Before this year and as far back as anyone can remember, Democrats controlled the Kentucky House of Representatives. Even though no Presidential candidate has carried Kentucky since 1996 and Kentucky has not elected a Democrat to the US Senate since 1992, Democrats in Kentucky have fair better on the state level. However, this ended in 2016, when Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives – what many commenters consider “the last Democratic legislative chamber in the South”.
The losses were not small – Republicans picked up 17 seats, and the chamber moved from a 7 seat Democratic majority to a 28 seat Republican majority. When the new legislature went into session, many long-stymied Republican priorities were made into law – new abortion restrictions, repeal of the “prevailing wage” law, implementation of “right to work”, and a new charter school system, among many others. Many of these bills passed with very little Democratic approval.
If Democrats want to regain the chamber, they will need to pick up 15 seats in the 2018 election. This post analyzes which of those seats pose the greatest opportunities for Democrats. To build this analysis, I consolidated precinct level results which are available at the Secretary of State’s website. Unfortunately, 12 of the 120 Kentucky counties do not make precinct level results available, including Warren County (Bowling Green). This means that we do not have data for 14 of the house districts.
Pat Smith tackled this question shortly after the election, identifying the 15 seats with the closest House elections. That’s a good start. Let’s do a different type of visualization of that same data. I’ve used colors from the ColorBrewer project to show the results of the 2016 election: