I’m just going to give highlights from this one. I only have the Democratic canvass for Harris County, so this is county by county data only. You can see the spreadsheet here.
– David Dewhurst had a majority of the vote in 148 counties. Unfortunately for him, the largest one was McLennan, with 20,947 total votes, where he got 50.05%. His worst performances were in some of the biggest counties in the state – Tarrant (33.65%), Dallas (33.06%), Denton (31.44%), and Collin (30.65%). The good news for him is that it was due to Tom Leppert, who not surprisingly was strong in his back yard. If he can get those Leppert supporters into his column, he’ll be much better placed in July.
– Ted Cruz only carried five counties with a grand total of 257 votes in them, but he ran best in the Houston area – Montgomery (46.81%), Harris (43.62%), Fort Bend (43.30%), Galveston (39.67%), Brazoria (39.16%). He also was strong in Bexar, with 39.20%.
– Tom Leppet did not get a majority or a plurality anywhere. He was easily at his best in his back yard – all 18 of the counties in which he got at least 20% of the vote are no more than an hour or so away from the Metroplex. Against that, there were 173 counties in which he failed to exceed ten percent. The Houston area was especially unkind to him – he got 5.91% in Montgomery, 5.83% in Harris, 5.80% in Fort Bend and 5.76% in Galveston. However much of his own money he spent in this race, it didn’t do a whole lot for him.
– As for Craig James…Why was he in this race again? Seriously, James’ best performance percentagewise was Young County, where he got 317 of 2,560 votes for 12.38%; his highest vote tally was 3,335 in Harris, worth all of 2.10%. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an attention-to-performance ratio more out of whack than that of Craig James, at least for this year.
– Putting it another way, there were five additional candidates in this race, none of whom you’re likely to have heard of or would want to have heard of. These five high-hopers combined for 4.24% of the vote, which is .65 percentage points better than Craig James’ 3.59%. For those of you who bang your head against the nearest hard surface at Democratic outreach efforts in heavily Latino parts of the state, you will be amused to hear that the None Of The Above crowd had some of its best showings in Webb (15.24%), El Paso (11.87%), Cameron (10.33%), and Hidalgo (9.97%) Counties. In all but Cameron, the five fringies combined to do better than Leppert and James put together.
– Finally, a question I was curious about going into this was whether Cruz would derive any benefit from being Latino in the south and along the border. Looking at the Trib’s interactive map, the answer is somewhat, but not that much. It’s an open question to me if Cruz might outperform the rest of the GOP ticket in the Valley and South Texas in November, as Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman did in 2010. On the one hand, Guzman was mostly below the radar, and is not known for far-right positions that would be out of step with most Latino voters. On the other hand, well-funded statewide Republicans tend to do better than less well-funded Republicans against underfunded Democrats, and that’s how this race may end up, and whatever Cruz’s politics are, as the first Latino Senate candidate since Victor Morales and the first who would be a clear favorite to win, he’d likely get a fair amount of positive notice. It could go either way, and I wouldn’t bet on either outcome.
More precinct analysis, from Harris County races, next week.