While I work my way through the precinct data in Harris County, we can keep looking at the county data for Texas from last week’s election. Here are the top and bottom ten counties by percentage of the vote for Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson:
County Johnson % County Johnson %
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Travis 2.72% Throckmorton 0.00%
Hays 2.46% Brooks 0.25%
Brewster 2.35% Kimble 0.32%
Williamson 2.22% Lipscomb 0.34%
Jeff Davis 2.02% Parmer 0.35%
Bastrop 1.90% Refugio 0.37%
Brazos 1.87% Bailey 0.39%
Caldwell 1.84% Zapata 0.40%
Terrell 1.80% Dimmit 0.41%
Blanco 1.71% Deaf Smith 0.42%
Travis County is a hotbed for third-party voting, and apparently that fever has spread to some of its neighbors. My guess is that more people there consider their Presidential vote to be meaningless, so they feel freer to use it for personal expression. I will add that the #12 county on the “most Libertarian” list is Loving County, where Johnson collected 1.56% of the vote. Of course, there were only 64 total votes cast in Loving County (2010 population: 82 residents), so that 1.56% represents exactly one voter. How would you like to say that you’re the only voter of your kind in your entire county? For what it’s worth, Travis was the only blue county in the top ten, while Brooks, Zapata, and Dimmit are all deep-blue Rio Grande counties. Only Blanco County was more than 70% red, while five of the top ten counties were between 50% and 60% Republican; of the bottom ten counties, all but Refugio among the Republican counties were at least 70% so.
By the way, Johnson did something that no other Libertarian Presidential candidate had ever done in Texas: He got more than 1% of the vote, 1.10% to be exact.
Here are the same lists for Green Party candidate Jill Stein:
County Stein % County Stein %
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Brewster 0.91% Loving 0.00%
Travis 0.87% Hudspeth 0.00%
Borden 0.83% Hemphill 0.00%
Foard 0.81% McMullen 0.00%
Presidio 0.66% Oldham 0.00%
Dallam 0.65% Sherman 0.00%
Kinney 0.63% King 0.00%
Delta 0.59% Kenedy 0.00%
Jeff Davis 0.59% Floyd 0.00%
Blanco 0.58% Martin 0.00%
Note: that’s “Dallam” County in Stein’s top ten list, not “Dallas”. There is Travis again, giving Stein not just a relatively high percentage but also a huge share of her total vote: The 3,360 Greenies in Travis County represented nearly one-seventh of Stein’s final total of 24,450 votes. Only three other counties appeared on both Stein and Johnson’s lists, and outside of Travis they’re all small to tiny; besides Brewster (35 votes for Stein) and Blanco (29 votes), none provided more than 12 Green votes. Serendipitously, there were exactly ten counties that pitched a Green shutout. Hays (0.57%, #11 on the list) and Jefferson (0.13%) were the high and low Green scorers among counties with at least 100,000 registered voters, while El Paso (0.37%) and Fort Bend (0.21%) were at the top and bottom of counties where at least 100,000 votes were cast.
And finally, the same lists for John Jay Myers and David Collins, the Libertarian and Green candidates for Senate, respectively.
County Myers % County Myers %
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Cottle 4.67% Glasscock 0.55%
Brewster 4.62% Brooks 0.64%
Travis 4.30% Sutton 0.70%
Hays 4.21% Martin 0.71%
Williamson 4.09% Jim Hogg 0.81%
Hudspeth 3.96% King 0.82%
Terrell 3.75% Dickens 0.83%
Bastrop 3.53% Wheeler 0.83%
Culberson 3.42% Rusk 0.85%
Kenedy 3.29% Jefferson 0.96%
County Collins % County Collins %
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Maverick 2.34% Glasscock 0.00%
Johnson 2.27% King 0.00%
Presidio 2.09% Floyd 0.24%
Jeff Davis 1.95% Borden 0.29%
Brewster 1.87% Hartley 0.32%
Culberson 1.85% Madison 0.32%
Webb 1.84% Garza 0.34%
Willacy 1.71% Hemphill 0.34%
Loving 1.67% Lamb 0.35%
Zapata 1.65% Camp 0.37%
There’s a lot of overlap between Johnson and Myers’ top lists – Hudspeth was #11 for Johnson, and Culberson was #26. Cottle and Kenedy are both tiny counties, and the differences are small but pronounced given the minimal number of voters. 31 people in Cottle votes Myers, but only 5 for Johnson, while in Kenedy it was 5 for Myers and 1 for Johnson. As for Collins, just as there was one Libertarian in Loving County, so is there one Green there. I wonder if they know each other.