With a little Python scripting (to pull down a few constituency statistics for every House member from the online Almanac of American Politics) and about an hour of grunt work (coding the race and gender of 435 House members), I now have some covariates to play with for my methods meeting paper. About halfway through it occurred to me that I could have just recycled the 105th Congress data I compiled for the Damn Impeachment Paper™ and used it, but maybe this will be fresher and more interesting even though it’s all just illustrative anyway.

Next steps: hack together some R code to run some simulations and start thinking about how to get this down on paper, in both prose and poster format.