The watchword you have been hearing and will be hearing about this November’s election is “turnout”, specifically whether Team Obama can match or at least approach the success it had in turning out minority and younger voters. Here at home the question is whether there will be another “Obama wave” to carry Harris County for the Democrats. As such, I thought now would be a good time to take a look at turnout from the 2008 election and compare it to the 2004 election. Here’s how it looked in the 25 State Rep districts, sorted by their partisan leanings:
Strong R
Dist 04 Votes 04 Voters 04 TO 08 Votes 08 Voters 08 TO Delta
===================================================================
126 52,596 83,577 62.93 57,159 84,948 67.29 4,563
127 64,214 99,780 64.36 70,802 104,186 67.96 6,588
128 41,809 75,102 55.67 42,357 74,291 57.01 548
129 58,414 91,506 63.84 59,790 89,189 67.04 1,376
130 71,088 102,778 69.17 90,120 123,726 72.84 19,032
132 55,543 86,167 64.46 71,373 104,910 68.03 15,830
135 46,107 75,279 61.25 49,417 76,754 64.38 3,410
136 58,165 85,890 67.72 58,835 82,714 71.13 670
138 38,736 66,264 58.46 38,280 62,422 61.32 - 456
144 40,398 73,312 55.10 40,910 72,656 56.31 512
150 60,102 94,473 63.62 71,191 103,866 68.54 10,089
Total 587,172 934,128 62.86 650,234 979,662 66.37 63,062
Strong D
Dist 04 Votes 04 Voters 04 TO 08 Votes 08 Voters 08 TO Delta
===================================================================
131 35,807 65,278 54.85 41,240 66,116 62.38 5,433
137 19,587 40,717 48.11 18,552 36,081 51.42 -1,035
139 36,714 73,284 50.10 40,536 70,569 57.44 3,822
140 19,039 48,512 39.25 18,519 45,008 41.15 - 520
141 36,429 74,294 49.03 43,196 74,876 57.69 6,767
142 37,838 75,861 49.88 42,475 72,547 58.55 4,637
143 19,566 49,074 39.87 17,741 44,390 39.97 -1,825
145 21,638 48,909 44.24 20,827 45,985 45.29 - 811
146 49,157 86,964 56.53 52,714 83,468 63.15 3,557
147 40,676 76,962 52.85 44,647 75,882 58.84 3,971
148 31,684 60,763 52.13 34,666 60,153 57.63 2,982
Total 348,135 700,618 49.69 375,113 675,075 55.56 26,978
Swing
Dist 04 Votes 04 Voters 04 TO 08 Votes 08 Voters 08 TO Delta
===================================================================
133 39,406 67,844 58.08 41,895 64,914 64.54 2,489
134 70,120 99,986 70.13 71,988 96,955 74.25 1,868
149 43,499 73,700 59.02 47,571 76,050 62.55 4,072
Total 153,025 241,530 63.36 161,454 237,919 67.86 8,429
There are several things to take away from these numbers.
– Of the approximately 100,000 more votes cast in 2008 than in 2004, 63,000 of them came from solidly Republican State Rep districts. It simply isn’t the case that there was a huge wave coming mostly from the heavily Democratic areas that carried the Dems to victory. In fact, there’s a lot more room in the Democratic districts to grow the turnout level than there is in the GOP districts.
– Clearly, a lot of the new voters in those GOP districts were voting Democratic, which is something precinct data told us at the time. Some of that increase in Democratic participation was demographic change, some of it was the excitement of the 2008 race and the Obama campaign, and some of it was the local coordinated campaign and its get out the vote drive. Changing demography is likely to have an effect this year as well, though it’s hard to say how much. The point I’ve made before is that of those 100,000 new voters in 2008, about 90,000 of them voted Democratic based on vote total differences between 2004 and 2008, while 10,000 voted Republican. I really have no idea how things will be this year. My assumption is that Harris is a 50-50 county in a Presidential year until proven otherwise.
– Did you notice how voter registrations declined between 2004 and 2008 in 16 of the 25 districts? The decline was enough in some districts that turnout percentage was up even though total votes cast was down. Some of this is due to population shifts, as we know from the Census, and some of it is an increase in the non-CVAP, but some of it is undoubtedly the result of the Tax Assessor’s unrelenting efforts to purge first and ask questions later. The total number of registered voters as of the May 29 primary was 1,901,722, slightly more than the November 2008 total of 1,872,656. We’ll see how that goes from here.
Those are the things that stand out to me. What do you see in the data?
theres a number of issues kuffner omits-first off in 2008 there were still millions of republicans that where scared out of there minds that “terrorrism”was going to strike-they voted for barack obama-they wont in 2012-theyll go back rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.secondlly-the historical component was in play-wont be in 2012-and lastly-weve been broke for most of the last 4 years ,people are going to be shocked at how low the presidents numbers are in november-
romney will take florida ands virginia-he wins
joshua ben bullard
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