Morning Digest: Our new media market data unscrambles the new House maps

_{The Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, and Stephen Wolf, with additional contributions from the Daily Kos Elections team.}

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Leading Off

● Media Markets: A further round of redistricting following the 2022 midterms has scrambled the congressional map in five states, but the newest version of one of our venerable data sets is here to help unscramble things. Daily Kos Elections is pleased to present our updated database detailing the relationships between media markets and congressional districts nationwide, as calculated by contributing editor David Jarman.

These relationships are critical to understanding how campaigns, outside groups, and parties spend their money on the single biggest expense for most House races: advertising on broadcast television. But because the boundaries of media markets are determined by things like TV viewing patterns and broadcast signal reach, they're never congruent with electoral districts. Instead, we have to see how the two—always imperfectly—overlap.

And when district lines change, those overlaps change, too. Louisiana's dramatically revamped 6th District offers a vivid example as shown on the map at the top of this story (click here for a larger version).