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Saturday, February 21, 2009

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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It’s no surprise that the Obama-Biden ticket won so convincingly in King County, and probably only slightly surprising that they swept every LD. After all, Kerry lost in the King County portion of the 31st District by fewer than 1000 votes, and much has changed in four years. More interesting, at least for me, is the immense variation in voter registration across Legislative Districts. Considering only the LDs that are entirely within the county, the number of registered voters in the 33rd LD is only 61 percent of the voter-count in the 5th LD. We might divide the 13 King-only LDs into three groups:

large—5th, 36th, 43rd, 41st
medium—46th, 45th, 34th
small—47th, 48th, 37th, 30th, 11th, 33rd

This wide range is all the more intriguing when you consider that Legislative Districts contained nearly identical populations (120,288, with no King County LD differing from that figure by more than 167, or 0.14%) in the 2000 Census, and were drawn in early 2002 by the Washington State Redistricting Commission to reflect those populations. A brief look at the 2002 general election, the first one conducted using today’s LD boundaries, demonstrates that the large differences in counts of registered voters existed from the start.

In 2002, before there were serious attempts to cull the registration rolls of double registrations, inactive voters, and the like, the 43rd District topped the list with (allegedly) over 106,000 voters ... implying that over 88% of its Census population were registered voters! In that same election, the county’s smallest LD in terms of voter registration was the 11th District, with just short of 68,000 voters. Though the counts are clearly inflated, and possibly differentially inflated across LDs, the lowest count was about 64 percent of the highest. Thus, the observation of wide disparities in registrations is more likely to be due to innate differences in the population characteristics of the LDs than to migration patterns in the near-decade since the LD boundaries were drawn.

There are three main groups of residents in an area who cannot register to vote—non-citizens, those under age 18, and felons. All of those people are, or at least are supposed to be, counted in the Census, which is constitutionally mandated to enumerate residents, not only citizens. The population patterns within King County, then, appear to account for an appreciable portion of the differences in voter registration by LD. It’s difficult to be much more definitive than that, as Census data and estimates aren’t tabled according to Legislative Districts. County data are readily available, and block or census tract numbers can be obtained if needed. What’s missing, or very difficult to locate, is the crosswalk for accumulating blocks or tracts into LDs. Well, actually, what’s also missing is any willingness whatsoever on my part to carry out such a geeky analysis.

Looking at the table of voter registration, turnout, and presidential vote by Legislative District, one can see that the high-registration LDs tend to have higher turnout as well. Considering only the 13 LDs that are entirely within King County, the correlation between registration and turnout was a highly positive 0.86. What strikes me as particularly noteworthy is the low turnout in the 37th District, which has the highest proportion of African-American residents (by far) of any LD in the state. Yes, the Obama-Biden ticket won overwhelmingly in the 37th—only in the 43rd did they pick up a higher percentage—but the result there could have been appreciably better if more of the LD’s voters had returned their ballots or shown up at their polling places.

In future installments of my 2008 election results series, I’ll look at the gubernatorial race, the race for Commissioner of Public Lands, and perhaps some of the Congressional results in King County. I’m also planning to do more extensive comparisons with the results from earlier elections—2004 for the presidential and statewide races, 2006 for Congress. Stay tuned for more!

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Posted by N in Seattle on 02/21 at 08:55 PM
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