Lots of competition to Get Out The Vote and in this election every precinct in Montgomery County showed an increase in voter turn-out compared to 2014, the last election for governor. The average increase in voter turn-out in the county, compared to 2014, was 13.6%. This increase, however, was not shared equally between Republican and Democratic precincts. Republican precincts — that already, historically, have a bigger turn-out than Democratic precincts — got a lion’s share of the increase.

For each precinct, I calculated the difference between the 2018 turn-out and the 2014 turn-out. The 180 precincts with the biggest improvements in turn-out voted 47.18% for Richard Cordray. The 180 precincts that had the lowest improvement in turn-out voted 54.7% for Cordray.  The precincts with the most improved turn-out tended Republican, the precincts with the poorest improvement of turn-out tended Democratic.

• There were 133 precincts, out of 360, that voted for Richard Cordray, with a combined vote of 74.1% for Cordray. Those Cordray precincts showed a turn-out of 46.4% (a 12.6% increase over 2014)
• There were 227 precincts that voted for Mike DeWine with a combined vote of 62.5% for DeWine. These Dewine precincts had turn-out of 57.7% (a 14.2% increase over 2014)

Comparing the top 18 Republican precincts to the top 40 Republican precincts, this chart shows that the more partisan that Republican precincts become, the more that turn-out increases. The opposite is true for the Democrats. The top 18 Democratic precincts, have a decrease in turn-out compared to the top 40 Democratic precincts.

• The top 40 Democratic precincts voted 92.8% for Cordray — with a turn-out of 44.1% (a 13.2% increase compared to 2014))
• The top 40 Republican precincts voted 74.3% for Dewine — with a turn-out of 60.7% (a 14.5% increase compared to 2014)

• The top 18 Democratic precincts voted 92.9% for Cordray, but had a turn-out of only 35.6% (an 11.1% increase from 2014)
• The top 18 Republican precincts voted 78.4 for DeWine and had a turn-out of 60.5% (a 12.4% increase from 2014)

Amazing the number of citizens who never vote. Only 70% of eligible voters are registered to vote. But surprisingly, many citizens who are registered to vote NEVER do so. In Montgomery County, of those who are registered, 21.3% NEVER turn out to vote — NEVER — not in non-presidential years and not in presidential years, either.

In Montgomery County 43% of the youth ages 18-30 who are registered to vote, NEVER vote.

The percentage of registered citizens not voting, particular the high percentage of registered youth in both Republican and Democratic precincts who never vote, is shocking.

Meanwhile the percentage of citizens ages 65 and older who are registered to vote, but who NEVER vote, is only 6.3%

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