Canvass report - Voting downballot

I'm taking a look through the precinct-by-precinct canvass data for the Democratic primary in Harris County to see what I can learn. The first thing I wanted to look at was voting in the downballot elections. Did the supporters of one Presidential candidate or the other vote more heavily for other candidates as well, or did they tend to be one-race voters? And if they voted all the way down the ticket, for whom did they vote? Let's take a look.

I'll note up front that I deleted the sixty or so precincts that had fewer than ten votes in them. I also threw out the tiny handful of votes for Presidential candidates other than Obama and Clinton. Finally, while there were some undervotes in the Presidential race as well, I simply used the sum of Obama and Clinton's vote totals as my "Presidential turnout" base figure. For each downballot contest, I then took the sum of the votes in that race and divided it by the Presidential total to get a percentage of that. In this study, I'm looking for the precincts that had the highest such percentages for each race.

I considered the four contested statewide primaries - Senate, Railroad Commissioner, and Supreme Court - as well as the three contested countywide primaries for non-judicial offices - County Judge, Sheriff, and Tax Assessor. We'll start with the Senate race. For this one case, I took the additional step of filtering out the precincts in Rick Noriega's State Rep District 145, on the grounds that I figured they'd vote heavily in the Senate race regardless. Which they did - every single precinct in HD145 had at least an 80% participation rate in the Senate contest. That left a total of 67 other precincts for which the total vote in the Senate race was at least 85% that of the Presidential. Here's how the vote broke down:

Candidate     Votes    Pct

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

Obama          8284   39.8

Clinton       12545   60.2

Noriega       12098   67.0

Others         5946   33.0

As you can see, the precincts that voted the most in the Senate race favored Hillary Clinton, and gave a solid majority to Rick Noriega.

Next up is Railroad Commissioner, where 53 precincts had at least 75% of the Presidential votes:

Candidate     Votes    Pct

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

Obama         15462   64.0

Clinton        8681   36.0

Noriega       10102   49.5

Others        10287   50.5

Take that for what it's worth. I think very few people knew who they were voting for in the RRC race, and some of those folks weren't too informed about the Senate race, either. I didn't bother breaking down the votes for each RRC candidate, as I didn't think there was anything useful to learn there.

Moving on to the Supreme Court. There were 86 precincts with 75% of the Presidential vote for Place 7, and 104 such precincts for Place 8. Here they are, listing the Place 7 totals first:

Candidate     Votes    Pct

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

Obama         11949   42.3

Clinton       16329   57.7

Noriega       15621   64.3

Others         8686   35.7

Houston        9943   45.8

Cruz          11764   54.2

Yanez         14690   67.5

Criss          7060   32.5


Candidate     Votes    Pct

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

Obama         18010   45.4

Clinton       21703   54.6

Noriega       21329   62.8

Others        12610   37.2

Yanez         20624   67.7

Criss          9832   32.3

Houston       14057   46.7

Cruz          16070   53.3

I think the Sam Houston/Baltasar Cruz results interest me the most here. These appear to be mostly Hispanic and Anglo boxes. How much did Sam Houston's name help him? I'd say a fair bit. Perhaps Dale Wainwright ought to be worried.

On to the countywides. Generally speaking, the number of people who voted in the countywide races was less than that of the statewides. For the County Judge race, there were 93 precincts in which the total vote for that race was at least 65% of the Presidential race.

Candidate     Votes    Pct

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

Obama         18563   52.0

Clinton       17243   48.0

Noriega       18490   61.6

Others        11548   38.4

Mincberg      18643   77.8

Hassan         5315   22.2

A slight preference for Obama here, along with a hearteningly solid majority for Noriega. Mincberg ran a bit better in these precincts than he did overall, which is no small thing given the size of his win.

Next up is Sheriff, where the vote total was the highest in any countywide race. There were 88 precincts that voted at 75% or higher of the Presidential level.

Candidate     Votes    Pct

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

Obama          8739   29.1

Clinton       21260   70.9

Noriega       19278   74.6

Others         6555   25.4

Garcia        19545   82.1

Others         4251   17.9

Now that's what I call a strong preference! Adrian Garcia probably had the highest name ID among the countywide candidates, and that definitely helped him in his three-way primary. Many of these precincts are in State Rep districts that overlap or are proximate to Garcia's City Council District H - HDs 140, 143, 145, and 148 in particular.

The last countywide race to look at is Tax Assessor. I wanted to set the cutoff for percentage of the Presidential vote at 70%, but that produced fewer than 40 precincts, so I went to 65%, and wound up with a total of 150 precincts. Better too many than too few, I guess.

Candidate     Votes    Pct

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

Obama         46198   62.5

Clinton       27751   37.5

Noriega       33170   54.2

Others        28036   45.8

Trautman      32986   66.6

Webb          16561   33.4

These precincts were all over the county. I was a little worried going into the primary that Diane Trautman's name wouldn't be as well known as it could be, and that this could cause her problems, but I needn't have fretted. She did just fine.

Can we draw any conclusions from this? Mostly, I don't think you can say that downballot participation was the province of one Presidential candidate's voters or the other, and I think that's reassuring. I think it suggests that whoever tops the ticket in November, we'll do fine on turnout either way. What do you think?

Finally, though it's not directly related to what I'm looking at here, I want to flag this Matt Stiles post about turnout in the Presidential primary. It's good stuff.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on March 14, 2008 to Election 2008