PRE-RELEASE: Calculating "left-ness"

Where can the left win in New York State?

NYS Assembly districts shaded by formulaic “left-ness”

NOTE: This is the first of my paid access “pre-release” articles on this newsletter. 48 hours from now on Monday the 22nd, I will release the same article without a paywall to free subscribers. The only differences between these two versions beyond their release dates is that the pre-release version will also include access to any materials I have created for this article (spreadsheets, raw map files, python code, etc) for the more professionally-minded readers to tinker with. I am hoping this model will strike a good balance between showing appreciation for my paid subscribers and ensuring accessibility to those who are unable to support it financially, something I feel quite strongly about.

Today I am going to be doing something I promised in my first post: attempt to write a formula for calculating how left-wing a given political district in the state of New York is relative to all other districts. If you are a baseball fan, you can think of this as a kind of political rate stat. It has taken a while, but I hope it will have been worth the wait. This formula is going to do a few key things:

• The “leftmost” district in the state according to our formula will have a value of 1.0000, the least will have a value of 0.0000

• All other districts will have a value somewhere between 0.0000 and 1.0000 which can be used to sort and compare districts

• It will be relatively simple and easy-to-explain, while it won’t look like that is the case in formal notation, this article will explain exactly what every element of the formula does