Here are the new FiveThirtyEight partisan leans for every state for the 2021-22 election cycle, updated with the results of the 2020 elections.
. Don’t worry, though: We’ll calculate the partisan leans of the new congressional districts as soon as they’re finalized.)
So now that you know what our new partisan lean scores are, let’s talk about how — and how not — to use them. First, we want to emphasize again that FiveThirtyEight partisan leans are expressions ofpartisanship; that is, they don’t necessarily tell us how red or blue a place is in absolute terms. And with Democrats having won the national popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections, there’s a good case to be made that the U.S.
The other thing to know about our partisan lean score is that it doesn’t simply reflect the results of a single presidential election . Rather, this version of partisan lean is calculated as 50 percent the state or district’s lean relative to the nation in the 2020 presidential election, 25 percent its relative lean in the 2016 presidential election and 25 percent a custom state-legislative lean based on the statewide popular vote in the last four state House elections.