What's the Diff?

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Abstract:

Suppose you don't care about percentages in elections, but you do care about raw votes.

Body:

Vote production for Republicans increased in 107 of the state's counties in this year's presidential race, compared with the 2004 numbers. The gains ranged from a couple of votes up to 7,155 (in Montgomery County).

Democrats lost the statewide race, but narrowed their total loss from 2004 to 2008 by 743,518 votes. A margin of almost a million votes (950,695) separated John McCain from Barack Obama; George W. Bush finished 1.7 million ahead of John Kerry in 2004. That's small consolation to Obama, but to strategists and schemers looking forward to the 2010 elections, it's significant. Democrats ran a weak statewide ticket against a strong Republican lineup in 2006 and got clobbered. Better candidates — and the absence of anybody named Bush on the ticket — narrowed the margins of victory. That's of interest to both sides.

Republicans improved their numbers, slightly, in Jefferson County — the only Democratic County that gave Kerry a bigger margin than it gave Obama. Democrats improved their lot in 147 counties, including 120 that were carried by the Republican standard-bearer.

The big numbers went in the blue column; Democrats had gains of more than 10,000 votes in 16 counties; more than 25,000 in eight counties; more than 60,000 in five counties.

The Republicans improved their raw vote margins in three of the state's 25 most populous counties: Montgomery, Galveston, and Jefferson. That happened even as the Republicans were winning in 16 of those same counties. In 2004, they won in 20 of them.

The difference in vote production illustrates the change from 2004 to 2008. In those top 25 counties, Bush racked up a 797,865-vote margin over Kerry. McCain's vote margin four years later in those same counties: 75,520.

You care about percentages? McCain outperformed Bush, on a percentage of the vote basis, in 100 counties in Texas. Obama outdid Kerry in the other 154. McCain's gains were concentrated in East and North Texas; Obama's biggest percentage improvements over Kerry were in South and Central Texas.