Today's turnout examination

Another day, another outrageously strong early vote showing in Harris County. Another 15,000 Democratic votes were cast on Monday, bringing the seven-day early vote total to a hair under 80,000. That means that we have already surpassed the entire Democratic primary vote total for 2004 (73,477), and we still have four more days of early voting plus Primary Day itself to get. Let that sink in for a minute.

I know there's been a lot of talk about Republicans voting in the Democratic primary, whether sincerely or not. I've contributed quite a bit of that talk myself. But let's keep things in perspective here. The fact of the matter is that Democrats are turning out strongly, whatever else may be going on. Here's one piece of evidence for that: the turnout at early voting locations in the six African-American State Rep districts:

EV Loc    Dem votes   GOP votes   Total votes   Dem %

=====================================================

HD131          2902          73          2975    97.5

HD139          4143         111          4254    97.4

HD141          5854        1095          6949    84.2

HD142          4103         513          4616    88.9

HD146          7645         490          8135    94.0

HD147          3415          40          3455    98.8


Total        28,062        2322        30,384    92.4

That's what I call strong Democratic turnout. In these districts, Barbara Radnofsky got over 70% of the vote against Kay Bailey Hutchison in all but HD146, where she got 67.7%. These aren't Republicans playing at mischief. And these six districts, which have nine of the 34 EV locations in Harris County, have cast more Democratic votes than Republican votes in all of Harris County combined.

(On a side note, my favorite statistic in the entire lot: Julia C. Hester House, one of two early voting locations in HD142, has had exactly one Republican vote cast there. That happened on Saturday. I feel like there should have been horns blowing and confetti dropping when that voter announced himself. Maybe next time.)

Now, just because these votes were cast at those locations doesn't mean those voters actually lived in those districts. You can vote anywhere during early voting, after all. I can tell you that a cursory glance through the rosters suggests most of those voters were actually in their home locations at the time, but let's look at this another way. Here's the Dem performance in various State Rep districts:

EV Loc  Dem votes  GOP votes  Total  Dem %  Moody %  06 Dem

===========================================================

HD126        2344       1100   3444   68.1     35.2    9114

HD127        3003       2131   5134   58.5     33.4   14305

HD129        2775       1653   4428   62.7     39.2   14397

HD133*       2249        824   3073   73.2     43.8    8750

HD134**      1845        498   2343   78.7     51.7   25128

HD135        2150        939   3089   69.6     40.2     N/A

HD137        1151        324   1475   78.0     55.8    5201

HD138*       1591        610   2201   72.3     45.1    8286

HD143         862        151   1013   85.1     69.4    6026

HD144**       706        398   1104   63.9     44.9    8017

HD149        3006        856   3862   77.8     48.7   12621

The ones marked with * are four-day totals; those with ** are three-day totals; the rest are five-day totals. "Moody %" refers to the share of the vote that Bill Moody got in 2006; "06 Dem" is how many votes the Democratic candidate for State Rep got in that district that year. Generally speaking, the better Bill Moody did, the greater the share of vote is in the Democratic primary. Note that the main exceptions are HDs 129 and 144, both of which are in CD22 and both of which have primaries for the GOP nomination for State Rep; and HD134, which also has a primary for the GOP State Rep nomination and where you'll probably find a higher percentage of people interested in the downballot races than in most other places. To me, there's nothing in these numbers to suggest any real funkiness going on in terms of crossover voting. Just a fully engaged and motivated Democratic populace.

I'll keep trying to make something of these numbers as I continue to get the daily rosters. It's getting to be a bigger chore due to the volume of the data, but I'll see what I can do. Other looks at turnout come from EoW, where you can see that while GOP participation is stagnant, Democratic early voting is increased eightfold; BOR, which is doing a day-by-day look at the top 15 counties - note also Ken Molberg's comment that of 57,000 early voters in Dallas, "less than 3,000 have previous R primary history" going back to 2002; Nick Beaudrot, who is projecting that Dems may cast nearly as many ballots in the 2008 primary as they did in then 2004 general election for President (!!!); and Paul Burka, who still hasn't quite wrapped his mind around all this - how many D-to-R voters do you think there are going to be this year? Not many, if you ask me.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on February 26, 2008 to Election 2008