Orange County Trending. . . PURPLE!

Democratic turnout in all of the primaries so far has been huge. As people get caught up in the horse races on each side, turnout difference is the big, mostly unreported story.
Here in OC (as in CA, and nationwide, I believe) the two major parties have been losing ground to independent voters. By registration Republicans outnumber Democrats by 15% (46.6% R to 30.5% D in the most recent number). Yet in a Presidential Primary Election that was extremely competitive on both sides, Democrats turned out at 56.0% countywide (with all 2076 precincts finally counted at 3 am Wednesday) while Republicans turned out at 42.8%. This turns “conventional wisdom” on it’s head!
Part of this might be due to independent voters requesting Democratic ballots, but the County Election Results website is unclear if these are included in the total or tabulated separately.
Provisional ballots and absentees received on election day that still need to be processed. If recent history is any predictor, these ballots should trend leftward.
I understand we’re looking at a (mostly) 2-person race on the Democratic side and a (mostly) 3-way race on the Republican side, but a few things are worth noting:Hillary Clinton received MANY more votes from OC residents than John McCain (141,668 to 117,333 so far). And this was not just in Democratic “base” areas of Central OC. Hillary outpolled McCain in the OC portion of 4 of 7 Congressional Districts – CDs 40, 46, 47, and 48. I’ll be doing a district by district, city by city breakdown when the numbers are final.
So much for “America’s Most Republican County.” Contrary to prevailing opinion, Democrats will show up when motivated by quality candidates. This certainly bodes well for Democrats at all levels who are on the November ballot.
Others have noted the historic nature of the choice between an African-American candidate and a female. For me the bigger story is that for the first time in a generation, even “conservative” Orange County is leans solidly left. Purple is a good start. Let’s try for solid blue in November.

3 Comments

  1. The total numbers of voters are pretty interesting too. Of 614,808 ballots cast, only 306,443 were byRepublicans, and 13,354 of them voted for Ron Paul.

    Also, by subtracting the total number of votes by each party from the total number of votes, it looks like there were around 29,000 DTS voters.

    I am curious to see how many votes are still left to be counted. At my polling place, I saw a lot of people returning absentee ballots, and we won’t see the first results from these ballots until 5:00 PM tonight.

    All in all, it looks like Republicans just aren’t very excited about their choices this year.

  2. No offense, but even with this record turnout and ‘help’ from the DTS, we were still 43,975 votes behind.

    Here’s the latest breakdown for the CD’s according to the SOS so you can see how we did (excuse the formatting):

    CD 40 Turnout Percent
    —————————————————
    Democrats: 56,513 47.4%
    Republicans: 62,716 52.6%
    =============================
    Totals: 119,229 100.0%
    Dem Deficit: (6,203)

    CD 42 (Orange) Turnout Percent
    —————————————————
    Democrats: 35,638 40.0%
    Republicans: 53,390 60.0%
    =============================
    Totals: 89,028 100.0%
    Dem Deficit: (17,752)

    CD 44 (Orange) Turnout Percent
    —————————————————
    Democrats: 10,905 36.7%
    Republicans: 18,831 63.3%
    =============================
    Totals: 29,736 100.0%
    Dem Deficit: (7,926)

    CD 46 (Orange) Turnout Percent
    —————————————————
    Democrats: 46,217 46.2%
    Republicans: 53,883 53.8%
    =============================
    Totals: 100,100 100.0%
    Dem Deficit: (7,666)

    CD 47 Turnout Percent
    —————————————————
    Democrats: 33,777 63.8%
    Republicans: 19,152 36.2%
    =============================
    Totals: 52,929 100.0%
    Dem Deficit: +14,625

    CD 48 Turnout Percent
    —————————————————
    Democrats: 72,592 45.3%
    Republicans: 87,700 54.7%
    =============================
    Totals: 160,292 100.0%
    Dem Deficit: (15,108)

    Granted, there will (presumably) be more folks voting in the general, but that also means there will be more Repugs voting.

    Which once again, points to the fact that while registering Dems is great, it’s more important to get them to the freakin’ polls!!

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