So the other day, I commented on the fact that Leffingwell had been endorsed by 50 Democratic precinct chairs and how cool would it be to have those on a map to see which areas of town their represented. Being a numbers and data visualization nerd, I have to say I was really excited to see a filled in map from the Leffingwell campaign land in my inbox today! Awesome!
Looking at it, I noticed a pattern. So I pulled up the 2003, 2006, and 2008 City of Austin turnout maps from the city demographer's (Ryan Robinson rocks) website. That's the two Will Wynn mayoral elections as well as last spring's election when Leffingwell got re-elected.
As you'll see in the map below (click to open a much larger 1 MB version), those endorsements track most of the highest turnout precincts year after year. The purple represents turnout rates of 40%+ for 2003, 30%+ for 2006, and 20%+ in 2008.
