New Hampshire currently has two districts that have changed hands a total of four times in the last five years. Whilst it is probably a good thing to have competitive districts, a question we could ask about New Hampshire is what might the map look like if there was bipartisan agreement to split the congressional districts between the parties?
CD 1 (Blue): 48.9% Obama
CD 2 (Green): 60.5% Obama
But effective.
Wonder if this was inspired by a comment I made in the previous thread about NH. I mentioned in that the towns/cities in the less Democratic 1st that were bluer (particularly Portsmouth, Dover, and Durham) tended to be far from the border with the current 2nd.
I wonder if one could prettify this map a little without changing it much. Those towns in Grafton, Sullivan, and Cheshire County that are in this 1st district tend to be pretty small and I don’t think would change a whole lot if they were put back in the 2nd.
of the state GOP throwing Bass under the bus and trying to shore up Guinta a little bit. I doubt they would do anything too ugly, but what if they were to draw something like this?
I would imagine that the 1st district would now have a PVI of R+2 and the 2nd would have a PVI of D+5 or so.
have barely changed since it became a state. It’s not about to change now.
Just to confuse you even further….the Telegraph might not be 100% wrong though for a couple of reasons.
1. The Mass exile community are still New England conservatives, meaning that the aggressive religiosity and ultra-hawkism of the national GOP tend not to be especially appealing. The shift in focus of the issues from those to health care and taxation explains why these folks shifted so sharply back to the Republicans in 2010. (Of course they didn’t quite know what they voted for. Little attention is paid to legislative races because there are so many of them.)
2. The newer breed of emigrant might be different. The real estate boom in Greater Boston might have caused people to look at New Hampshire for its lower house prices as opposed to its lower tax rates. While there’s an ideological component to “I want to live someplace with lower taxes and lower services,” there isn’t really anything ideological per se about “I need to live somewhere with lower housing costs.”