After the last precinct analysis post, I got an email from Danny Norris, one of the two candidates in the runoff for HCDE Position 6, Precinct 1, asking if I intended to look at this race. My answer at the time was no, mostly because it’s not as straightforward to do this kind of analysis on non-countywide races. There’s only a subset of the other districts within the area in question, and some of them only partially intersect. Though there are some examples that work well in this framework, it’s generally not very useful. At least, I don’t think that it is.
But I thought about it, and I thought about it in the context of what I was trying to learn from the other examples, which mostly was about how the runoffs might play out, and I thought I could get something of interest from this exercise. There are three non-countywide races in which there are runoffs – CD07, HCDE6, and JP7. They all overlap to some extent. Let’s see what their cross-section looks like:
Miller Bryant Norris
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CD07 709 358 1,306
JP7 6,585 8,209 6,528
Danny Norris and Prince Bryant are the candidates in the HCDE6 runoff. Norris has a big advantage in the part of HCDE6 – which is to say, Commissioners Court Precinct 1 – that overlaps with CD07. Unfortunately for him, that’s a small part of the district. Bryant has a larger absolute advantage in Justice of the Peace Precinct 7, but it’s smaller as a percentage of the total vote there, and there are a lot of voters who went with Johnathan Miller. About forty percent of the vote in HCDE6 was also cast in JP7, so turnout in one will affect turnout in the other. The money is in CD07, which will drive people to the polls there, but that’s mostly a factor for the countywide races. There’s not enough of CD07 in HCDE6 to have much effect on it.
The other perspective is for the countywide races. I didn’t include HCDE6 as a district when I did the analysis of the countywide races, for no particular reason. Let me correct that oversight here, with a look at how each of those races played out in HCDE6/CC1:
District Clerk
Howard Burgess Jordan Shorter
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9,466 24,089 7,598 14,566
County Clerk
West Mitchell Trautman
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8,151 24,945 21,809
County Treasurer
Garcia Copeland Osborne
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15,743 16,087 21,722
HCDE Position 3 At Large
Wallenstein Cantu Patton
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15,006 19,271 19,558
I don’t think this tells us anything we didn’t already know, but there you have it anyway. What I did notice that I hadn’t spotted before was that HCDE6/CC1 contributed about a third of the overall vote total. Technically, HCDE6/CC1 is one fourth of Harris County, but it’s also by far the most Democratic of the four Commissioners Court precincts. I’m not sure what ratio of the vote I’d expect, but it seems like it might normally be a bit higher than one third. The fact that it isn’t is probably one part the CD02/CD07 primaries, one part the other races, and one part the overall level of engagement this year. I’ll be interested to see what the ratio looks like from the runoff.