My anecdotal impression is that the Inland Empire is a pretty politically conservative place.  So I was surprised that Obama won in the region and I want to look at the issue a bit more closely.  Congressional representatives are a good place to start, because they tend to reflect local retail politics most closely, with their constant reelection cycles and small geographic focus.  There’s a metric, the Cook Partisan Voting Index (CPVI), that measures how conservative or liberal a congressional district is.  Wikipedia explains it thus:

The index for each congressional district is derived by averaging its results from the prior two presidential elections and comparing them to national results. The index indicates which party’s candidate was more successful in that district, as well as the number of percentage points by which its results exceeded the national average. The index is formatted as a letter + number; in a district whose CPVI score is R+2, recent Republican presidential candidates received 2 percentage points more votes than the national average. Likewise, a CPVI score of D+3 shows the Democrats received 3 percentage points more votes than the national average.

So how do the congressional districts of the Inland Empire rank on the CPVI?

Congressional districts don’t align themselves neatly to the borders of the Inland Empire; the region encompasses parts of four congressional districts.

CA-41, where I live, is the most Republican with a CPVI of R+9.  It reaches from Redlands all the way out to the Nevada and Arizona borders, making it geographically a very large, although largely unpopulated, district.  The long-serving representative, Republican Jerry Lewis, is the head of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

CA-43, on the other hand, is very strongly Democrat with a CPVI of D+13.  This district is in the IE heartland, covering the cities of Ontario, Fontana, Rialto, and San Bernardino.  Joe “Cabeza de” Baca, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, has been in the House since 1999.

CA-44, covering Riverside, the commercial hub of the region, is Republican with a CPVI of R+6.  The district reaches from Norco and Corona all the way down to (non-IE) San Clemente.  But the 2008 election, between eight-term incumbent Ken Calvert and Democratic challenger Bill Hedrick, was so close that it still has not yet been decided who actually won, although Calvert has claimed victory.

CA-45 is weakly Republican with a CPVI of R+3.  Sonny Bono’s widow, Mary Bono Mack, took over the seat after her husband died in a skiing accident.  The district covers the IE communities of Hemet and Moreno Valley but also the Coachella Valley cities of Palm Springs and Indio, which I don’t consider a part of the Inland Empire.

So, based on this limited set of evidence, the picture in the region is more complicated than I had understood.  What really stands out is the strongly Democratic 43rd Congressional District; it’s more Democrat, on the CPVI, than any other district is Republican.