CityLab: “On November 6, voters will head to the polls to elect local and state leaders, and their representatives to Congress. All eyes are on the House of Representatives, which many consider more representative of the American public than the Senate, and where a large number of seats are up for grabs. According to the New York Times, Democrats need to flip a minimum of 23 Republican-held spots to retake it. And if they do, they will be in a stronger position to place checks on the rest of Donald Trump’s presidency. Ahead of this high-stakes midterm election comes a deliciously wonky new project called “Electing the House,” put together by the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) and Virginia Tech’s history department, which visualizes 200 years of elections to the House.

“Electing the House” makes the most robust and comprehensive dataset to-date of Congressional elections available in a user-friendly format, offering additional dimension of insight into the current political moment. It is the first part of a series, which may include visualizations of historical data on Senate elections in the future. The project features an interactive map, presenting each district color-coded based on the party that won in each Congressional election between 1840 and 2016. Toggling the option in the legend can isolate just the districts that have flipped one way or the other for each election year. (The first Congress was elected in 1788, but the researchers started with 1840 because that’s the year the data become sufficiently reliable.)…”