Wednesday, November 5, 2008

South Valley Improves Turnout, Performance

The South Valley improved its turnout rate compared to the 2004 presidential election. In 2004 the turnout rate was a mediocre 56.3%. This year it was fully 3 percent higher, at 59.4%. Even more importantly, Obama's performance--he got 68.2% of the votes cast between him and McCain--was fully 10 points higher than the 58.4% that Kerry got in 2004. This netted Obama a margin of 4843 votes compared with a margin of 2214 delivered to Kerry. By comparison, Dona Ana county as a whole gave Obama 57.9% out the Obama-McCain totals.

Overall, Dona Ana county gave Obama an 11,363 vote margin over McCain. 43.3% of these votes came from the South Valley. In this sense, the South Valley's margin compared to the rest of the county was proportionally lower than in 2004 since in that year the South Valley produced a margin of 2586, more than 100% of the 2214 vote margin of victory in the county.

This is the first time a presidential campaign has had a field office in the South Valley, in Anthony, staffed by Luis Avila, who worked tirelessly to identify Obama supporters, register people to vote, and get out the vote in early voting, absentee balloting, and election day voting. The data suggest he did an excellent job.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did Teague also have an office in the south valley as well.

Jose Z. Garcia said...

No, but he had Art Terrazas, from Anthony, as one of the top three managers of the Teague campaign. Terrazas had solid experience four years ago as the manager of the Kerry campaign in CD2, so he is familiar with the district. In part because of his presence the Teague campaign was, in my opinion, the best one in the Valley this year.

Anonymous said...

Well lets hope Teague hires someone on his staff from the Valley we have been over looked by Gov Richardson's office for to long.