Election

In honor of all the election excitement I thought I'd put up some neat Durham county elections maps. These are all available on the incredibly helpful and easy to use state board of elections website. The biggest caveat for the maps from the 2008 election below is that one-stop early voting and absentee voting are not represented. This is a big deal as 97,429 votes were cast in early voting which is about 71% of the total 135,793 ballots cast. Nonetheless, I think the election day results are somewhat representative - it's not as if Rougemont would have gone blue had everyone been forced to vote in their precinct. (click on the images for higher res map)

First up - presidential results by precinct

Pretty solid division between the north and south parts of the county with a lone red holdout at the St. Stephen's episcopal church polling place to the SW.

The map for the senate race (went 74/23 for Hagan overall) looks much the same except for those flip-floppers at Glenn Elementary School in the eastern part of the county. While voters there went 53/46 for McCain they voted for Kay Hagan 49/46.

Bev Purdue won Durham handily (70/25) and even got the voters of Glenn Elementary on her side but for some reason folks voting at Forest View elementary (center-west) which went 57/41 for Obama decided for McCrory 50/43 with 6% going for Dukie Michael Munger.

Yet lo and behold when it came to the Lt. Governor's race voters at both Glenn and Forest View elementaries just couldn't bear to be consistent. Forest View went 49/45 for Dalton (D) while Glenn, which liked Purdue 48/46 seemed to prefer a Republican Lt. Gov also 48/46. Any voters there care to explain themselves?
Finally, I give you the big winner of the night, attorney general Roy Cooper (won 82/17). He garnered the most votes of any candidate or item on the ballot (107,786 or 5,500 more than Obama) and will I'm sure be handed the keys to the county at some point. Not even unopposed candidates managed as many votes. There are probably 240k or so men, women, and children living in Durham county so he did quite well though he obviously couldn't persuade the curmudgeons in the Neal middle school district to complete his all Durham sweep.

If the NCBOE site is right it looks like voter turnout ~70% was slightly lower than the ~73% in 2004 but this obscures the fact that there were 40,000 more registered voters this time around (~193,000) meaning that nearly as many people voted this year -135,000 (if +/-20,000 is nearly) as there were registered voters in total in 2004 (~154,000).

There has been a sharp jump in both registrations and the number voting for president as well. Below are the numbers of people who voted for president in Durham (not total number who voted) since 1996:

1996: 80,910 (60/38 Clinton)
2000: 84,604 (63/36 Gore)
2004: 109,651 (67/33 Kerry)
2008: 135,342 (75.5/23.5 Obama)

Big numbers and an exciting big win locally for Obama. This weekend I bring you a historical election map or two.