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(Cross-posted at Daily Kos)I have had to spend some serious time catching up with life things over the past five days. I posted a diary on Wednesday (I think) about my day of door-knocking for Webb. I posted it, finally, when the conventional wisdom was that Webb's advantage was large enough not to be overcome. It was only then that I relaxed.
Well, I didn't relax for long. Because believe me - I remain SHOCKED at how close the Allen-Webb election was. You'd have to have been on the ground, doing literature drops and phone banks and canvassing activities to fully understand. But my day walking around doing GOTV door-knocking on Tuesday gave me EVERY reason to believe that the vote wouldn't be as close as it was between Webb and Allen. I thought Webb would have it decisively on Tuesday night.
We're still boogying - so do it with me over the bump.
I can't underscore enough how many people here as well as from the non-blogger population put their feet (walking) and their knuckles (knocking) and their fingers (dialing) to use to deliver this victory for Webb. We worked like people possessed, chased utterly by the dire remembrance of how we felt the day after the 2004 Presidential election.
We had to win. Period. If that meant no sleep and abandoned spouses and abandoned domestic responsibilities and a less-than-100%-focus at work, so be it.
And we won. We did. The uncertified margin gave it to Webb by 9,187 votes for a margin of 0.38%. Let me underscore - we took this by less than half a percent. My stomach tightens just thinking about it. Because let's be honest here - in addition to the candidate himself (Webb) and the power of his volunteer army, it can't be discounted that Webb's push over the top also had a lot to do with the general Republican backlash witnessed across the country this midterm. We can't count on that in 2008 - two years is a lifetime in political and political whimsy, and there is much to be learned from how the numbers played out for Webb. A simple analysis is and was in order, and I took my holiday yesterday to start doing it. Bear with me while I explain what I did.
I visited Virginia's Board of Elections page. I went county by county and city by city and entered the following into a spreadsheet:
- County/City
- Allen Votes
- Webb Votes
- Total Votes
- % Voter Turnout
From there I could do some simple calculation of Webb's percentage by county/city, Allen's percentage by county/city, the percentage of difference (margin) between Allen and Webb by county/city, and an estimate of the total voter population in a specific county/city.
From there I made an assumption. I set a threshold of 55% voter turnout. I sorted the spreadsheet by turnout and isolated those that were BELOW 55%. I eliminated the counties/cities that went for Allen by whatever margin and considered ONLY counties/cities where Webb won AND the voter turnout was below 55%.
Still with me? This short-list allowed me to do some assumptive calculation. My goal was to arrive at an estimate of how many additional votes Webb would have gotten if voter turnout would have been at 55% in those counties/cities where he won. The formula was simple:
Total Voter Population Estimate x Percentage Difference Between Actual Turnout and 55% Turnout x Webb's Percentage
Here's how it looks:
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Please note the bottom line: 48,859 precious votes irrespective of demographics, etc. In other words, a simple goal of increasing voter turnout in the counties and cities listed to 55% would have substantively increased Webb's margin.
I was flabbergasted - mainly because many of the populous regions are totally within our reach in terms of GOTV efforts for 2008. In other words, counties like Prince William and Fairfax and Loudoun already have a great structure in place and potentially require only some tweaking and planning to make this kind of goal a completely doable reality.
I totally subscribe to Dean's 50-State strategy. Within that, however, is a microcosm. In my case, there's a Virginia strategy that feeds that 50-State strategy. And within that is a county and city strategy that could really deliver this state as blue (GASP!) in 2008. I'm not suggesting that Virginia Democrats ignore counties and cities where Allen won - I am merely suggesting that there are obvious areas where we can start focusing today to put us in the best possible position for the next election.
My next step is to take the list from the spreadsheet and get a contact list of Democratic party officials and state Senators and Representatives and start working emails and phones. It may be a rudimentary analysis on my part, but I really think it's a starting point that has to begin three days ago. We have no time to lose.
I'm in - I've got the bug. I feel empowered. I know I can help, and I fully plan on making a difference.
Where is Arlington?
That is not to say that there is NO merit to the exercise, but it would be foolish to look at a particular percentage as being meaningful when the denominator's accuracy varies greatly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
I tried to control for that by measuring the relative effort in this race vs. the 2005 election. If you compare 2006 turnout to the 2005 turnout, and particularly if you compare relative effort in places that went Democratic to turnout in places that didn't, you may get some interesting numbers. I did the math, but frankly could draw few conclusions about the results that were not already obvious from the gross data.
One conclusion that I drew -- and the spreadsheet is at the office and I am at home, so I can't tell you now what the actual numbers are -- is that the Republican turnout appears to have been 6% better than ours. The marriage amendment, maybe?
The Richmond Times-Dispatch points out in an article today that Allen's margin in Henrico was only 562 votes. It's time to show that no county is safe for complacent Republicans.
There was no pattern that I could see to the places where she got over 1% vs. well under. It's a wash.
Webb's lead in the vote count (after canvassing) is 9,162.
For Allen to make up that amount he would have needed to get 17,631 of Parker's 26,099 votes (67.55%) to overcome Webb's lead (Extremely unlikely, especially since a portion of these voters presumably were voting 'neither' in this case and would have sat this one out otherwise).
As the number of Parker voters that would have not voted if she wasn't in the race increases, the percentage of remaining voters that Allen would need to overcome his deficit grows even more steep (since the 9,162 vote mountain that Allen must overcome remains constant). For example, if 10% of the voters that voted for Parker had not voted Allen would have need to pull 16,326 of the remaining 23,489 votes (69.5%) to gain 9,163 votes.
I don't think Parker made any difference in the outcome of the race.
Next Virginia general election is November 2007. We need the 100 district in the state strategy. My highest priorities are to get Bob Marshall and Dave Albo voted out of office, and to recover at least a few seats in the house of delegates.
We need to put the pressure on, starting now.
If you know Greg Werkheiser or Bruce Roemmelt, try drafting them into running again in 2007. They both got close, and we can probably beat Albo and Marshall in a re-match with better funding and earlier organization. In fact, we should probably run primary challenges to both to drive up the press coverage on the races in those two districts.
In the State Senate, we need to get folks in 23rd (Lynchburg and Bedford) to vote State Senator Stephen Newman out of office as soon as possible to show him what we think of people who co-sponsor discrimination into the consitution.
The idea of microtargeting is great. The more we microtarget and establish a relationship with these voters the more likely we are to get them out to vote. I believe a major factor in the lower than hoped for turnout was the rain. This seemed particularly discouraging to the younger and more marginal voters -- the folks who hadn't voted before or liked Webb's message but weren't inclined to get wet. My 20 year old daughter called all her friends and Webb votes on Election Day and was astounded when several told her it was just too icky to go out. If they're more invested in the campaign they're less likely to wimp out on account of rain.
Contrast that to the Richmond precinct I monitored all day where most of the people were low-income cigarette factory workers. That precinct showed a 53% turnout where many of the potential voters are poor, minority, and often unfamiliar with voting. BTW I believe they were one of the precincts that went whole hog for the constitutional amendment, but trounced Allen 493 to 70 (with 4 for Parker). Would they have shown up without the amendment? Who knows?
One issue that came up was practical. My Richmond poll was a library, and the librarian turned off all the lights when the library closed at 6 p.m. The chief election officer put up a fight to get them back on right away, but two voters told me they thought at first the polls were closed because the lights were off. They decided to come toward the building because they'd heard the polls were open until later. But we can't know if others were discouraged from coming in during the few minutes the incident went on.
My niece's Marine boyfriend, fresh back from his third tour of Iraq, ended up not getting to vote because he saw really long lines outside his precinct in McLean at 6:45 and thought that he would not be allowed to vote after 7:00 p.m. Unfortunately, no one thought to call the only person in the family who happened to have the whole election law manual on hand, but he simply did not know that once in line he had to be permitted to vote. Maybe we should think of posting signs spelling this out in future elections, or we should make mention of this in our microtargeting efforts, but that's one Marine veteran who didn't get to cast his vote for Webb.
Thanks for doing the math, RenaF, so I don't have to.
People who put off voting until the evening were sitting in traffic for two hours.
This is our high turnout area - even if you consider 1% per fairfax precinct were impacted by traffic congestion - then that would have made the race better.
Better yet - that would be a good ad for the 07 races. Was your vote missed Nov 2006 due to traffic? Then vote in the DEMS