Where the votes are: HD136

Continuing my series on blue precincts within red State House districts (see here for the first installment), today I'm looking at HD136, where incumbent Beverly Woolley defeated Democrat Scott Brann with just over 70% of the vote. Unlike HD126, HD136 has basically no genuinely blue areas. It has only three precincts that were carried by Brann. Here they are:

Pcnt   RVs  Votes  Turnout  Brann Brann% Sharp Sharp% Henley Henley%

====================================================================

179   1749    421   24.07%    189   50.9   211   55.4    N/A     N/A

272   2415    506   20.95%    233   51.1   243   51.7    232    48.6

807   2127    387   18.19%    242   67.4   256   69.4    N/A     N/A

(As before, "Sharp" is Jim Sharp, the top Democratic votegetter in Harris County; "Henley" is Democrat Jim Henley, whose CD07 covers most of HD136.)

Only Precinct 807 qualifies as a place you'd clearly want to target for GOTV operations. Naturally, it had the lowest turnout in the district - overall turnout was 42%, with quite a few red precincts topping 50%. That doesn't mean I think the other two precincts should be ignored, but it does suggest that perhaps a different approach might be needed to ensure that any new voters turned out are voters you actually wanted. I'm not an expert in those matters, but there's plenty of those folks around. My task here is to point out where the opportunities are, and I say Precincts 179 and 272 are opportunities.

In fact, I'd expand the definition here to include precincts where at least one Democrat topped 40%, since that is still significantly better than the district as a whole. There are a half-dozen of those precincts:

Pcnt   RVs  Votes  Turnout  Brann Brann% Sharp Sharp% Henley Henley%

====================================================================

298   2332    798   34.22%    263   36.3   297   40.3    286    38.8

312   4148   1367   32.96%    476   38.0   515   40.5    480    37.2

313   2711    794   29.29%    312   42.6   339   46.6    319    42.9

330   2311    564   24.41%    240   47.7   250   49.6    N/A     N/A

569   3098   1076   34.73%    416   42.3   460   46.7    454    45.4

572   2969    905   30.48%    374   44.6   400   47.4    381    44.5

These precincts, especially the bottom four, are close enough to the 50% mark that a project to figure out who the desired voters are and then target them makes sense. I should also note that an eyeball comparison with the 2002 numbers in the Lite Guv's race also indicates that each of those precincts became bluer in 2006. The material is there - it needs extra work, but it's there. And again, I won't say we're maximizing our efforts to win Harris County in 2008 unless we're giving precincts like these the work they need. More to come, so stay tuned.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on June 29, 2007 to Election 2008