Here they are, and here are the full 2010 EV totals. The debate about what the turnout numbers mean continues apace. You already know what I think about that, so let me introduce a different perspective. We’ve been talking about these numbers mostly in the context of 2010. I’ve been saying that’s at least somewhat misleading since so much of the early voting explosion that year came from Republicans. I thought it might be useful to look back at previous to see how Democrats in Harris County performed in them, since as I’ve been saying it’s as much about who turns out as it is how many of them there are. To that end, here are the actual absentee plus in-person early voting numbers for the Land Commissioner race for 2002, 2006, and 2010, taken from harrisvotes.com:
Year Candidate Mail Early Total Pct RvD
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2002 Patterson 22,114 79,879 101,993 56.1 58.0
2002 Bernsen 12,607 61,003 73,710 40.6 42.0
2002 Others 634 5,374 6,008 3.3
2006 Patterson 13,640 88,517 102,157 55.2 56.8
2006 Hathcox 7,945 69,703 77,648 42.0 43.2
2006 Others 477 4,629 5,106 2.8
2010 Patterson 36,216 221,145 257,361 59.2 60.3
2010 Uribe 16,450 152,832 169,288 39.0 39.7
2010 Others 733 7,098 7,831 1.8
“RvD” is the straight R versus D percentage. I have used the Railroad Commissioner race for similar purposes in the past; I had no specific reason for using the Land Commish race here, I figure they both recapitulate partisan participation reasonably well. Greg had the R/D number at 54.5/45.5 through Monday. However you feel about the numbers so far, they are better than what we have done in elections past. Does that mean they are as good as they could be? Is this where I thought we’d be as of today? No and no. But it is better than what we have done in past non-Presidential elections, assuming we don’t do any worse till the end of the week. We’ll see how it goes from here.