Not really much to see here, but here’s what things look like for Prop 1.
Dist Yes No Yes% No%
=======================================
A 6,271 13,110 32.36% 67.64%
B 6,265 14,435 30.27% 69.73%
C 26,781 19,544 57.81% 42.19%
D 9,871 16,775 37.04% 62.96%
E 8,211 24,713 24.94% 75.06%
F 4,553 7,074 39.16% 60.84%
G 13,358 26,555 33.47% 66.53%
H 7,131 9,062 44.04% 55.96%
I 5,438 8,165 39.98% 60.02%
J 3,388 4,817 41.29% 58.71%
K 9,136 12,583 42.06% 57.94%
Elections that aren’t close yield precinct analyses that aren’t terribly interesting. District C supported HERO as expected, though for this thing to pass it probably needed to be at 65% or higher. I’ve said my piece about what I think heeds to happen next. It wasn’t about turnout, it’s about doing better outreach, all over the city. If these numbers don’t convince you of that, I don’t know what would. Lies can’t be sustained forever, but they don’t usually get dispelled without a lot of effort.
Prop 2 is more of (mostly) the same:
Dist Yes No Yes% No%
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A 11,452 7,078 61.80% 38.20%
B 12,659 5,984 67.90% 32.10%
C 29,490 14,524 67.00% 33.00%
D 17,085 8,011 68.08% 31.92%
E 18,816 12,859 59.40% 40.60%
F 7,636 3,270 70.02% 29.98%
G 22,952 15,496 59.70% 40.30%
H 10,446 4,479 69.99% 30.01%
I 8,774 3,994 68.72% 31.28%
J 5,298 2,500 67.94% 32.06%
K 14,267 6,370 69.13% 30.87%
Like I said, boring precinct data in non-close elections. It would have been truly remarkable if there had been big variations in different districts. I don’t care for the change to the term limits ordinance (which I also didn’t care for and didn’t vote for back in 1991), but it is what it is and I’m finding my way towards acceptance on it. I have said that people probably didn’t know what they were voting on here, but that’s the way it goes. If the people always understood fully what they’re voting on, Prop 1 would have passed in as much comfort as Prop 2 did.
As before, see here for pretty colored maps. I’ll be back on city races tomorrow.
Voters in District E, who historically have shown little interest in city elections, participated at high levels, and were 10% more conservative on term limits and HERO than other districts.
I wonder what the breakdown of the 61% vote against HERO was? If we use Greg’s 4 group breakdown:
African-American
Hispanic/Latino
Anglo GOP
Anglo Dem/Swing (does he mean independents?)
What is the split to get to 100% of “No”, the 157,000 who voted against it?
Mainstream, how do you define “high levels”? Kuffner has shown that E’s share of the 2013 vote, which had a far less interesting Mayor election than this one, was 10.7%. In 2015, they upped their share to 12.5%. That is an increase of only 1.8 percentage points out of the 100 points that were cast. It is a 16.8% improvement, clearly the largest increase of any district, but they didn’t exactly overwhelm the vote.
What is puzzling is why C, the only district supporting HERO, had a significant decrease in share of the 2015 vote. Again, Kuffner’s numbers show a decline from 18.6% to 17.6%, a 1.0 point drop and a 5.3% decrease.
If you are implying that the E voters were conservatives and really interested in HERO and thus showed up in larger numbers to vote against it, then is the parallel implication that C voters, as liberals, were particularly disinterested in HERO and chose NOT to turn out to vote for it?
J–I do not have any scientific explanation for the low voter interest in C. Perhaps there was a less effective ground game to turn out voters. Perhaps some complacency by folks who live in a bubble and thought the proposition would pass easily since all their friends were supporters. Perhaps young progressive and glbt voters were not enthused about Prop 1, did not believe there is significant discrimination at present, work for companies which already have non-discrimination provisions in place. My gut tells me that voters opposing HERO feel more threatened by Supreme Court decisions for marriage equality and similar social changes, than those who support HERO felt threatened that their equality was under attack.
I think as a result of the groundwork done by the Harris County GOP during this election cycle, and the differences in enthusiasm levels, that the GOP is likely to sweep all countywide offices in Nov. 2016, and every incumbent D judge will lose.
To be clear, turnout in C was indeed up – 32,489 in 2013, and 47,125 in 2015. It was C’s proportion of the electorate that was down slightly because turnout elsewhere was up more. Putting it another way, turnout overall was up 53.7%, but “only” up 45.0% in C.
Mainstream, if they now how to proceed with the ground work, I have my doubts that they do. Phrased differently they don’t understand the minority community and Hillary rightly or wrongly is well like by at the Spanish surname community in Harris County. So I don’t expect all Democrats to lose. But it may be closer than it has been. But the LGBT supporters handed Republicans a big pie up in Dallas to use across the state.
I think that the open mayor seat caused most of the increase in both E and C. There was more uptick in E, but it doesn’t seem to me to be significant enough to call it “people who show historically little interest suddenly coming to the polls at high levels”. That’s not the true story of why HERO went down or Bill King made the runoff. E was certainly a key part, what I’d call necessary, but not sufficient.