Presidential vote by LD (election analysis part 3)

After a too-long break, largely due to the injury described here and here, we’re back with what’s probably the analytic table of the widest interest of any that I’ll present in this series on the 2008 election in King County.  We’re going to look at the presidential results, subdivided by the county’s 17 (13 complete, four partial) Legislative Districts.

For reference, you’ll find a map displaying the locations of King County’s LDs in Part 2 of this series.  Alternatively, you can display King County’s .pdf version of the map by clicking here (you’ll want to do some serious resizing if you want to see the whole thing at once).

As we saw in my previous post in this series on the 2008 election, a total of 930,038 ballots were cast last November by King County residents.  On 2,946 of those ballots, the voter did not choose to cast a vote for a presidential candidate.  Conversely, 635 King County voters cast “overvotes” for president, placing marks in two or more of the choices.  The remaining 99.61% of the ballots displayed valid presidential votes—922,032 for one of the tickets on the ballot, and 4,425 write-ins.  We also saw that King County’s overall voter turnout was 83.9%, superb by national standards but a full percentage point lower than that recorded in the rest of the state of Washington.

The table below shows turnout and presidential results for the Legislative Districts in King County.  The LDs are listed in descending order of registered-voter count, with the 13 LDs entirely within the county shown first, followed by the four partial LDs (indicated by the asterisks next to their labels).  In each column, I’ve italicized the highest count or percentage.

Legis Dist	Registered	Voted	Turnout	Prez votes	Obama	O Pct.	McCain	M Pct.
5th	95,613	81,464	85.2%	81,198	46,445	57.2%	33,187	40.9%
36th	92,936	82,076	88.3%	81,832	68,297	83.5%	12,043	14.7%
43rd	88,300	75,823	85.9%	75,624	66,850	88.4%	7,218	9.5%
41st	86,171	73,568	85.4%	73,240	46,359	63.3%	25,575	34.9%
46th	84,145	73,669	87.6%	73,415	60,405	82.3%	11,636	15.8%
45th	83,511	71,507	85.6%	71,288	43,160	60.5%	26,716	37.5%
34th	76,831	66,451	86.5%	66,180	51,115	77.2%	13,696	20.7%
47th	71,966	58,198	80.9%	57,948	32,121	55.4%	24,547	42.4%
48th	69,290	58,507	84.4%	58,305	36,883	63.3%	20,343	34.9%
37th	69,034	55,761	80.8%	55,467	47,595	85.8%	6,947	12.5%
30th	63,914	49,916	78.1%	49,724	29,124	58.6%	19,457	39.1%
11th	58,539	45,812	78.3%	45,546	32,157	70.6%	12,363	27.1%
33rd	58,524	46,229	79.0%	46,010	29,092	63.2%	15,860	34.5%
32nd*	67,002	56,838	84.8%	56,602	39,979	70.6%	15,505	27.4%
31st*	28,247	22,203	78.6%	22,107	11,196	50.6%	10,356	46.8%
1st*	13,713	11,699	85.3%	11,655	7,260	62.3%	4,163	35.7%
39th*	392	317	80.9%	316	192	60.8%	104	32.9%
King County	1,108,128	930,038	83.9%	926,457	648,230	70.0%	259,716	28.0%

President Obama won the county as a whole with 70% of the vote to John McCain’s 28%.  By comparison, the 2004 major party percentages in King County were 65% for Kerry and 34% for Dubya.  The Democratic ticket won every LD in the county, even the King County portion of the 31st LD (where Bush edged Kerry in the last presidential election).  As always, the 36th District had the highest turnout and the highest voter-count of any LD in the county.  However, I’m pleased to report that my own LD, the 43rd, gave the Obama-Biden ticket their highest percentage of the vote (and, correspondingly, the lowest percentage of misguided/delusional/whatever Republican voters ... McCain-Palin didn’t even reach double-figures).  Four years ago, we tallied a Democratic margin (Kerry votes minus Bush votes) of 53,940.  This time, the 43rd came in just short of a 60,000-vote margin (59,632, to be precise).  Both of those margins were the highest of any LD in the county.  I plan to look more closely at 2004-2008 comparisons in future posts in this analytic series.

More discussion below…

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