Precinct analysis: Humble ISD

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.

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