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Laboratories of Democracy: Alternate State Legislatures

I did discover this lying around (and marked on the map), so here goes.

Colorado
(2014 legislative election)

Colorado, one of two perfectly rectangular (at least in theory) states in the Union, sits squarely across the Great Continental Divide, and is home to Mount Elbert, the tallest mountain in the US east of California, as well as fifty-three other mountain peaks more than 14,000 ft (4,267 m) above sea level. Its mountainous location makes it a border state between the Midwestern and Southwestern cultural regions, with the high plains along the state's eastern border basically indistinguishable from Kansas or Nebraska while the Western Slope is more similar to the less desert-y parts of Arizona and New Mexico. The vast majority of its people, though, live along the Front Range, where the cities of Fort Collins, Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo form a north-south line, with Boulder and Greeley as outliers on either side north of Denver. The state capital is home to around half the state's population, depending on where you count its urban area as beginning and ending, and has seen large growth since the 1980s as businesses and people have relocated en masse from the declining Midwest.

Denver leans very much to the left, and has voted Labor consistently since the 1930s, and the college town of Boulder tends to support the Greens in most elections. But these are outliers in a mostly liberal-conservative state. The Republicans are Colorado's dominant party, and have been for a long time. The Colorado Republicans are usually considered a moderate branch of the party, eagerly supporting business, tourism and infrastructure expansion, while remaining silent on social concerns and letting their individual candidates take their own stances. This has served them very well, as both metropolitan Denver and the ski resorts can vote for Republicans who will cater to their worldview, while Colorado Springs and the more conservative rural towns can vote for Republicans who will cater to theirs. Even so, as Denver has grown, liberal Republicans have increasingly gotten the upper hand, and this has resulted in a backlash from conservative parts of the state. In 2014, the Liberty Party won ten seats, all in the traditional rural-suburban heartland of the GOP. Like so many other states, then, Colorado seems on the cusp of a realignment.

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California
(2014 legislative elections)

California is the largest state in the Union, containing around a tenth of its population. It's home to both Los Angeles, the home of the American film industry, and San Francisco, whose southern suburbs play host to a huge high-tech industry - both cities are in the top-ten largest cities in the Union. But it also has a number of regional cities as well as a large agricultural region in the Central Valley and abject wilderness in the far north and the Mojave Desert. In short, it's an extremely diverse state, and this is reflected in its politics.

Californians are stereotypically rather apolitical, or at least nonpartisan. In part, this is an effect of its constitution, which has probably the biggest Progressive Era footprint of any American state constitution, allowing for plebiscites and referendums on a huge number of issues and consequentially reducing the power of elected officials. Turnout is usually low in state elections, although not as low as in the Deep South, and voters tend not to have a strong allegiance to any political party.

There used to be a strong north-south divide in California, with the north voting Republican while the south voted Democratic - at least as far as the old parties went. Today, the Democrats are nearly dead, their big-government conservative stance finding few takers in an increasingly liberal Southern California. Instead, the two biggest competitors to the GOP are Labor, which has had a strong presence in California ever since the Great Depression, and the Greens, who have reaped massive benefits from the changing political climate in California over the past few decades. The two combine to form what would in theory be a strong centre-left majority in the Assembly - however, the California Greens are solidly on the right of the party, and can work with the GOP almost as easily as Labor. Most of the time, it comes down to who's in the governor's mansion.

Two other forces have emerged in recent time, representing a racial polarisation that's far from unique to California: on one hand, the Raza Unida have made strong gains among the Latino population, campaigning on social justice and equal status for the Spanish language, and organizing successfully among both urban Chicanos in Los Angeles and farm workers in the Central Valley. On the other hand, the Liberty Party has been making inroads into California just as they have in a lot of states. Their platform in California is unusually tinged by anti-Latino sentiment, but otherwise bears no great difference from their national anti-establishment right-wing populist approach.

On the face of it, California's legislature looks a lot like most other bicameral state legislatures - single-member districts for the upper house, proportional representation for the lower house. However, because of the heavy Progressive Era influence on California's state constitution, two major factors set it apart from its neighbors:
- Firstly, both houses are elected by preferential voting, as is the Governor. For the Senate, this means a straight instant-runoff vote in each of the 40 districts, while the Assembly is elected by single transferable vote.
- Secondly, while most states' lower houses are elected by county, California uses the same 40 legislative districts to elect both houses of the legislature. For the Assembly, each district returns five members for a total of 200 seats. The districts are drawn with the goal of being "compact, contiguous and equal", which has been defined by precedent as no more than a ten-percent deviation in size. This makes the California state legislature one of the most equitably-apportioned in the Union.

The preferential element means a lot of smaller parties can break through in the Assembly if they manage to amass enough vote transfers. In 2014, the following parties other than the major ones mentioned above won seats:
- Humanist Party (2): The surviving rump of the Natural Law Party, which made a major splash in California in 1990 and saw two of its Assembly members become popular enough to remain in office even as their party crashed around them. Pretty much a San Francisco phenomenon.
- Tolerance (2): A new party for 2014, the result of a number of figures from outside politics (mainly from the outer circles of Hollywood) coming together to promote "kind, honest, tolerant politics". Essentially limited to the Westside of Los Angeles and outlying areas, can basically be seen as the Southern California equivalent of the Humanists.
- Raise the Speed Limit (1): Protest party based in the San Fernando Valley. Their key policy, as hinted by the name, is to raise the speed limit on Californian highways from the current 65 mph maximum to 80, but they also cover a number of suburban cost-of-living populist issues including lower gas tax and income tax.
- The Bridge/El Puente (1): East LA-based party calling for peaceful coexistence between English- and Spanish-speakers. Essentially attracts the liberal end of Raza Unida voters, which aren't terribly numerous, and mainly got into the Assembly because of transfers from the eliminated Green candidate in the 28th district.
- Forest Conservation (1): Pretty much what it says on the tin. Popular along the coast of Northern California, which is rich both in scenic environment and in environmentalists who think the Greens have sold out.

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That's the Assembly. The State Senate, with its small membership and large districts (California has fewer state senators than it has representatives in Congress), tends to be slower in responding to political trends, and it was only in 2014 that the last Democrat retired from the body. Labor won an outright majority in 2014, supported by transfers from the Greens, and centre-left independents broke through in the Central Valley.

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Is it really more democratic? There's quite a few cases where there's clear indication in the descriptions about districts not matching population.

This thread is great though, I really enjoy the detail put in it. Though I think you might see a few more left of Labor parties grab a seat or two with such an open political system?
 
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