Crowdsourcing Pres-by-CD: Third Wave of Results

A few words about some of the states. Many of you have already seen the California numbers, which californianintexas published in her excellent diary; for those of you who haven’t, here they are on the front page again. There are unfortunately some California districts missing; a number of large counties (Santa Clara, San Joaquin, Ventura, and Fresno especially) haven’t provided precinct-by-precinct data, so districts incorporating parts of those counties can’t be completed.

The missing precinct-level data problem explains missing districts in certain other states, too. (In some cases, there was missing data for smaller counties, but I made a judgment call that the counties in question were small enough that they wouldn’t affect the overall percentage much, so they’re included.) In Indiana, we’re still missing data for Allen and Elkhart Counties, so that rules out IN-02, IN-03, and IN-06. (I already did the 8th in the first wave.) The partial totals for the left-out districts are still available in the Indiana database (the same is true for OH, PA, and TX as well), if you click the link. They may well be very close to the actual percentages, but there’s just no way of knowing.

In Ohio, large counties we’re missing include Mahoning, Trumbull, and Medina, so we’re short OH-06, OH-13, OH-14, OH-16, and OH-17.  Pennsylvania is missing Montgomery, Butler, and Cumberland Counties among others, so there we’re also missing the PA-03, PA-04, PA-05, PA-06, PA-07, PA-09, PA-10, PA-13, and PA-19. (MontCo also occupies a tiny bit of PA-02, PA-08, and PA-15, but it’s such a small percentage of those districts I decided to let it slide.)

In Texas, Cameron County is missing, so that leaves out TX-15 and TX-27. (I also did the 1st and 31st in the first wave.) Finally, there’s the matter of New York, where only a few counties bother to report by precinct. Luckily, two of them are Westchester and Rockland, so at least we can do NY-18 and NY-19 there.

There was also one missing county in Oregon, which kept me from including OR-02 and OR-04 in the first wave. I found enough information about Josephine County to decide how to allocate its votes (66.8% of the county’s voters voted for a candidate in the OR-02 congressional race, while 33.1% voted in OR-04, so I just applied those percentages to the presidential race).

In Georgia, as with many of the other southern states, early votes aren’t broken down, so what jeffmd did, as before, was to use both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ totals, where soft totals included early votes allocated proportionately. I’m including the soft totals (otherwise, we wouldn’t have even won GA-02 and GA-12, where victory clearly depended heavily on black turnout).

So what are some of the highlights in this data set? Check out some of the traditionally Republican districts in California (where in many, not coincidentally, we came very close to surprising long-term incumbents) like CA-03, CA-26, CA-44, and even GOP strongholds like CA-25 and CA-48: all won by Obama.

Some of the biggest gains were in Indiana, especially in the Indianapolis area, where both the city itself (IN-07) and its right-wing suburbs (IN-05) zoomed to the left. Amazing what you can accomplish when you actually try to contest a formerly uncontested state.

One area where the GOP might take heart is western Pennsylvania, where there’s apparently the one district in the nation that flipped from going for Kerry to going narrowly for McCain: John Murtha’s PA-12. Also, the Philly burbs didn’t move as much as one might expect (the needle barely budged in PA-08 in Bucks County); where the biggest progress occurred in Pennsylvania was out in places like Lancaster and Harrisburg (see PA-16 and PA-17).

Texas is a very complicated tapestry: in many rural parts of the state, there was no real improvement from 2004, despite the loss of the favorite son effect. For example, expect TX-13 to replace UT-03 as the district with the worst PVI once they recalculate. And look at TX-08, where both growing right-wing exurbs and declining Dem fortunes in the Beaumont area were a double-whammy. Contrast that, though, with not just hugely improved percentages in the minority districts, but also a lot of progress in the suburban districts that we’ve discussed a lot recently where the minority growth is accelerating: TX-10, TX-22 (where the growth wasn’t enough to save Nick Lampson, sadly), TX-32, and especially TX-24 in the area around DFW airport.

And, as always, if more results trickle into the master database, I’ll be sure and post them to the front page. So keep on number-crunching!