Early Voting Results
March 4th, 2008 at 11:39 am
With all our chasing after the campaigns yesterday, we didn’t have time to look at the early vote. Fortunately, the ever-perceptive Leland Beatty did most of the heavy lifting for us. According to the Associated Press, about 2 million people voted early. That’s just a fraction of the estimated 12 million registered voters in the state, but it’s a historic number nonetheless.
Beatty’s analysis points to a few startling and suggestive facts from the early vote numbers:
A huge percentage of the vote is from voters who have not previously voted in a Democratic primary.
In Harris County these newbies make up 66.8 percent of the early vote. In Travis County, they constitute 58.5 percent of the vote. In Dallas County, they are 59.7 percent of the vote. Even in Hidalgo County, where the only game in town generally is the Democratic primary, 40.1 percent are new primary voters. As we’ve discussed before, if Democrats can identify what motivates these folks and dedicate resources to getting them out again in November, they could have a huge impact on Texas politics going forward.
There are a lot of past Republican primary voters casting ballots in the Democratic primary.
Republicans are being outvoted in the primary 3-to-1. If that wasn’t bad enough, some of the surging Democratic vote is coming from former Republicans. The SwitcherShare, as Beatty calls it, is 8.5 percent of the vote in Dallas County, 7.8 percent in Houston, and 11 percent in Travis County. One has to think that this trend favors Barack Obama, who has attracted support from Republicans and Independents in the past.
Despite record youth turnout, the bulk of the vote comes from folks over 40.
In Harris County, 67.5 percent of the vote is from those over 40, and approximately 40 percent of that vote is women over 40. The trend is similar in the other big counties. In Hidalgo, 64.7 percent of the early vote is the older demographic and 37.1 percent is women over 40. In Travis County, with its huge university population, 57.5 percent of the vote is from folks over 40, with 30.8 percent coming from women over 40. In Dallas, it’s a whopping 69.8 percent of the early vote for the older folks, with 39.1 percent of that women. The early turnout of women over 40 is huge for Hillary Clinton.
Some say the early vote favors Obama but other polling indicates Clinton is ahead. We should know soon enough.
Early reports from folks here in Austin are that traffic at the polls has been light. It’s possible this early-vote thing actually works!
Stay tuned. Throughout the day and evening we will have blog posts from around the state, including reports from the caucuses in key cities.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:36 am
As an election judge in a suburban/rural precinct north of Fort Worth I did see significant numbers of Republicans voting in the Democratic primary and some even attending the precinct conventions. My impression was that these Republicans were sent to vote for Clinton, as an anti-Obama vote. I believe there were enough people in this category to have influenced the vote.