Martha has a nice look at the 50 precincts inside the city of Houston in which the most votes were cast, and how each of the four contenders for Mayor did in them. I’ve copied the data into this Google spreadsheet so that I could add in total and percentages. Here’s how that breaks down:
Candidate Votes Pct ======================== Parker 17,162 36.93 Morales 12,322 26.52 Brown 10,139 21.82 Locke 5,633 12.12
So in these 50 precincts, which make up about 25% of the total vote, Parker led Locke by a 3-1 margin. You have to be a little careful about drawing any broad conclusions here, since this is a heterogeneous set of precincts, in which Parker or Morales were the top votegetters in all but two, but that looks like an impressive performance to me.
Now of course, with a finite data set like this, for Parker to do better than her overall performance here she must have done not as well as her overall performance elsewhere, with the same being true in reverse for Locke. Here’s how it looks for the remaining 700+ precincts:
Candidate Votes Pct ======================== Locke 38,341 29.98 Parker 36,757 28.74 Brown 29,317 22.92 Morales 23,480 18.36
Locke edges ahead here, as Parker’s margin over him in the other precincts was larger than her total margin over him. There’s a lot more voters here than there are in the top 50, so he doesn’t have to do as well percentage-wise to move ahead. By my calculation, if you redistribute the votes in these precincts so Locke got 35% and Parker 24%, he’d have finished ahead of her. Having said that, I’d rather depend on a smaller number of big boxes than a larger number of small ones to hit my target. That just seems like the simpler task to me.
One could also look at the data and state that 60.44% didn’t vote for Annise Parker. It’s all in how you want to look at the numbers.