We love bringing you elections data, but it's hard work and costs a lot, so we need your help

Whenever we're talking about elections to the House of Representatives, the first questions anyone ever asks are: "Is it a red district? A blue district? And how red or how blue?" We need to know, of course, because we have to concentrate our limited resources on the seats that could be in play. And having accurate information on this score is a major reason why Democrats were so successful in taking back the House last year.

It turns out, though, that answering this seemingly simple question takes quite a lot of work—work that we spend a ton of time on here at Daily Kos Elections, so we want to give you a look under the proverbial hood.

The Daily Kos Elections team is a vital part of the Daily Kos community, helping to choose which candidates to endorse and where to focus our elections resources. It's important for Daily Kos to hit our fundraising goals so that we have the support we need to do all the work we do. We are $68,084 away from hitting our goal. Can you help Daily Kos by giving $5 today?

The most important metric for figuring out a district's lean—red or blue—is to examine the recent presidential election results within that district. That might sound straightforward, but it's anything but.

States could easily provide this information themselves, and some do (shout-out to Minnesota!). But most don't, so we have to calculate this data ourselves. And it's not easy!

Because almost every state with more than one congressional district splits counties between districts, that means you need precinct-level election results, so that you can figure out what part of each county goes in which district.

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2XODywc