judge superior court panel this week.

Much has been made about whether the new legislative districts in certain counties represent a truly 'non-partisan' redrawing of the maps, especially since the court order mandated that no electoral (read, partisan) data was to be used in the creation of the new districts.

There will be some debate over whether the 'base-line' maps (selected by random draws from the simulated maps provided by Dr. Chen) were non-partisan or not, but that is for the court to decide. However, those of us outside the legislative process do have partisan/electoral data at our disposal to analyze the precincts assigned to the proposed state house and senate districts.

While there are several counties that are being redrawn due to the court order, I decided to use Mecklenburg County to analyze their proposed state house and senate districts, due to the fact that Mecklenburg County gives their precinct election results with early votes (absentee one-stop, in particular) assigned back to the voter's respective precinct. Some counties (like Wake County) do not have their early votes publicly reassigned back to the precinct, make it harder to analyze a precinct's true electoral behavior (if anyone has a lead on how to get those precinct election returns to include early votes, please drop me an e-mail).

How NC's 2018 State Legislative Districts "Behaved" in Relationship to Trump's 2016 Vote

In a previous blog post, I noted that there appeared to be a close relationship to how a Republican state legislative candidate performed (that is, the vote percentage that GOP candidate received in the district) compared to the district's vote for Donald Trump in 2016.

Now that we have the preliminary election results and percentages for both state house and state senate Republican candidates, I decided to re-run the analysis to see what, if any, association was present between Trump's vote percentage in the new state legislative districts and the GOP candidate's vote percentage in the 2018 election.

Generational Partisanship (or Why Millennials May Not Save Us from Partisan Loyalty and Polarization)

As many may have realized by now (by reading some of my previous posts), I've become very interested in the generational dynamics underway in American politics, and particularly in North Carolina (through voter registration figures and analyses). But voter registration only tells part of the story--a companion aspect to our political environment is voting "behavior," especially about voters' party self-identification and supporting presidential candidates, when it can be a driving force of our partisanship and polarization.

In trying to better understand the partisanship and potential polarization coming from party identification in our nation, along with the generational dynamics that are happening (especially with the rising Millennial generation), I ran a series of analyses using survey data from the American National Elections Studies (ANES) to investigate the following questions:

• Are Americans really moving into political independence with the "rise of the independent" or are we seeing another phenomenon, especially when it comes to voting behavior of these independents?
• What have been the trends in recent presidential elections when it comes to partisan self-identification and presidential vote choices among the four generations in the American electorate?

Exploring Partisanship & Party Loyalty from 1952 to 2016

Much has been made about the role of partisanship in American politics: some call it "tribalism" in the sense that party loyalty drives most views and actions, especially when it comes to voting behavior at the presidential level. And while some believe that the "political independents" can save us (and point to rising numbers in polls that show "independents" are now the largest bloc of voters), the sense of party loyalty has been evident even among these 'faux' independents.

In looking at data from the American National Election Studies from 1952 to 2016, I wanted to get a better sense of how these trends--the perceived rise of independents, as well as the potential rise or decline of partisanship and party loyalty--has been recorded in presidential election years.