NH-1 + NH-2 = apples + oranges
By Dante ScalaLast week's state primary turnout offers a glimpse of how different New Hampshire's two congressional districts have become.
Almost 72,000 voters participated in the Republican primary, which featured two competitive congressional primaries. About 50,000 took the Democratic ballot, which featured no contests at the congressional or gubernatorial levels. That's a turnout ratio of 1.43 Republicans for every Democrat.
By county, here is the turnout ratio (Republican ballots for every Democratic ballot):
- Carroll: 2.49
- Belknap: 2.23
- Rockingham: 1.75
- Hillsborough: 1.44
- STATEWIDE: 1.43
- Merrimack: 1.30
- Grafton: 1.15
- Coos: 1.13
- Sullivan: 1.09
- Cheshire: 0.99
- Strafford: 0.96
The top three counties at the top of the list, Carroll, Belknap and Rockingham, almost entirely sit in the 1st Congressional District. Most of Hillsborough County sits in the 2nd district, except the city of Manchester and the solidly Republican towns of Bedford, Goffstown and Merrimack.
In contrast, almost every county below the 1.43 GOP-DEM statewide ratio belongs to the 2nd distict: Merrimack (except the town of Hooksett), Grafton, Coos, Sullivan and Cheshire counties.
This underlines Jennifer Horn's challenge during the next six and a half weeks. In her district, almost as many Democrats turn out for a noncompetitive primary as Republicans do for a competitive one.
Dante Scala teaches American politics at the University of New Hampshire and blogs at Graniteprof.
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Turning Out
It's all about turning out to vote. The polls at this point mean little, provided the candidates they test are in the ballpark of victory. The turnout on September 9th doesn't dictate much -- just that one race in one party was more competitive than in the other party.
Democrats will be motivated to vote on November 4th because we don't want to see years 9, 10, 11, and 12 of the George W. Bush / Dick Cheney Administration.
We want our brave soldiers out of Iraq. We want health care for all. We want quality education. We want oil-free energy development. So we have reasons to vote on November 4th.
an amusing analysis
by Mr. Scala - but looking at numbers may not be the whole story. Many independent voters took GOP ballots to vote in the CD1 Congressional race. They'll be voting for Democrats in November.
Senile Post
Jim, your last paragraph screams "Lets be poor and miserable together." Rationed health care, $10 gas, 20 bucks for oil in the winter...that is unless you plan to invent vehicles, and planes to run on wind and wood chips.
After all thats what socialism is.
Misleading data
Dante -
You have indeed compared apples with oranages. If you're going to compare the two districts...compare the two districts. A good chunk of Hills and Rock - the two vote-rich counties - are in NH-2, including Nashua of course. In fact, the # of voters in the portion of those counties in NH-2 is probably greater than the number of voters in several of the counties that are entirely in NH-2.
A better analysis would compare NH-1 to NH-2 straight up - and then they might not seem as different, as your use of stats suggests.
All you've done here is identify which counties are the most and least Republican on a statewide basis.
A more interesting academic question would be to compare R turnout by state senate district to see if the presence of three R state senate primaries affected turnout compared to the "control" group of state senate districts that only featured the congressional primary.
It is worth noting that in Carroll Co, Rs has a state senate primary and a spirited sheriff primary in addition to the congressional primary, which could also help explain why Carroll comes at the top of the list.
Regardless, good news for Republican state senate candidate Bill Denley, no?
Fergus Cullen
Chairman, NH GOP
fair point, Fergus
Fergus,
Fair points, I will do some more calculations and report back.
DJS
socialism
Oiy, I think you are wrong. Socialism is when the government owns the means of production. Just this week, Bush Republicans have spent over $85 billion to buy up huge swaths of Wall Street. This is the biggest socialism take-over ever.
I'm just saying.
Huh?
Not sure how anything can be extrapolated from these statistics. As a Carroll Cty voter, it is clear Republicans (and perhaps Indies) had more reason to vote in the Primary, but Fergus will have to explain to me how this looks good for Denley. As Jim points out, there will be motivated voters of all kinds in November.
follow-up on original post
As promised, a follow-up to last week’s post on the state primary:
As Fergus Cullen rightly noted, the three towns of Rockingham County that sit in NH 02 (Atkinson, Salem, and Windham) represent a large number of votes. Indeed, these three towns cast more votes in the September primary than Coos County or Sullivan County.
What's more, those three towns are heavily Republican. Combined, they cast 3,450 GOP ballots and 1,755 Democratic ballots in the state primary.
On the other hand, NH 02 contains all of Merrimack County except Hooksett, which is heavily Republican (940 GOP ballots cast in the state primary, compared to 370 Democratic ballots).
Hillsborough County also is divided between the two congressional districts. Bedford, Goffstown, Manchester, and Merrimack vote in NH 01, but their combined ratio (9,896 R ballots, 6,967 D ballots) is roughly equal to the remainder of the county (11,550 R, 7,881 D ballots).
Once all the September primary ballots are allocated between the two districts, the ratio of Republican ballots to Democratic ballots in the September primary looked like this:
NH 01: 37,653 Republican ballots, 23,600 Democratic ballots. Ratio: 1.60 R/D
NH 02: 34,310 Republican ballots, 26,680 Democratic ballots. Ratio: 1.29 R/D.
Statewide ratio: 1.43 R/D.
The partisan differences between the two CDs still look significant.
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