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Notes from Cook
04/10/09 12:11 PM ET
The Cook Political Report is out with its new Partisan Voting Index (PVI) rankings.
PVI allows you to compare the partisan makeup of a congressional district in Maine to a vastly different district in Alaska and get a pretty good idea how good a chance each party has in federal races in each of them.
The formula takes the results of the last two presidential elections (2004 and 2008) and finds out how the district performed relative to the rest of the country. Democrats averaged 51.3 percent of the vote in those two elections, so if Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) got 53 percent and President Obama got 55 percent, Democrats would average 54 percent for that district. Subtract the Democratic performance average for the nation (51.3), round it off, and you get a PVI of D+3.
A few interesting notes:
-The country, as a whole, is voting more and more Democratic, but Cook
PVI allows you to compare the partisan makeup of a congressional district in Maine to a vastly different district in Alaska and get a pretty good idea how good a chance each party has in federal races in each of them.
The formula takes the results of the last two presidential elections (2004 and 2008) and finds out how the district performed relative to the rest of the country. Democrats averaged 51.3 percent of the vote in those two elections, so if Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) got 53 percent and President Obama got 55 percent, Democrats would average 54 percent for that district. Subtract the Democratic performance average for the nation (51.3), round it off, and you get a PVI of D+3.
A few interesting notes:
-The country, as a whole, is voting more and more Democratic, but Cook
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