The GOP Is the Strongest It's Been in Decades

Last fall, RCP Election Analyst David Byler and I put together an index of party strength.  While most journalists look at presidential performance as a measure of party strength (see the ubiquitous “Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six elections”), we take a broader view of party strength.  Rather than look simply at presidential performance, we look at party dominance at the federal, congressional, and state levels.  One need only look at fights over voter identification laws, redistricting, food stamp benefits, Obamacare expansion, and a multitude of other battles from the last few years alone to understand the importance of non-federal elections. We therefore believe this approach gives a more complete measure of party strength.

In this article, we do three things.  First, we recap our methodology.  Second, we update the methodology for 2014, and we look forward to 2016.  Finally, we run some diagnostics on our index, answering various objections that have been raised.

Our index is the sum of five parts: presidential performance, House performance, Senate performance, gubernatorial performance and state legislative performance. The first is measured by the party’s performance in the previous presidential popular vote (NB: In this, and all other measurements, third parties are excluded). 

House performance is the average of the popular vote for the House and the average of the share of the House won by the party. This helps mitigate the effects of gerrymandering.  Senate performance is the share of the Senate held by the party.

Gubernatorial performance is the party’s share of governorships (again, with third party candidates excluded). We do not weight for population, for reasons explored further below.  For state legislatures, we average four numbers: the share of state Houses and state Senates held by each party along with the share of state House seats and state Senate seats held by each party.

This gives us five metrics, all of which run on a scale from 0 to 100.  Adding them together gives us a scale from 0 to 500.  We then subtract 250 from the total.  All this does is assign a score of zero to a situation where the parties are evenly matched, rather than 250. A positive score then means that the Republican Party is stronger while a negative score means the Democratic Party is stronger.

Via: RCP

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