6th Senate District profile

I’m pretty sure most folks are familiar with the registered voters by locality that VPAP has for the 6th Senate District, which is shown to the left. I’m also pretty sure that folks are familiar with the party performance in the district:

• 2012 – Pres. Obama won 57% of the vote and Sen. Kaine won 58%
• 2009 – McDonnell won 54%, Cuccinelli won 52% and Bolling/Wagner tied

Again, according to VPAP, the district is 63% white, 28% black, 3% Asian and 5% other. Hispanics make up 8% of the district.

In 2011, Ralph Northam bested Ben Loyola 56.75% to 43.13%.

I’ve been hearing for the last couple of months – as the race for the seat heated up – that a majority of the votes Northam received in the 2011 contest were garnered in the 100th House District, a seat currently occupied by Lynwood Lewis, one of three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination. I decided to check the math myself. Using publicly available data, I calculate between 52.43% and 54.52% of the votes Northam received in the election came from the 100th. My spreadsheet is at the bottom of this post.

I constructed this by first identifying the precincts in the 100th House District. I took those precincts from the SBE website for the 2011 contest. Lewis ran unopposed in that election, so his vote total in the 33 precincts was actually higher – 12,512 – that the total votes received by Northam. The shared precincts in Accomack County and Northampton County are 100% within the 100th House district. The same is true for all but one of the Norfolk precincts: Granby is split between the 89th & the 100th. One could argue that the Granby precinct totals should be split somehow between the two; when I did that based on the total votes cast between the two precincts, the 100th accounted for 52.43% of the votes Northam received – still the majority.

But I left one number out of the analysis completely: Norfolk absentee ballots. There is no precinct breakdown of the 196 absentee ballots cast for Northam in Norfolk. In essence, what that means is that my calculated range is low by some unknown factor.

Of course, the voters in a general election are a much larger group than those in a special election, which is where we are headed at some point in the near future. In 2011, a total of 29,228 votes were cast – 16,606 for Northam and 12,622 for Loyola. I haven’t run my estimate of the special election turnout yet – that will depend somewhat on who the parties nominate – but it will be far below 29,000.