10.09.09

US State legislators’ affiliations

Posted in Maps at 11:34 am by ducky

I have two more political layers up on my political/demographic map: US state senators and US state representatives (or assemblymembers, as they are called in some states).  Alaska and Hawaii didn’t fit nicely on these images, but you can see them on the political/demographic map.

In the pictures below (and on my site), red is Republican; blue is Democratic.  (To those outside the US who are used to red meaning liberal, the US does its colours backwards, sorry.) Some districts elect multiple members; in those cases I average the colour, with exact Democratic/GOP balance being white.  In cases where there is a vacancy or a third-party affiliation, the colour is also white.

Here are the state senators:

Below is the party affiliation of the lower chamber members (which are usually called Representatives, but also sometimes Assemblymembers or Delegates).  Note that Nebraska doesn’t have a lower chamber.

Most of the party affiliation data came from the excellent Project Vote Smart.  What they didn’t have, I gleaned from the appropriate state legislature’s page, Wikipedia, or both.

For comparison, the images below show all the districts in the continental US in random colours:

There are almost 8000 state and federal legislators in the US for a population of 300M people, or about one legislator per 375,000 people.   The number of legislators varies wildly by state, however.  New Hampshire currently has 424 state and federal legislators representing a population of 1.3M, or one legislator for every 3066 people.  California currently has 176 representing a population of 36M, or one legislator for every 204,000 people.

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