To generate the list of Top forty precincts for a proposed Montgomery County Democratic Get Out The Vote effort, I manipulated a matrix that contains a lot of voting data for each of Montgomery County’s 360 precincts. I loaded this data by hand from the Board of Elections webpage some time ago.
First, I sorted the 360 precincts to find all of those precincts that voted for Hillary Clinton by a rate of 65% or more. This produced a list of 77 precincts. On this list of 77 strong Democratic precincts, the highest percentage that a Montgomery Count precincts voted for Hillary is an amazing 98.4% voting, and the lowest is 67.5%. The average for the group is 90.6%
Next, of these 77 strongly Democratic precincts, I found the 40 that had the lowest voting rates in 2014 — the election that parallel’s this year’s election. The turn-out for these 40 precincts in 2014 was a measly 25.2%. Think of it, only one-fourth of registered voters in these heavily Democratic precincts exercised their right to vote. This was even worse, much worse, than the anemic turn-out for the whole county which was 39.9%. (The lowest percentage of turn-out in this list is a shocking 16.7% !)
These 40 precincts with their 36,000 registered voters have the potential of producing a lot of Democratic votes. But, the problem is, if these precincts vote as the same rate as they did in 2014, about three-fourths of the registered voters — 27,000 — will not vote. If all of these 27,000 missing voters actually voted, however, about 10% or 2700 would go Republican and about 90%, or 24,300, would go Democratic — a net gain for Democrats of a whopping 24,300 votes !
Using data not shown in this graph, it looks like about 67% of registered Democrats in these 40 precincts voted in 2014 — a big improvement overall turn-out rate of 25.2%, but this means that in 2014, about one-third of registered Democrats stayed home ! This failure of Dems to vote meant that in just these 40 precincts, the Dems lost 2468 votes.
The challenge is to create a strong GOTV plan.
This shows the last few lines of the graph with the summation. :
The headings to the columns are: Precinct Name, Ohio House District, Precinct Leader, Roll in 2012, Vote in 2012, % in 2012, Roll in 2016, Vote in 2016, % in 2016, Dems registered in precinct in 2016, % of vote for Hillary 2016, Roll in 2014, Vote in 2014, % vote in 2014, % of voters who are Dems, % vote for Obama in 2012
Great research, MIKE. Question remains as to HOW.
Thanks Chet. The HOW, I believe, can come from these efforts: 1) Breaking each precinct into specific neighborhoods of maybe 100 voters. 2) Finding a leader for each neighborhood 3) Creating a system of accountability.
It is illegal to reward citizens for voting. Even offering doughnuts as a reward is illegal. But it is legal to reward or pay campaign workers. A system of accountability could be supported and neighborhood leaders incentivized by a reward system. I am thinking this through and I’m considering writing a plan and creating a GO FUND ME campaign to try to drum up funding for such a plan.
I think the data shows that even in Republican precincts, an increase in voting advantages the Democrats. The Republican leaning district where I live went 53% for Trump. But of the unaffiliated voters who voted, it looks like only about 35-40% voted Republican and 60-65% of unaffiliated voters who voted, voted Democratic. The 30% of the registered voters in my precinct who failed to vote consists of about 90% unaffiliated voters. The more unaffiliated voters we can get to the polls, the better. This whole election comes down to GOTV, and GOTV can be framed as a non-partisan goal that every patriotic American should support.
Learn how to post actual table data Mike. Look up tablepress as a plugin.
Pictures of tables are about as worthless as MCDP leadership.
David — I will send you the file if you would like. I have it in NUMBERS. It shows turnout and election results in the 360 precincts — data copied from the local Board of Elections. I’ve used the data to compare the 62 strongest Democratic precincts with the 62 strongest Republican precincts. I am trying to think through what questions we should ask this data. What will this data help us to understand?