Runoff precinct analysis, Mayor’s race

All right, I now have a copy of a draft canvass report from Saturday’s election, courtesy of the Harris County Clerk’s office. As before, I will be going through it to see what I can learn from it. First up is a report on the Mayor’s race broken down by City Council districts. For comparison, here was the same analysis from the general election, from which the first table below comes:

Dist   Parker   Locke   Brown   Morales  AP Pct  GL Pct  Tot votes
==================================================================
A       7,450   2,601   4,937     6,312    35.0    12.2     21,300
B       1,537   8,774   2,931       681    11.0    63.0     13,923
C      10,439   4,522   5,224     4,156    42.9    18.6     24,341
D       6,185  11,928   4,642     1,007    26.0    50.1     23,762
E       5,741   3,147   5,734     8,084    25.2    13.9     22,706
F       2,714   2,079   3,026     1,935    27.8    21.3      9,754
G      11,183   4,985   7,643     9,881    33.2    14.8     33,962
H       6,011   3,119   3,082     2,143    41.9    21.7     14,355
I       2,650   2,815   2,215     1,582    28.6    30.4      9,262


Dist   Parker   Locke   AP Pct  GL Pct  AP inc  GL inc  Tot votes  %Nov
=======================================================================
A      11,199   6,439     63.5    36.5   3,749   3,838     17,638  82.8
B       2,219  11,395     16.3    83.4     628   2,621     13,614  97.8
C      15,248   7,152     68.1    31.9   4,809   2,630     22,400  92.0
D       8,181  15,223     35.0    65.0   1,996   3,295     23,404  98.5
E       9,893   7,733     56.1    43.9   4,152   4,586     17,626  77.6
F       4,612   4,383     51.3    48.7   1,898   2,304      8,995  92.2
G      17,902   9,429     65.5    34.5   6,719   4,444     27,331  81.1
H       8,575   4,854     63.9    36.1   2,564   1,735     13,429  93.5
I       3,879   4,135     48.4    51.6   1,229   1,320      8,014  86.5

As a reminder, all data is Harris County only, and does not include provisional ballots or any corrections that may be made, but it’s plenty close enough for these purposes. As before, Locke finished first in three Council districts – B, D, and I – while Parker won the rest. On the flip side, Locke improved his performance by more than Parker in each district except C, E, and H. Her gains in those three districts were large enough so that she increased her total in Harris County by about a thousand more votes than Locke did. Even counting the Fort Bend numbers, Parker picked up more support than Locke did, adding 27,786 to her November total compared to a 27,430 boost for Locke.

Basically, the runoff followed the tried and true path of each candidate turning out his or her voters. There were some new participants – about 15% of the early voting pool – but I don’t think they had a great effect. Compare these maps from Round One, which show how Parker and Locke did individually, to this map from the runoff, which shows Parker’s performance. In that sense, the final numbers should be no surprise.

In looking at the turnout levels from November to December, it strikes me that the pre-Saturday conventional wisdom that Locke needed a higher level of turnout to win was wrong. I guess there might have been another 10,000 net votes for him to get in B and D given whatever extra resources his campaign thought it might have needed, but I think he wrung pretty close to maximum value out of them. You’d need for such an increase in turnout to be concentrated in the places where Locke did well for there to be a chance of a different result. As you can see, Parker surely would have benefited from more people showing up in A, C, and G. It’s not at all clear to me that a 180,000 vote runoff wouldn’t have given Parker a 55%+ win.

So that’s the Mayor’s race. I’ll have more to come soon.

Related Posts:

• The Mayor’s race in three numbers
• Precinct analysis: The 2011 Mayor’s race
• Precinct analysis: 2023 Mayoral runoff