Trends in Maryland Pt. 1

So yeah, everyone on here likes to talk about how the West Coast and New England formed our firewall last week, but I don’t see too much mention of Maryland – we do exist, and we do kick some major ass. Therefore, I’ve decided that I’m going to write a few diaries about political trends in Maryland, past and present. There isn’t really a plan to this, I just want to provide some good info that maybe fellow SSPers can use.

The topic today is trends in the Maryland State Legislature, 1974-2010. Maryland’s current system involves 47 legislative district, each of which elects 1 Senator and 3 Delegates. The 3 delegates can be elected together, or can be elected in 1 or 2 member subdistricts. There are really no guidelines for the creation of subdistricts, so they really just represent another opportunity to gerrymander.

The current system came about in the early 1970s when Maryland’s old way of apportioning delegates was thrown out in court. Maryland has had 4 legislative maps and 10 elections under this plan.

In the first election (1974), the Democrats won close to 90% in both chambers. This made me wonder whether Maryland had ever been controlled by Republicans, so I checked the Maryland Manual. In fact, it had – back in the late 1800s the Republicans briefly held a supermajority in the legislature, as crazy as that sounds. Back then, Western Maryland was very Republican, Central Maryland (including Baltimore City) was a swing region, and the Eastern Shore and Southern MD were mostly Democratic.

I’d wager that the current era of Dem dominance came about as a result of the New Deal (and has only faced minor changes over the decades). Interestingly, back in the 70s when the Republicans had 10% of the legislature, some of that 10% came from Montgomery County, while the Dems held almost the entire Eastern Shore and even held seats in Carroll County, north Baltimore County, and north Harford County.

Here are the figures.

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From these graphs, one can see that the Maryland Democratic Party really skated by until the 1990s, when their share of the seats dropped from 90% to 70%. This is still enough to coast by on, but it is somewhat less impressive. The two major loss years for the MD Democratic party were 1990 and 1994; 1994 in particular was a disaster, since we almost lost the governorship.

Compared to 1994’s loss of 16 seats in the GA, or even 1990’s loss of 8 seats, this year’s loss of 6 seats, 4 of which were open seats, really does not look bad at all.

In the State Senate we actually picked up 2 seats, which not only makes Maryland one of the few states where we picked up state legislative seats, but also bring the MD Dem Party to its largest # of seats in the State Senate since 1990. Indeed, Maryland is a very unique state politically, where even conservative Dems can still survive.

Oh, one more thing: Baltimore City started with 11 seats back in the 70s and now only has 6 (soon to be 5.5), but this doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect on the toplines – as many of these seats have gone to MoCo and PG.

So yeah, I think I’ll write my next diary as an analysis of Dem losses in MD in 2010 and an appraisal of Dem strength as it stands. Let me know what you think of this diary and if there’s anything Maryland-related in particular that you’d like to see in the future.