California Congressional Primary Analysis Part II

The chart attached here has county party participation and party registration breakdowns for the June 5 California primary. Sacramento County has a 9.6% Democratic registration advantage but only a 7.8% June 5 primary participation advantage. Kern County has a 6.3% Republican registration advantage, but had a 26.1% Republican participation advantage.

The counties are divided into three groups. The first one includes counties which reported turnout by party. The second one has counties that didn’t. Thus, I had to use the Presidential vote. It’s conceivable that this number could be inflated for the Democrats, as minor parties and independents could vote in the Democratic primary. In the past, however, these people accounted for less than 5% of the Democratic vote. Considering that the Democratic Presidential primary was non-competitive, even 5% would be a high estimate. This number doesn’t include undervotes, a ballot where the voter left their Presidential choice blank. Democratic voters had no real alternative to President Obama and some may have left President blank as protest. We’ve certainly seen a lot of protest voting in other states.

The last group are the counties which don’t have competitive congressional races. While I believe these numbers to be accurate I wasn’t as concerned about them. Overall, Democrats had a 13.1% registration advantage, but only a 5.3% participation advantage. The November participation advantage should be close to the registration advantage, although this will vary by county.

I’d like to do this by congressional district but those numbers aren’t available from the county election sites or the SoS. So I’m going with what I have and attempting to extrapolate.

We see a wide variance by county. The Central Valley counties of Kings, Merced, Tulare, Kern, Fresno, and Madera had incredibly inflated Republican participation. As I showed in my last blog post, this isn’t a surprise. Central Valley voting is far more Republican than registration, likely due to the Democratic registration heavily relying on Hispanics, who are low propensity voters. Another area with heavily inflated turnout is Southern California. Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Ventura counties all showed a heavy Republican turn-out.

On the other hand, there were areas where Republican turnout wasn’t very inflated. Alameda, Amador, Calaveras, Contra Costa, El Dorado, Lake, Marin, Mendocino, Napa, Placer, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Joaquin, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Yolo counties were all either had slight elevated Republican turnout or had elevated Democratic turnout. These counties border each other, so that hardly seems to be a coincidence.

These numbers tell me that we can’t assume that every district won’t move uniformly toward the Democrats by the same amount. As I showed in my last post, districts do tend to move toward registration but they do so by different amounts. Sometimes they move further and other times far less. Still I think the difference between registration and participation is a good one to look at when determining how far left a county will move.

Southern California is likely to move far more than Northern California. Democrats should get optimistic about increased turnout in districts like CA-41 and CA-47, but shouldn’t expect things to get a lot better in CA-7 and 9. I’ll get into analysis with my next post.