Over the next few months (and probably years) I will be writing a series on the 2010 midterm elections. These will focus primarily on the gubernatorial and senatorial races and their results. Given the nature of this blog, the posts will focus less on personality and campaigns, but more on the electoral dynamics and political geography that led to each result.

There is quite a lot of interesting stuff to look at. Given the Republican nature of the 2010 midterm elections, there were a lot of Republican victories in Democratic states. Republicans were sometimes able to recreate suburban coalitions they had lost for decades. For instance, the elections saw the city of Chicago being overwhelmed by Republican suburbs and downstate Illinois – for the first time in generations (this has been something I have always wanted to see from the perspective of an analyst, albeit not that of a Democrat). They saw Detroit’s suburbs voting strongly Republican, another thing they have not done in a while. With the new technology of the New York Times, these results have been mapped in spectacular fashion.

Disappointingly, the elections did not show what a Republican New York or California would look like. On the other hand, the elections did see an extremely strong Democratic performance in New York, Colorado, and South Carolina. These results are also of some interest (especially the ones in South Carolina, which may or may not have been due to racism against the non-white Republican candidate).

The series will start with the gubernatorial election in Florida, where Democratic candidate Alex Sink narrowly lost to a deeply flawed Republican.

(A note: The site formatting has been belatedly updated to the 2010 version of the wordpress theme. I hope you enjoy the new design; it is definitely much better for posting large maps.)

The following is a list of the posts analyzing the midterm results in full:

• Colorado’s Senate Election

• Florida’s Gubernatorial Election

• Illinois’s Senate Election

• Ohio’s Gubernatorial Election

• Pennsylvania’s Senate Election

• South Carolina Gubernatorial Election, Part 1

• South Carolina Gubernatorial Election, Part 2

• South Carolina Gubernatorial Election, Part 3

• Utah’s Gubernatorial and Senate Elections