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Rockwall County

On comparing counties from 2018 to 2022

Nov 19th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

I started with this.

Voters in counties across Texas chose GOP leaders over Democrats at a higher rate than they did four years ago, a Dallas Morning News analysis shows.

The findings, based on data as of noon on Wednesday, reflect that an overwhelming number of counties — 205 out of 254 — favored Republicans. Those counties turned more Republican by an average of 2.87 percentage points, the data showed.

The analysis also showed urban areas are shifting toward Democrats, part of a continuing trend across the country.

All five North Texas counties experiencing population growth saw an uptick in the percentage of votes for Democrats, the analysis showed.

Collin County, a Republican stronghold anchored by suburban women, shifted its share of votes to Democrats by 4.45 percentage points compared to 2018, according to the analysis.

Tarrant County, another GOP-dominated region that has seen an increasing number of Democratic votes, increased support for Democrats by 3.04 percentage points; Dallas County, by 3.23 percentage points; Denton by 3.53; and Rockwall by 3.5, the analysis showed.

Political experts who reviewed The Dallas Morning News’ findings weren’t surprised by the shift. Though slow-moving, the changes can make an impact over the next decade, they said.

“We shouldn’t delude ourselves in any way that the Democrats are about to take over,” said James Riddlesperger, a professor of political science at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. “At the same time, election coalitions are dynamic and what we’re seeing is the competitiveness of the two political parties in this area is becoming more apparent.”

This Trib story has more of the same. And it set me off to do the thing I usually do, which is put a bunch of numbers into a spreadsheet and then try to make something interesting happen with them. If you were to do the same – copy county-by-county election results for the Governor’s races from 2018 and 2022 into Excel – you’d see what these stories say, which is that Beto generally did better than Lupe Valdez in the large urban and suburban counties, and generally did worse elsewhere. You’d also notice that the reverse is true, which is that Abbott did worse where Beto did better and vice versa. You might think this means something about maybe Dems closing the gap in some places, and maybe that’s true, but if so then you have to contend with the fact that the likes of Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton did better overall than they had done four years ago, and as such there’s a limit to this kind of analysis.

I got to that point and I just didn’t feel like putting more time into it. I’ll spend plenty of time looking at district-level numbers, to see how the assumptions of the 2021 redistricting have held up so far and where opportunities and dangers for 2024 might lurk. Much of that data won’t be available until after the next Legislative session begins, though some county data should be there after the votes are canvassed. But statewide, I think we already know what we might want to know, at least at a macro level. We Dems didn’t build on 2018. There’s nothing to suggest that the trends we saw over the last decade have reversed, but there was nothing to see this year to suggest that we have moved the ball any farther than it would have moved on its own. So I’m going to put my effort into places where I hope to find things to work for in the next election or two. I promise I’ll throw numbers at you in those posts.

Precinct analysis: The new State House map

Nov 8th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Like it or not, we have new State House districts. We may as well acquaint ourselves with them. The coverage we’ve had so far has focused on the 2020 election numbers to say whether a district will be red or blue or (in a limited number of cases) purple. I think that we need to see more data than that to get a full picture. I’ve spent a bunch of time on this site looking at how districts changed over the course of the past decade. This post will do the same for the new State House districts. I may do the same for the other types of districts – we’ll see how busy things get once filing season opens – but for now let’s look at how things are here.

We now have a full set of election data for the new districts. All of the data for the new State House districts can be found here. I am using election data for these years in this post: 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020

If you want to remind yourself of what the map looks like, use the district viewer, which allows you to zoom in all the way to street level. What would have happened in the last decade if we had had this map in place following the 2011 session?

2012 – 59 seats won by Obama
2014 – 51 seats won by Davis
2016 – 64 seats won by Clinton
2018 – 66 seats won by Beto
2020 – 65 seats won by Biden

This shows a couple of things. One is just how bad a year 2014 was. Two, how effective the 2011/2013 map was for the conditions that existed at the time. Note that with this map, the big shift towards the Democrats happened in 2016, not 2018. I have to wonder how things might have played out in 2018 and 2020 if that had been our experience. After that, it gets a lot more static. I’ll tell you which districts were won by Beto but not Clinton, and which district was won by Beto but not Biden, later in this post.

Enough setup. You’re ready for some numbers, right? I know you are. I’ve broken this down more or less by region, and am including districts that are within 20 points in the 2020 results.


Dist  Obama  Romney Obama%Romney%    Biden   Trump Biden% Trump%
================================================================
014  14,134  29,676  31.5%  66.1%   30,840  38,146  43.5%  53.8%
020  19,803  40,618  31.9%  65.4%   44,651  58,876  42.2%  55.6%
045  20,079  21,248  47.0%  49.8%   48,915  32,987  58.4%  39.4%
052  16,708  28,942  35.7%  61.8%   44,974  49,046  46.7%  51.0%
054  18,164  22,668  43.9%  54.7%   26,960  31,067  45.5%  52.4%
055  17,348  26,906  38.5%  59.8%   30,054  36,826  43.9%  53.8%
118  21,895  25,284  45.7%  52.8%   36,578  34,584  50.6%  47.9%
121  25,850  47,798  34.5%  63.8%   50,133  52,533  48.1%  50.4%
122  21,516  48,130  30.4%  68.1%   50,094  59,855  44.9%  53.7%

Call this the “Central” region – HD14 is Brazos County, HDs 20 and 52 are Williamson, HD45 is Hays, HDs 54 and 55 are the infamous “donut” districts of Bell County, and the other three are Bexar. Couple things to note, as these themes will recur. One is that if there’s a district you think might belong but which isn’t listed, it’s probably because it just doesn’t qualify as a “swing” district any more. A great example is HD47 in Travis County, which was a 52-47 district for Mitt Romney in 2012. In 2020, however, it was won by Joe Biden by a 61-36 margin. HD45 is more or less the same, but I included it here as a borderline case.

Looking at the shifts, it’s not too hard to imagine the two Williamson districts moving into (back into, in the case of HD52) the Dem column, in a future election if not this year. Note also that HD118 was once a red district. It’s one of the two that Beto flipped and which Biden held. Sure, it’s accurately described in all of the coverage of the special election runoff as being more Republican than the current HD118, but one should be aware of the direction that it has traveled. I won’t be surprised if it outperforms the 2020 number for Dems in 2022. (No, the result of this special election runoff doesn’t change my thinking on that. It’s not the first time that Republicans have won a special election in HD118.)

Not all districts moved so dramatically – that parsing of Bell County looks like it will be durable for the GOP, at least at this time. The other two Bexar districts were a lot more Democratic at the Presidential level than they were downballot, so one has to wonder if the splits we see here are entirely about Trump, or if they will be the leading edge for Dems as the 2016 Trump numbers were in places like CD07 and all of the Dallas House districts that Republicans once held.


Dist  Obama  Romney Obama%Romney%    Biden   Trump Biden% Trump%
================================================================
034  28,030  19,409  58.4%  40.4%   32,171  26,232  54.4%  44.3%
035  19,519   5,678  76.7%  22.3%   22,629  16,478  57.3%  41.7%
036  21,416   7,022  74.5%  24.4%   26,905  19,328  57.6%  41.4%
037  21,580  17,109  55.2%  43.7%   27,740  26,576  50.6%  48.4%
039  23,219   8,076  73.5%  25.6%   27,861  18,679  59.2%  39.7%
041  20,882  15,585  56.6%  42.2%   33,385  25,616  56.1%  43.0%
074  25,903  16,270  60.5%  38.0%   31,415  28,538  51.7%  46.9%
080  26,122  16,344  60.9%  38.1%   27,099  29,572  47.3%  51.6%

Here we have South Texas and the Valley, where things are not so good for the Dems. Again, the districts you don’t see here are the ones that are not swing districts; check out the linked numbers to see for yourself. HD41 was pretty stable, and I will note that the current version of HD74 was carried by Trump, so the new map is a bit friendlier to the Dems, at least for now. HD80 is the Beto district that Biden lost, and as with every other Latino district we’re just going to have to see how it performs in a non-Trump year. If State Rep. Alex Dominguez, the incumbent in HD37, does indeed primary Sen. Eddie Lucio, that puts another Dem seat squarely in the danger zone. (Modulo the pending litigation, of course.)


Dist  Obama  Romney Obama%Romney%    Biden   Trump Biden% Trump%
================================================================
033  16,134  40,104  28.2%  70.1%   35,618  53,384  39.3%  58.9%
057  13,506  30,350  30.3%  68.0%   36,387  47,660  42.6%  55.8%
061  15,178  34,157  30.3%  68.1%   43,274  50,795  45.2%  53.0%
063  20,983  40,571  33.5%  64.8%   42,303  47,444  46.4%  52.0%
065  18,851  36,946  33.3%  65.2%   43,265  51,231  45.1%  53.4%
066  19,348  41,191  31.5%  67.0%   43,902  51,608  45.2%  53.1%
067  16,268  32,870  32.6%  65.7%   39,889  47,769  44.6%  53.5%
070  23,926  36,395  38.9%  59.2%   45,111  35,989  54.7%  43.6%
084  17,622  30,644  35.8%  62.3%   25,604  36,144  40.7%  57.5%
089  18,681  39,334  31.6%  66.6%   39,563  49,499  43.5%  54.5%
093  13,971  29,638  31.6%  67.0%   34,205  45,799  42.0%  56.2%
094  23,934  46,010  33.6%  64.6%   37,985  45,950  44.4%  53.8%
096  22,912  42,668  34.5%  64.2%   39,472  48,073  44.4%  54.1%
097  21,540  40,721  34.0%  64.4%   38,218  46,530  44.3%  53.9%
099  17,899  33,551  34.2%  64.2%   31,245  43,999  40.8%  57.5%
106  12,893  30,578  29.2%  69.3%   38,447  50,868  42.4%  56.2%
108  26,544  58,932  30.7%  68.1%   54,481  55,364  48.9%  49.7%
112  24,601  44,320  35.2%  63.4%   44,881  45,370  48.9%  49.4%

So much action in the Multiplex. HD33 is Rockwall and a piece of Collin. HDs 61 and 70 are Collin, HD57 is Denton. I have lumped HD84 in here as well, even though it’s Lubbock and it remains on the fringe, but I don’t care. We will make a race out of that district yet! HDs 108 and 112 in Dallas are also much more Republican downballot than they were at the top, and while I think they will eventually fall, it’s unlikely to be in 2022. HD70, by the way, is the other district that flipped Dem in 2018.

Everywhere else I look, I see districts that are about as competitive as the formerly Republican-held districts of Dallas County were circa 2012. (Note how none of them have made an appearance in this post.) Look at how huge those splits were a decade ago. A decade in the future, either we’re going to be grimly hailing the evil genius of this gerrymander, or we’re going to be chuckling about Republican hubris and how if they’d maybe thrown another district or two to the Dems they could have saved themselves a bucketful of losses.


Dist  Obama  Romney Obama%Romney%    Biden   Trump Biden% Trump%
================================================================
025  16,141  33,014  32.4%  66.2%   29,441  43,675  39.7%  58.9%
026  14,574  36,701  32.4%  66.2%   37,863  47,532  43.7%  54.8%
028  15,831  33,229  31.9%  67.0%   36,213  46,580  43.1%  55.4%
029  18,280  37,848  32.1%  66.5%   32,787  46,758  40.6%  57.9%
126  18,574  47,202  27.9%  70.7%   35,306  50,023  40.8%  57.8%
127  19,674  45,760  29.7%  69.1%   38,332  53,148  41.3%  57.3%
129  21,321  45,292  31.5%  66.9%   38,399  51,219  42.2%  56.2%
132  13,399  31,974  29.1%  69.5%   35,876  46,484  42.9%  55.6%
133  21,508  45,099  31.8%  66.7%   40,475  42,076  48.4%  50.3%
134  34,172  42,410  43.7%  54.3%   66,968  38,704  62.5%  36.1%
138  20,133  40,118  32.9%  65.6%   37,617  42,002  46.6%  52.0%
144  17,471  16,254  51.1%  47.6%   25,928  20,141  55.6%  43.2%
148  20,954  19,960  50.4%  48.0%   34,605  24,087  58.1%  40.5%
150  14,511  34,552  29.2%  69.6%   34,151  45,789  42.1%  56.5%

Finally, the Houston area. HDs 25 and 29 are Brazoria County, HDs 26 and 28 are Fort Bend. The now-in-Fort-Bend HD76 slides in here as another former swing district, going from 51-48 for Romney to 61-38 for Biden. I threw HD134 in here even though it’s obviously not a swing district by any reasonable measure in part because it was once the epitome of a swing district, and because damn, just look at how far that district shifted towards Dems. The open HD133 is unfortunately another one of those redder-downballot districts, so even though it’s an open seat don’t get your hopes up too much for this cycle. Maybe later on, we’ll see.

I’m fascinated by HD144, which like HD74 is now slightly more Dem than it was under the existing map. I guess Republicans had other priorities in the area. As for HD148, it’s a little jarring to see it as a genuine swing district from 2012, though it barely qualifies as of 2020. Rep. Penny Morales Shaw has complained about the changes made to her district, not just geographically but also by reducing that Latino CVAP by almost ten points. Finally, I will note that while the GOP shored up HD138, it’s another district that used to be a lot redder than it is now. Again, we’ll just have to see how resilient that is. That “genius/hubris” divide will largely come down to places like that.

I hope this helped shed some light on what these districts may be going forward. As always, let me know what you think.

Crossing a red line

Nov 30th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
15 comments

Will Greg Abbott notice?

North Texas crossed a critical threshold in the number of hospital patients fighting COVID-19 that could trigger bar closings and lower occupancies at stores and restaurants if such cases don’t decrease within a week.

With more than 2,300 patients testing positive for the coronavirus in the 19-county hospital region, 15.05% of all beds were occupied by a person with COVID-19, according to state data.

Hospitals had been approaching the 15% red line — set by Gov. Greg Abbott in October — for several days before the Thanksgiving holiday as the state continued to report record-breaking numbers of new coronavirus cases. On Friday, Texas reported 2,473 new cases and 51 new deaths — a drastic drop compared to recent results likely due to labs being closed for the holiday.

Currently, most businesses in the area may operate at 75% capacity. But under Abbott’s Oct. 7 executive order, businesses will be forced to limit capacity to 50% if they are in a region where more than 15% of hospital patients have tested positive for the coronavirus for seven consecutive days. The rate must drop below the red line for one week before business capacity can rise again.

“As the number of positive cases grows, our health care heroes need your patriotism and sacrifice,” said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins in a statement Friday. “Please put off get-togethers and avoid crowds to protect public health and the economy.”

The 19-county region includes both Dallas and Tarrant counties as well as smaller counties, including Rockwall, Cooke and Hunt.

A total of 8,518 people were in a Texas hospital Friday with COVID-19, the state reported. That’s about 2,400 shy of the state’s peak, set in July.

Nine of the state’s 22 regions reported at least one day above the 15% threshold this week. And another hovered just below it Friday. The region that includes El Paso was by far the worst, with about 35% of all its hospital patients fighting COVID-19.

Abbott on Friday tweeted a rosier outlook, highlighting that the rate of infected patients at El Paso counties had dropped for two weeks in a row, and the state’s positivity rate has been declining.

Earlier this month, Abbott rejected the idea of once again scaling back the economy statewide. Another shutdown would have a disastrous effect, he said. At the time of his comments — just eight days ago — six of the state’s regions were above the line.

At this point, we’ve basically surrendered. I have no expectation that Abbott will take any action, other than maybe to cheerlead treatment options, for those who will be able to use them. If you don’t want to be complicit in this, do your part – wear your mask, maintain social distancing, avoid public gatherings, and so on. I don’t know why our leadership is so terrible, but it is and it’s up to us to keep our own selves safe.

Counties of interest, part two: Around the Metroplex

Nov 19th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
17 comments

Part 1 – Counties around Harris

Dallas and Tarrant Counties are two big squares right next to each other, so I’m combining them into one post.


County       Romney    Obama    Trump  Clinton    Trump    Biden    Shift
=========================================================================
Collin      196,888  101,415  201,014  140,624  250,194  227,868   73,147
Denton      157,579   80,978  170,603  110,890  221,829  188,023   42,795
Ellis        39,574   13,881   44,941   16,253   56,651   27,513   -3,445
Johnson      37,661   10,496   44,382   10,988   54,523   16,418  -10,940
Kaufman      24,846    9,472   29,587   10,278   37,474   18,290   -3,810
Parker       39,243    7,853   46,473    8,344   61,584   12,789  -17,405
Rockwall     27,113    8,120   28,451    9,655   38,842   18,149   -1,700
Wise         17,207    3,221   20,670    3,412   26,986    4,953   -8,047

Most of the attention goes to Collin and Denton counties, for good reason. Even as they stayed red this year, they have shifted tremendously in a blue direction. Basically, a whole lot of Dallas has spilled over the county lines, and the result is what you’d expect. There’s not a whole lot to say here – demography, time, and continued organizing should do the trick.

But once you get past those two counties, it’s a whole lot of red. The Republicans have netted more total votes since 2012 from the other six counties than the Dems have from Denton. Parker County, west of Tarrant, home of Weatherford, ninety percent white and over eighty percent Republican, more than twice as populous now as it was in 1990, is A Problem. Johnson County, south of Tarrant and with nearly identical demographics as Parker while also growing rapidly, is right behind it.

I don’t know that there’s much to be done about those two. There does appear to be more promise in Ellis (south of Dallas, home of Waxahachie), Kaufman (southeast of Dallas), and Rockwall counties. The first two are slightly less white than Parker and Johnson, and all three saw enough growth in Democratic voters in 2020 (at least at the Presidential level; we’ll need to check back on other races) to mostly offset the growth in Republican voting. It’s almost certainly the case that proximity to Dallas County is better for Democratic prospects than proximity to Tarrant. Again, that doesn’t address a big part of the problem, but it at least provides a place to start.

I don’t have a whole lot more to offer, so I’m interested in hearing what my readers from this part of the state have to say. I’ll be honest, I had not given any thought to the geography of this before I started writing these posts. Hell, in most cases I had to do some research to know which counties to look up. I hope that by doing so I’ve helped you think about this.

So how did my simple projection work out?

Nov 12th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Remember this? I divided the counties up by how much their voter rolls had grown or shrunk since 2012, then used the 2016 turnout levels and 2018 results to project final numbers for the Presidential election in 2020. Now that we have those numbers, how did my little toy do? Let’s take a look.

A couple of things to acknowledge first. The most up to date voter registration numbers show that the group of counties that looked to have lost voters since 2012 have actually gained them, at least in the aggregate. Second, the actual turnout we got so far exceeded past numbers that we literally couldn’t have nailed this, at least not at a quantitative level. So with that in mind, let’s move forward.

We start with the counties that had seen growth of at least 10K voters on their rolls since 2012. There were 33 of these. Here are the numbers I had in my initial review, updated to include what happened this year.


Romney  3,270,387   Obama    2,792,800
Romney      53.9%   Obama        46.1%
Romney +  477,587

Trump   3,288,107   Clinton  3,394,436
Trump       49.2%   Clinton      50.8%
Trump  -  106,329

Cruz    3,022,932   Beto     3,585,385
Cruz        45.7%   Beto         54.3%
Cruz   -  562,453

Trump   4,119,402   Biden    4,579,144
Trump       47.4%   Biden        52.6%
Trump  -  459,742

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012    10,442,191     6,157,687     59.0%
2016    11,760,590     7,029,306     59.8%
2018    12,403,704     6,662,143     53.7%
2020    13,296,048     8,765,774     65.9%

When I did the original post, there were 12,930,451 registered voters in these 33 counties. As you can see, and will see for the other groups, that increased between August and November, by quite a bit. As you can see, Trump did considerably worse than he had in 2016 with these counties, but better than Ted Cruz did in 2018. That says it all about why this race wasn’t as close as the Beto-Cruz race in 2018. My projection had assumed 2016-level turnout, but we obviously got more than that. Here’s what I had projected originally, and what we would have gotten if the 2020 results had been like the 2018 results from a partisan perspective:


Trump   3,533,711   Biden    4,198,699
Trump  -  664,988

Trump   3,975,236   Biden    4,723,310
Trump  -  748,074

Fair to say we missed the mark. We’ll see how much of a difference that would have made later. Now let’s look at the biggest group of counties, the 148 counties that gained some number of voters, from one to 9,999. Again, here are my projections, with the updated voter registration number:


Romney  1,117,383   Obama      415,647
Romney      72.9%   Obama        27.1%
Romney +  701,736

Trump   1,209,121   Clinton    393,004
Trump       75.5%   Clinton      24.5%
Trump  +  816,117

Cruz    1,075,232   Beto       381,010
Cruz        73.8%                26.2%
Cruz   +  694,222

Trump   1,496,148   Biden      501,234
Trump       74.0%   Biden        26.0%
Trump  +  994,914

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012     2,686,872     1,551,613     57.7%
2016     2,829,110     1,653,858     58.5%
2018     2,884,466     1,466,446     50.8%
2020     3,112,474     2,022,490     65.0%

As discussed, there’s a whole lot of strong red counties in here – of the 148 counties in this group, Beto carried ten of them. They had 2,929,965 voters as of August. What had been my projection, and how’d it go here?


Trump   1,264,954   Biden      449,076
Trump  +  815,878

Trump   1,496,148   Biden      501,234
Trump  +  994,914

The margin is wider due to the higher turnout, but Biden actually did a little better by percentage than Clinton did, and was right in line with Beto. This is obviously an area of great need for improvement going forward, but the projection was more or less right on target, at least from a partisan performance perspective. But as you can see, even with the more optimistic projection for Biden, he’s already in the hole. Like I said, this is an area of urgent need for improvement going forward.

Now on to the last group, the 73 counties that had lost voters from 2012, at least going by the August numbers. As you can see, that turned out not to be fully true:


Romney     182,073   Obama      99,677
Romney       64.6%   Obama       35.4%
Romney +    82,396

Trump      187,819   Clinton    90,428
Trump        67.5%   Clinton     32.5%
Trump  +    97,391

Cruz       162,389   Beto       79,237
Cruz         67.2%   Beto        32.8%
Cruz   +    83,152

Trump      226,104   Biden     105,490
Trump        68.2%   Biden       31.8%
Trump  +   120,514

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012       517,163       284,551     55.0%
2016       511,387       286,062     55.9%
2018       505,087       243,066     48.1%
2020       546,997       335,110     61.2%

As you can see, that decline in registrations has reversed, quite dramatically. I didn’t check each individual county – it seems likely that some of them are still at a net negative – but overall they are no longer in decline. Good for them. As you can also see, Biden performed a little worse than Clinton and Beto, but close enough for these purposes. Let’s compare the projection to the reality:


Trump      187,587   Biden      91,561
Trump +     96,026

Trump      226,104   Biden     105,490
Trump  +   120,514

Put the best-case scenario from the first group with what we got in the last two, and we could have had this:


Trump    5,697,488   Biden   5,330,034
Trump       51.67%   Biden      48.33%

Which is pretty close to what I had projected originally, just with a lot more voters now. The actual final result is 52.18% to 46.39%, so I’d say my method came closer to the real result than most of the polls did. Clearly, I missed my calling.

All this was done as an exercise in frivolity – as I said at the time, I made all kinds of assumptions in making this projection, and the main one about turnout level was way wrong. The point of this, I think, is to show that while Dems have indeed improved greatly in performance in the biggest counties, they haven’t done as well everywhere else, and while the marginal difference from Obama 2012 to Clinton 2016 and Biden 2020 isn’t much, the overall direction is wrong (even as Biden improved somewhat on the middle group over Clinton), and we’re going to have a real problem making further progress if we can’t figure out a way to improve our performance in these smaller counties. There is room to grow in the big and growing counties – these include some fast-growing and very red places like Montgomery and Comal, for instance – but we’re going to reach diminishing marginal growth soon, if we’re not already there. We need to step it up everywhere else. I’ll be returning to this theme as we go forward. Let me know what you think.

A very simple projection of the November vote

Aug 31st, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

In my earlier post about the current state of voter registrations, I noted that you could see the county-by-county totals in the contest details for the Senate runoff. What that also means is that if you have current (till now, anyway) voter registration totals, you can do a comparison across the counties of where voter registration totals have gone up the most, and how the vote has shifted in recent elections. In doing so, you can come up with a simple way to project what the 2020 vote might look like.

So, naturally, I did that. Let me walk you through the steps.

First, I used the 2020 runoff results data to get current registration totals per county. I put that into a spreadsheet with county-by-county results from the 2012 and 2016 Presidential elections and the 2018 Senate election to calculate total voter registration changes from each year to 2020. I then sorted by net change since 2012, and grouped the 254 counties into three buckets: Counties that had a net increase of at least 10,000 voters since 2012, counties that had a net increase of less than 10,000 voters since 2012, and counties that have lost voters since 2012. From there, I looked at the top race for each year.

First, here are the 2012 big gain counties. There were 33 of these counties, with a net gain of +2,488,260 registered voters as of July 2020.


Romney  3,270,387   Obama    2,792,800
Romney      53.9%   Obama        46.1%
Romney +  477,587

Trump   3,288,107   Clinton  3,394,436
Trump       49.2%   Clinton      50.8%
Trump  -  106,329

Cruz    3,022,932   Beto     3,585,385
Cruz        45.7%   Beto         54.3%
Cruz   -  562,453

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012    10,442,191     6,157,687     59.0%
2016    11,760,590     7,029,306     59.8%
2018    12,403,704     6,662,143     53.7%
2020    12,930,451

The shift in voting behavior here is obvious. Hillary Clinton did much better in the larger, growing counties in 2016 than Barack Obama had done in 2012, and Beto O’Rourke turbo-charged that pattern. I have made this point before, but it really bears repeating: In these growing counties, Ted Cruz did literally a million votes worse than Mitt Romney did. And please note, these aren’t just the big urban counties – there are only seven such counties, after all – nor are they all Democratic. This list contains such heavily Republican places as Montgomery, Comal, Parker, Smith, Lubbock, Ector, Midland, Randall, Ellis, Rockwall, and Kaufman. The thing to keep in mind is that while Beto still lost by a lot in those counties, he lost by less in them than Hillary Clinton did, and a lot less than Obama did. Beto uniformly received more votes in those counties than Clinton did, and Cruz received fewer than Trump and Romney.

Here’s where we do the projection part. Let’s assume that in 2020 these counties have 59.8% turnout at 2018 partisan percentages, which is to say Biden wins the two-party vote 54.3% to 45.7% for Trump. At 59.8% turnout there would be 7,732,410 voters, which gives us this result:


Trump   3,533,711   Biden    4,198,699
Trump  -  664,988

In other words, Biden gains 100K votes over what Beto did in 2018. If you’re now thinking “but Beto lost by 200K”, hold that thought.

Now let’s look at the 2012 small gain counties, the ones that gained anywhere from eight voters to 9,635 voters from 2012. There are a lot of these, 148 counties in all, but because their gains were modest the total change is +243,093 RVs in 2020. Here’s how those election results looked:


Romney  1,117,383   Obama      415,647
Romney      72.9%   Obama        27.1%
Romney +  701,736

Trump   1,209,121   Clinton    393,004
Trump       75.5%   Clinton      24.5%
Trump  +  816,117

Cruz    1,075,232   Beto       381,010
Cruz        73.8%                26.2%
Cruz   +  694,222

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012     2,686,872     1,551,613     57.7%
2016     2,829,110     1,653,858     58.5%
2018     2,884,466     1,466,446     50.8%
2020     2,929,965

Obviously, very red. Beto carried a grand total of ten of these 148 counties: Starr, Willacy, Reeves, Jim Wells, Zapata, Val Verde, Kleberg, La Salle, Dimmit, and Jim Hogg. This is a lot of rural turf, and as we can see Trump did better here than Romney did, both in terms of percentage and net margin. Ted Cruz was a tiny bit behind Romney on margin, but did slightly better in percentage. The overall decline in turnout held Cruz back.

Once again, we project. Assume 58.5% turnout at 2018 partisan percentages. That gives us 1,714,030 voters for the following result:


Trump   1,264,954   Biden      449,076
Trump  +  815,878

Trump winds up with the same margin as he did in 2016, as the 2018 partisan mix helps Biden not fall farther behind. Trump is now in the lead by about 150K votes.

Finally, the counties that have had a net loss of registered voters since 2012. There were 73 such counties, and a net -17,793 RVs in 2020.


Romney     182,073   Obama      99,677
Romney       64.6%   Obama       35.4%
Romney +    82,396

Trump      187,819   Clinton    90,428
Trump        67.5%   Clinton     32.5%
Trump +     97,391

Cruz       162,389   Beto       79,237
Cruz         67.2%   Beto        32.8%
Cruz +      83,152

Year  Total voters   Total votes   Turnout
==========================================
2012       517,163       284,551     55.0%
2016       511,387       286,062     55.9%
2018       505,087       243,066     48.1%
2020       499,370

Again, mostly rural and again pretty red. The counties that Beto won were Culberson, Presidio, Jefferson (easily the biggest county in this group; Beto was just over 50% here, as Clinton had been, while Obama was just under 50%), Zavala, Duval, Brooks, and Frio.

Assume 55.9% turnout at 2018 partisan percentages, and for 277,148 voters we get:


Trump      187,587   Biden      91,561
Trump +     96,026

Again, basically what Trump did in 2016. Add it all up, and the result is:


Trump    5,012,802   Biden    4,770,351
Trump       51.24%   Biden       48.76%

That’s actually quite close to the Economist projection for Texas. If you’re now thinking “wait, you walked me through all these numbers to tell me that Trump’s gonna win Texas, why did we bother?”, let me remind you of the assumptions we made in making this projection:

1. Turnout levels would be equal to the 2016 election, while the partisan splits would be the same as 2018. There’s no reason why turnout can’t be higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, and there’s also no reason why the Democratic growth in those top 33 counties can’t continue apace.

2. Implicit in all this is that turnout in each individual county within their given bucket is the same. That’s obviously not how it works in real life, and it’s why GOTV efforts are so critical. If you recall my post about Harris County’s plans to make voting easier this November, County Clerk Chris Hollins suggests we could see up to 1.7 million votes cast here. That’s 360K more voters than there were in 2016, and 500K more than in 2018. It’s over 70% turnout in Harris County at current registration numbers. Had Beto had that level of turnout, at the same partisan percentages, he’d have netted an additional 85K votes in Harris. Obviously, other counties can and will try to boost turnout as well, and Republicans are going to vote in higher numbers, too. My point is, the potential is there for a lot more votes, in particular a lot more Democratic votes, to be cast.

Remember, this is all intended as a very simple projection of the vote. Lots of things that I haven’t taken into account can affect what happens. All this should give you some confidence in the polling results for Texas, and it should remind you of where the work needs to be done, and what the path to victory is.

More on the voter registration numbers

Oct 22nd, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Wayne Slater has a contrarian perspective on the voter registration numbers.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Getting new voters begins with registering new people. When the secretary of state last week announced a record-high 14 million Texans are registered to vote, Battleground Texas trumpeted that number as evidence their efforts are working. Not so much, it turns out, according to the actual numbers.

For example, voter-registration in the top five Democratic-rich South Texas counties where Davis expects to do well is up 5.8 percent from the last time there was a governor’s race – slightly better than the average statewide. But voter registration in five top GOP-rich suburban counties is up a whopping 13.8 percent.

The Davis camp hopes for a good showing in Dallas County and Harris County, especially among Democratic-leaning black and Hispanic voters. Dallas County voter registration is up about 5 percent from four years ago. Harris County is up over 6 percent. And voter registration in Travis County where Battleground Texas has a strong presence is up 8.4 percent.

But the real voter-registration increases this election are in suburban GOP strongholds like Fort Bend County (17.5 percent), Collin County (14.3 percent), Rockwall County (12.9 percent), Denton County (11.6 percent) and Williamson County (14.2 percent).

Does that mean Battleground Texas has failed to deliver on its much-ballyhooed promise to register new voters? Not necessarily. In the big South Texas counties they say they’ve targeted, the increase in registered voters is a lot better this year than four years earlier. For example, in Hidalgo County, voter registration is up 7.5 percent from 2010. Four years earlier, when Democrat Bill White was on the ballot, voter registration grew 5.9 percent in from 2006 to 2010. The same thing for Cameron County, where voter registration this time has grown twice as much as it did between 2006 and 2010, the last governor’s race.

Three things here:

1. Comparing percentage increases can be misleading, because things that are smaller to begin with can have sizable percentage increases without actually increasing all that much. Rockwall County, for example has 51,787 registered voters in it. That’s an increase of 5,944 over their 2010 number of 45,843. That doesn’t crack the top 20 total increases as I noted in my previous post, and the total number of registered voters in Rockwall County is less than the increase in registered voters in Dallas County, which grew by 58,086.

2. We can argue over the numbers all we want, or at least until we start seeing some data about who actually voted, but who was registered matters at least as much as how many of them were. As I’ve said before, some of the increase in voter registration is the natural result of population growth. We know that Battleground Texas has focused a lot of resources on voter registration. One presumes they’re smart enough to target people that will be likely to go Democratic if they vote. There may have been some concerted Republican effort to register like-minded voters – I don’t know, and the story Slater links to doesn’t address the question – but again, one would think that if there were something comparable on the GOP side it might have warranted some attention from the press. Be that as it may, we don’t have to guess, or at least we don’t have to guess blindly on insufficient data. The various county clerks and elections administrators could provide, if asked by a professional reporter, more detailed information about where those new voters came from – what precincts, for example, whose more fine-grained electoral information might provide a richer illustration – and about their racial and ethnic composition. We don’t have enough information here to base a judgment on this, but that doesn’t mean that information doesn’t exist. It’s there if a professional political reporter wants to find out about it.

3. All that said, the burden of proof remains with BGTX. They are trying to do something that hasn’t been done before, and some level of skepticism is warranted until we see evidence of success in the results. A lot of those heavily GOP counties Slater cites have been slowly trending Democratic in Presidential years, but outside of Fort Bend the increase in Democratic votes from 2006 to 2010 failed to keep up with the growth in registered voters. That’s the challenge, and that’s what it will take to move the needle in the GOP strongholds. The good news is that we should have some idea of how this is going as soon as we have data about who is voting early. Whether the good news continues from there, that’s the question.

White return flight

Jul 9th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Some interesting demographic trends going on.

Between 2000 and 2010, [Harris] county, like much of the U.S., saw a sharp decline of its white population, losing about 12 percent of Anglos or about 83,000 people.

The drop mirrors demographic shifts across the nation as white birthrates have slowed. But in the past three years, Harris County added about 25,000 white residents, about 11 percent of its approximately 227,800 new residents, according to U.S. Census data released Thursday.

While the greatest drivers of the county’s growth are still Hispanics, it’s the reversal of the decadelong white decline that grabs demographers.

“It’s a surprising pattern given what we saw in the last decade, and indicative of the overall pervasiveness of population growth in Texas and especially in Houston,” said Steve Murdock, a onetime state demographer and former Census Bureau director who now leads the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University.

“The amount of growth, percentage-wise, is almost the same as the decline … that’s a fairly substantial change,” Murdock said.

Though Anglos remain the nation’s largest racial group, it’s the only demographic group which is shrinking rather than growing. Last year, it was the sole group to count more deaths than births.

Texas, on the other hand, saw the largest numeric increase of white residents in the U.S. between 2012 and 2013, gaining about 51,000 Anglos

Within Harris County, where Anglos make up about 32 percent of the population or about 1.3 million, some 9,000 white residents were added last year.

“There’s a significant amount of Anglos moving into the region from outside of Houston,” said Patrick Jankowski, vice president of research for the Greater Houston Partnership, an economic development organization.

“They’re coming here because of the jobs. … If you look at all the growth in the Energy Corridor and the Medical Center, and the new Exxon campus in The Woodlands, we’re attracting workers who are more skilled, and many of them are white.”

But he suggested there might be a more subtle shift as well. Because Houston is attracting more single or young workers seeking to cash in on the energy and medical booms, an increasing number, like Carey and Bowen, are choosing to live in Houston rather than more suburban, neighboring counties.

“There’s no white flight anymore,” Jankowski said. “People are more and more accepting of different races and different ethnicities. They don’t care about their next-door neighbor as long as the lawn is mowed.”

As we know, some parts of town were getting whiter long before this. There are lots of questions one could ask about this, but for me I always come to the political implications. While it’s true that the increase in Harris County’s Anglo population is a reversal of earlier trends, the overall trend of Harris County getting less white hasn’t changed, it’s just decelerated a bit. I doubt there will be much change at a macro level, but there could be some effects here and there, especially in lower-turnout environments. It would be nice to know more about where these folks are coming from and what their existing proclivities are, but without that information we’ll just have to hypothesize.

One related tidbit from a different story.

Demand for high-density living grew across the state, according to the report. San Antonio saw the biggest increase in sales at 18 percent, followed by Austin at 14 percent. In Dallas, sales were up 4 percent.

“There is little available land for housing development in Texas’ major metro areas, particularly in its urban centers where housing demand is strongest,” [Jim Gaines, an economist with the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University] said in the report. “Developers are now looking upward for opportunities to build and invest in multifamily developments both in these centers and even in some suburban areas. Condo sales will likely be a strong driver in the Texas housing market for the rest of the year.”

Developer Randall Davis said rising single-family housing prices are driving expansion in the condominium market. Builders can put multiple units on one site, he said, and “deliver a product that’s almost equivalent but at a lesser price.”

More of Houston’s big builders, too, are interested in developing in the central city, said Gary Latz of Bohlke Consulting Group, a consulting firm for the housing industry.

Over the last 12 months, residential permits within Beltway 8 were up 22.8 percent over the same period last year. That’s compared with the overall Houston area, which was up 9.3 percent.

“People love the idea of living in closer and being close to all the amenities Houston has to offer,” Latz said.

Again, that’s a trend that’s been happening for some time now. Maybe if it keeps up we can get some more infrastructure spending inside the Beltway, too? Because that would be nice.

The story from Dallas is similar but not quite the same.

“Let’s look at Dallas County,” said Steve Murdock, director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University. “There was growth in the Asian population, no doubt about it. But we also see a turnaround in growth in the non-Hispanic white population.”

While Dallas County showed a loss of 1,436 non-Hispanic whites from the 2010 census through July 1, 2013, that’s minuscule compared with losses in the previous decade, Murdock said.

“If you had the same pattern going on as you had in the last decade, you would have lost a good number more,” he said. “At this rate, you might lose 5,000 over this decade, compared with the loss of 198,000 over the last decade. We’re seeing the same thing in Harris County, where it changed from a negative to a positive.”

While non-Hispanic whites continue to move to suburbs, it could be that some younger folks and empty-nesters are finding urban centers more attractive for lifestyle reasons. And, demographers say, those leaving are being replaced by others looking for jobs, either from other parts of Texas or out of state.

“When you look at the state level,” said Lloyd Potter, the Texas state demographer, “we’re seeing positive immigration of non-Hispanic whites.”

The splashy numbers, though, came from growth rates in the Asian population — up 20 percent in Denton County, 18.5 percent in Rockwall, 18.1 percent in Collin, 14.9 percent in Dallas and 10.8 percent in Tarrant — over the last three years. In many ways that’s a continuation of the trends from 2000 to 2010, when Asians and Hispanics were the two fastest-growing groups in the state.

Hispanic growth rates were still double-digit in Collin, Denton and Rockwall counties at 11.2, 13.7 and 14 percent, respectively, for the three-year period, “but the rate of growth is down in Collin” compared with the previous decade, Murdock said.

[…]

The non-Hispanic black population is growing rapidly as well — up 19.6 percent in Denton, 18.1 percent in Collin, 12.5 percent in Rockwall, 10 percent in Tarrant and 5.8 percent in Dallas.

Much of the growth across the region and the state comes from migration, Potter and Murdock agreed, and that migration is driven largely by jobs.

“Overall, I think we’re seeing that Hispanic growth rates are down, but the non-Hispanic white losses have been significantly reversed,” said Murdock, a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau.

He used Travis County as an example.

“From 2000 to 2010, Travis County added about 59,000 non-Hispanic whites,” Murdock said. “This time, it has added 41,000 non-Hispanic whites in the first three years,” an annual rate that roughly doubles that of the previous decade.

I don’t really have anything to add to that, I just find stories like these to be fascinating. Whatever else you can say about Texas, it’s not static.

You know you’re not supposed to do fundraising activities while in your official capacity, right?

Jan 30th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Oops.

Shelli Miller

[On Wednesday], the Texas Democratic Party called on Rockwall County Clerk, Republican Shelli Miller, to close down the illegal campaign fundraising operation she is running within her official office to benefit a February 1st event featuring keynote speaker, Attorney General Greg Abbott.

Conducting campaign activities out of an official office is a direct violation of state law, punishable by a fine of up to $4,000 and up to a year in jail.

The Texas Democratic Party also called for an independent investigator to be named to conduct a formal criminal investigation.

Here’s What Happened

Republican Shelli Miller has been using her office and office employees to arrange for the purchase and pickup of tickets to a GOP fundraising event. Greg Abbott is the keynote speaker at the event, which will benefit him and other Republican candidates.

The Lone Star Project has confirmed the illegal activity by obtaining audio recordings of Shelli Miller and at least one other county employee arranging for the purchase and pickup of tickets to the GOP/Abbott event.

The use of official resources for political purposes is a violation of a number of state laws. For instance, it is illegal to accept political donations in certain government buildings under TEX. ELEC. CODE. § 253.039.

It is likely–if not certain–that Greg Abbott and/or someone on his staff was aware of the illegal activity. An independent investigation is required to assure proper enforcement of the laws broken by Rockwall County Republicans and perhaps by the Abbott Campaign itself.

Click over to hear the audio. As I drafted this last night, the only news coverage I saw of this was on the Rockwall Herald Banner and NPR station KETR, both of whom add a bit to the LSP report. We’ll see where it goes from here. BOR has more.

UPDATE: The DMN has a small story that doesn’t add anything new.

Where the votes are going

Mar 26th, 2010
by Charles Kuffner.
8 comments

Matt Stiles looks at Census data and notes a political point.

Seven Texas counties — Rockwall, Williamson, Collin, Hays, Fort Bend, Montgomery and Denton — are listed among the nation’s 30 fastest-growing areas, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released [Tuesday].

They are also Republican-voting counties, according to results in the 2008 general election. Sen. John McCain won these counties by a 20-point margin, well over 240,000 votes.

It’s actually a hair shy of 260,000 votes – Stiles had missed Rockwall County in his initial post, and though he added it in for an update, he did not re-do the math. There’s a bit more to this than that, however. Let’s have a look at how these counties voted in 2004:


County       Name   Party     Votes     Total    Pct
====================================================
Collin       Bush       R   174,435   243,370  71.67
Collin      Kerry       D    68,935   243,370  28.33
Denton       Bush       R   140,891   200,237  70.36
Denton      Kerry       D    59,346   200,237  29.64
Fort Bend    Bush       R    93,625   162,347  57.67
Fort Bend   Kerry       D    68,722   162,347  42.33
Hays         Bush       R    27,021    47,131  57.33
Hays        Kerry       D    20,110    47,131  42.67
Montgomery   Bush       R   104,654   133,282  78.29
Montgomery  Kerry       D    28,628   133,282  21.71
Rockwall     Bush       R    20,120    25,440  79.09
Rockwall    Kerry       D     5,320    25,440  20.91
Williamson   Bush       R    83,284   126,401  65.89
Williamson  Kerry       D    43,117   126,401  34.11

Total        Bush       R   644,030   938,208  68.64
Total       Kerry       D   294,178   938,208  31.36

Total      McCain       R   699,183 1,139,175  61.38
Total       Obama       D   439,892 1,139,175  38.62

Putting it another way, those counties had about 200,000 more voters in 2008 than in 2004. 145,000 of those new voters – 72.5% – voted Democratic, 55,000 voted Republican. That’s change I can believe in, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Obama did do about five and a half points better overall in Texas than John Kerry did, going from 38.22% to 43.68% of the absolute vote (38.49% to 44.06% in the two-party matchup). It would be strange indeed if he didn’t markedly improve on 2004 in these counties. Notice, however, that he improved by a point and a half more than he did in the state as a whole. That’s a good trend, too.

To which you may say, “Oh sure, compare a historic election for which Democrats were super-excited to one where a highly popular Texas Republican President was on the ballot. That’s fair.” Well, how about we compare the election of 2002 to the election of 2006? Since there are no Presidential candidates, I’m going to look at a couple of Supreme Court races, because 1) they’re usually more about party identification than anything else, and 2) we have a couple of races with similar R/D performances: Margaret Mirabal versus Steven Smith in 2002, and Bill Moody versus Don Willett in 2006. Here are the numbers:


County        Name   Party     Votes     Total    Pct
=====================================================
Collin       Smith       R    88,762   122,655  72.37
Collin     Mirabal       D    33,893   122,655  27.63
Denton       Smith       R    69,899   100,260  69.72
Denton     Mirabal       D    30,361   100,260  30.28
Fort Bend    Smith       R    47,008    84,153  55.86
Fort Bend  Mirabal       D    37,145    84,153  44.14
Hays         Smith       R    14,238    26,129  54.49
Hays       Mirabal       D    11,891    26,129  45.51
Montgomery   Smith       R    53,977    71,428  75.57
Montgomery Mirabal       D    17,451    71,428  24.43
Rockwall     Smith       R    10,148    13,304  76.28
Rockwall   Mirabal       D     3,156    13,304  23.72
Williamson   Smith       R    46,480    71,981  64.57
Williamson Mirabal       D    25,501    71,981  35.43


County       Name    Party     Votes     Total    Pct
=====================================================
Collin     Willet        R    82,834   125,348  66.08
Collin      Moody        D    42,514   125,348  33.92
Denton     Willet        R    63,475    99,380  63.87
Denton      Moody        D    35,905    99,380  36.13
Fort Bend  Willet        R    49,953    92,843  53.80
Fort Bend   Moody        D    42,890    92,843  46.20
Hays       Willet        R    13,644    27,775  49.12
Hays        Moody        D    14,131    27,775  50.88
Montgomery Willet        R    54,018    74,650  72.36
Montgomery  Moody        D    20,632    74,650  27.64
Rockwall   Willet        R    10,331    14,233  72.58
Rockwall    Moody        D     3,902    14,233  27.42
Williamson Willet        R    43,193    75,659  57.09
Williamson  Moody        D    31,466    75,659  42.91

2002 Total               R   330,512   489,910  67.46
2002 Total               D   159,398   489,910  32.54

2006 Total               R   317,448   508,888  62.38
2006 Total               D   191,440   508,888  37.62

Once again, improvement by the Democrats across the board. Dems picked up 32,000 voters, while the Rs lost 13,000. It’s not an exact apples to apples comparison because there was a Libertarian candidate in 2006, but even if you assign all of his votes (23,730 in these seven counties) to Willett, the Dems still have a 32,000 to 10,000 advantage in voters gained. All without any of that hopey-changey stuff.

If you want to see the effect in pictures, I’ve got you covered there as well:

Democratic vote share - click to enlarge

Democratic vote share - click to enlarge

GOP vote share - click to enlarge

GOP vote share - click to enlarge

The GOP vote share ticked up a bit from 2006 to 2008 in Montgomery, and to a lesser extent in Hays, but overall the trends are pretty clear. It’s especially clear when you simply compare 2002 to 2006, and 2004 to 2008.

Does any of this mean anything for 2010? Well, elections are all about the candidates, and every election is different, and blah blah blah. What I’ll say is simply that these counties start out with a higher floor for Democrats than they had eight years ago – I’ll be surprised if Bill White doesn’t carry Fort Bend and Hays, and he has a decent shot at Williamson, too – and I expect that this year there will be a lot more organizing done in them as well; in some cases, that may be the first time there’s been a real, funded, organizing effort. All things being equal, that should certainly have a positive effect. The whole point of this exercise was to show that while these counties are still challenging territory for Democrats, they’re a lot friendlier overall than they once were, and the prospect of them being the fastest growing areas in the state is not a daunting one for the Ds.