On turnout and 2012

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?

Related Posts:

• Time for another chat about voter registration and turnout
• The “blue spine” and the rural counties
• Initial thoughts about the election