I’d been meaning to go back to the Humble ISD election in May, where two Project LIFT candidates were running against incumbent members, to see what I could learn. The canvass reports are up on the Harris County Clerk website, and I had a bit of spare time, so here we go.
Pcnct Whitmire Cunningham Clinton Trump
===========================================
83 27 48 1461 758
108 25 136 919 868
118 52 53 1162 987
199 49 91 631 1921
340 82 107 772 1753
351 115 195 857 2381
357 68 70 672 1580
363 16 36 1435 907
380 52 54 1588 1503
388 45 106 1852 1548
421 21 28 777 636
447 59 99 1024 1649
459 147 194 704 1884
469 75 174 543 1638
546 86 136 362 1385
563 76 178 621 1626
590 126 151 394 1124
599 15 45 1201 572
612 125 147 571 1593
635 47 63 534 1454
658 48 78 674 990
659 62 121 1073 2277
670 92 196 541 1717
674 78 109 830 1950
758 100 122 658 1840
760 63 119 322 1058
764 61 58 1232 1721
776 26 35 798 1038
799 0 2 68 13
840 17 14 672 318
847 11 14 951 299
885 48 55 821 987
888 9 14 714 326
911 6 47 106 179
960 8 14 818 200
964 35 50 1051 1275
967 0 3 65 29
968 3 12 450 106
Totals 1975 3174 29924 44090
Percent 38.36% 61.64% 40.43% 59.57%
I just evaluated the Abby Whitmire/Charles Cunningham race because it wasn’t substantially different than the Chris Herron/Angela Conrad race. The first thing we see is that Humble ISD was a pretty Republican place. I limited myself to the Presidential race for comparison because I had to do this manually, but given how much Trump lagged the rest of the Republican slate, it’s very likely that the overall hue for Humble ISD in November was a deeper shade of red than what we see here. The next thing to note is how much lower the turnout was for this election. About 64% of Humble ISD voters cast a ballot in November. Less than five percent of them turned out in May. That’s a big difference.
You can see the distorting effect of this change in voting population in the first three precincts listed, where the Democratic-endorsed candidate lost badly in places that Hillary Clinton had carried. I was afraid after doing these precincts that the numbering scheme was different or the ISD boundaries didn’t line up with the precinct borders or something. But the voter registration numbers matched up, and as you can see Whitmire outperformed Clinton, sometimes by a lot, in some strong Trump precincts. It was just a matter of who showed up, and while the overall partisan ratio in May was comparable to that of November, the distribution wasn’t uniform.
What that suggests is that a Democratic candidate could steal a race like this, as long as the overall turnout rate remains low. That would require a greater investment in identifying and targeting likely Democratic voters in the precincts where they predominate. That’s easier said than done, of course, but on the plus side you don’t need that many of them. Seems to me this would be a great opportunity to test GOTV messaging on people whom you’d really like to see get out and vote in a non-Presidential context. That’s the lesson I take from looking at these numbers.