Number Crunching ... a prequel
One comment I had in an earlier post took me to task for presuming that suburban counties would offset the more Hispanic counties in some of the votes. So I decided to check out the numbers from 1998 in the Lt Gov race and this is what I got:
Perry Sharp
Bexar 101,714 118,811
El Paso 30,571 56,315
Hidalgo 16,502 29,352
Nueces 25,117 35,342
Collin 59,020 23,548
Denton 44,155 22,476
Fort Bend 32,478 26,262
Montgomery 35,835 15,556
Williamson 30,832 22,331
The math on this comes to a +65,916 in the Hispanic counties for Sharp, but a -92,147 in the suburban counties. Now those counties were just the ones picked out by my guest commentator. The claim made was that those counties would outvote the suburban counties, which is technically correct (413,724 - 312,493), but Bexar county has not voted as predominately Democratic as we Dems would like. That's a big part of why you see that net loss of 23,231 votes in comparing these counties for Sharp.
I'm sure there might be another combination worth throwing out there that might get the desired results. But this does go a ways towards proving my point that suburban counties tend to get ignored in the leadup to elections. Its worth checking against these numbers to see how the various statewide candidates perform vis-a-vis 1998. I'll be in front of my PC with a spreadsheet handy at all times after I get off work, so look for all sorts of number crunching as results trickle in.
Any ideas out there for points of comparison, I'm all ears. I'm contemplating looking at the county results for Sanchez vs Mauro, Sharp vs Sharp, and after that I'm kinda open. I'll definitely be looking at Mirabel's vote across the state. I don't recall that the precint votes trickle in on election night to look at some of the local races in more detail, but whatever's out there, I'll be digging it up. Afterwards, I'm ensconsed in precint vote details on the Bell and Hochberg races to see what went right and/or wrong. Yay me!