As the Austin Chronicle noted, Wednesday saw 2580 voters come to the polls for all jurisdictions Travis County. That is an increase for the third day in a row and a higher than expected day than my turnout models predicted for today. Naturally, that bumps up the overall turnout estimates ever so slightly.
Expected Total Early Vote for City of Austin by Latest Model Run (Wednesday)
The easy math is to just go with a 50/50 split but again, I'll be conservative and use the 48/52 early to e-day split, and produce the following projected TOTAL votes by model as of Wednesday's data.
2006 mayoral model: 52,348 total votes
2008 council model: 42,410 total votes
Combined Avg model: 47,571 total votes
I'm a numbers nerd so elections are that time of year when I get a chance to try to see how well past performance is really a predictor of the future. City elections are if anything, predictable, so below is an attempt to run the first two days of voting against some past models and see what we end up with.
First off, a note that overall, turnout is higher in raw numbers and slightly higher in percentage turnout than past years. Then again, this is a Mayoral election year and most recent years' turnout has been low even in the face of contested council elections. The following chart is from the Travis County Elections Division which reports the daily turnout countywide on the 1st day only for all elections, inclusive of those in Austin and smaller jurisdictions.
Yes, even with Monday's rain, we were able to shock the electorate by .04 percentage points higher raw participation! **ahem, cough**
So, as in past elections, I'm running my own models based upon the 2006 (Mayoral) and 2008 (Council) elections for Austin. Each day of data refines the data and rainy days like Monday can suppress the total estimated turnout. These models adjust for average excess of votes included in the daily tallies from the county that don't end up being City of Austin voters (which is measurable and reasonably predictable in past years).
Expected Total Early Vote for City of Austin by Latest Model Run (Tuesday)
Now, this is just the Early Vote estimate, but the share of the EV to Election Day vote has been trending predictably as well.
2006: 33% early
2007: No election
2008: 43% early
2009: 48% early (projected)
The easy math is to just go with a 50/50 split but I'll be conservative and use the 48/52 early to e-day split, and produce the following projected TOTAL votes by model as of Tuesday's data.
2006 mayoral model: 50,258 total votes
2008 council model: 40,360 total votes
Combined Avg model: 45,477 total votes
I expect these numbers to lift some more in coming days.
Lee Leffingwell, candidate for Mayor of Austin, has loaned his campaign $58,837, the Austin American-Statesman reports. After a previous loan of $41,163 on January 16, that brings Leffingwell's total loans to $100,000.
His campaign says Leffingwell always planned to loan at least this much to the campaign. Personal campaign loans are not unusual in Austin Mayoral campaigns, either. In fact, current Mayor Will Wynn loaned himself $90,000.
As the Statsman points out, given the $350 per person limits and the state of the economy, raising money for city races is not easy. While the strict contribution limits had good intentions, they clearly are hurting voter turnout in Austin Municipal elections.
Many have predicted that this year's elecion will have a turnout of about 13 percent. That is significantly lower than the 26 percent turnout we had in the 1994 Mayoral election (Bruce Todd and Daryl Slusher), the 23 percent turnout in 1991 (Bruce Todd and Robert Barnstone), and the 17 percent in 1997 (Kirk Watson and Ronney Reynolds).
Of course, all three of those elections were before the contribution limits made it difficult to wage an aggressive campaign in a city of Austin's size, especially without a candidate dipping into their own pocket.
In the coming years, it would be nice to see a conversation begin about raising the contribution limits to try to raise turnout in city elections and ensure that candidates do not have to loan their campaigns money to run aggressive races.
(As I have previously disclosed, I am a supporter of Lee Leffingwell.)
At Brewster McCracken's campaign kickoff yesterday, senior field strategist Temo Figueroa, who served as President Obama's national field director, layed out the McCracken campaign's path to victory.
For those of you who missed the kickoff, don't worry. I was watching the Rockets in Houston but still was able to see part of Figueroa's presentation by watching the Austin Chronicle's City Hall Hustle.
Figueroa said they were expecting a turnout of 60,000. That, he said, would be 13 percent of Austin voters.
Obviously Temo Figueroa knows a lot about this kind of stuff, but that turnout estimate initially struck me as low.
In Wynn's first race for Mayor, though he easily beat Max Nofziger and Marc Katz without a runoff, 59,929 people voted, for a turnout of 15 percent.
Given that there are three fairly well-known candidates running well-financed campaigns this year, I would think the turnout would be higher in 2009 than it was in 2006 or 2003.
Back in November when Carole Strayhorn said her goal was to get 100,000 to vote, I dug up the turnout numbers for the last two truly competitive Mayoral races in Austin to try to get a better idea of what kind of turnout we could expect.
In 1997, political newcomer Kirk Watson faced off against Council Member Ronney Reynolds. There was 17 percent turnout in this election.
In 1994, Bruce Todd, Daryl Slusher and James Cooley were in a very close three-way race that was destined to go to a runoff (sound familiar?). Over 85,000 people voted, giving the election a turnout of 26 percent.
If Austin had a 26 percent turnout this year, a whopping 161,092 people would vote.
Of course, a lot has changed in the last fifteen years and I am not expecting a turnout that astronomically high. For one, city campaign finance laws have significantly affected the amount of money city campaigns spend.
Figueroa and others who have pegged turnout at 60,000 could be exactly right.
But given that McCracken, Leffingwell, and Strayhorn are all going to run hard campaigns (as are Chris Riley and Perla Cavazos in Place 1), there is a chance turnout could go beyond most expectations.
In my time as Editor (now Publisher) of Burnt Orange Report, I have occasionally taken the liberty of talking about my hometown of Fredericksburg in Gillespie County out west of Austin in the beautiful Texas Hill Country. Today, I'm going to use it as an example of why this 2008 Democratic primary is one for the record books.
Gillespie County, in the good times, is 20% Democratic. It has had no Democratic candidates run for local office in decades (other than Daniel Boone for state rep which covers multiple counties. My father, a city councilman there, is the only (non-partisan) elected and open Democrat in town. We do have a great county chair in George Keller who has helped build the local organization from a half dozen people meeting in the backroom of Gatti's Pizza to regular meetings of about 40 active Democrats of a more diverse nature.
But this email from my mother underscores what we are seeing all over the state.
Forgot to tell you last night at the Democratic meeting- we had about 100 people come! That's about 4 times as many as usual. We had quite a few from Kerrville (even 3 African-Americans) who came for the Obama get together.
After the meet, we broke up into Obama and Hillary groups, about 6 for Hillary, about 80 for Obama (including those from Kerrville). (A few people had to leave early). The Hillary group went out in the hall.
So that is how Gill County shapes up for the candidates!
We had two really good Obama people there from the Austin office. The signs and bumper stickers got snapped up, I have a sign in the yard now!
It was a good meet up, people are very excited. I have yet to see a McCain or Hillary bumper sticker anywhere, but there are several Obama ones out!
This is what amazes me. I know Gillespie County and the average age of the Democratic primary voting electorate is probably 65+. These are folks who knew LBJ personally (who was the last Democrat to carry the county, in large part, because he brought the Chancellor of Germany to town before his election). According to the census, there are only about 70 African Americans that live there out of ~20,000 residents so it's whiter than Iowa & New Hampshire. And yet given all that, it was 80-6 Obama/Clinton in yesterday's meeting? I can't explain it. It's not normal.
Even crazier- the breakdown of the mail ballot requests, which typically are even more Republican than the 80-20 split the county is normally. From the local paper yesterday...
"As far as Democratic voting goes, I don't think I've ever seen it this heavy before," said [Republican County Clerk Mary Lyn Rusche].
In addition to Tuesday's walk-in voting activity, her staff was also processing 117 Republican and 68 Democratic requests for mail-in ballots.
Democratic mail ballot requests were 37% of the total. That just doesn't happen. And this is even in the face of hotly contested GOP primary races- a 4 way contest for the open seat of county Tax Assessor-Collector and a contest for County Commissioner which normally pulls over all the Dems to vote in the GOP primary so they can decide their local elected officials.
My point in telling this story, is that I think we are seeing a re-alignment of Democratic politics in Texas- even in Rural Texas. While we have a lone way to go before we turn those intense minorities out there into competitive pluralities and eventually simple majorities, the energy we are seeing is not limited to the urban cores in this election.
That gives me great hope for the general election and beyond.
Update: I got word that in the first 2 days of EV in Gillespie plus the mail ballots has now exceeded the totals from the last election. In short, the same patterns we're seeing in the metros.
The following chart is courtesy of an unsolicited offer by a former TA of mine in college to put into perspective the stunning increase in Early Voting we saw Tuesday on the first day of voting in Texas. Click the image for a larger, clearer view. Understand that the top 15 counties in Texas can cast the majority of the 254 county statewide vote. You can track the daily progress here at the Secretary of State website.
I was your TA when you took Brian Roberts's Public Choice class at UT, Fall 2005. I'm now a professor at the City University of New York. But despite my Yankee location, I still have a great interest in Texas politics, and in reading Burnt Orange Report.
I've looked at the early voting numbers for the major counties. TexasWeekly.com compared 1st day voting to four years ago. It's increased across the board, as you know. But I noticed that increase was not even. I'm attaching a chart I made.
It's a basic scatter plot, with a trend line (and the regression equation, for nerdy types). The Y-Axis is the percent increase in early Democratic primaryvoting for each county over the 1st day total in 2004. The X-Axis is the % Hispanic population per county, which is a crude proxy for support for Hillary. As you can see, as the Hispanic population increases, the percent increase in voting lessens.
