No serious political observer ever believed that Ron Paul had a real chance to win the Republican nomination for President in 2008. Ron Paul was always destined to be a spirited also ran. But one thing Ron Paul was clarly able to do was gather a very enthusiastic and determined group of followers around him who were willing to go to extrordinary lengths in their attempt to win Ron Paul the Republican nomination. I decided to review the election results for the Republican contests using February 5th as a snap shot in time baseline, while Mitt Romney was still in the race and Republicans still had 4 contenders actively fighting for the nomination. I wanted to see if there was any noticable difference in how Ron Paul, with his highly motivated core base of support, performed in Primary vs Caucus contests. This is what I found.

I wrote this for today's Beyond Chron.

Last night, Barack Obama accomplished what no insurgent presidential candidate has ever done: survive Super Tuesday.  The Illinois Senator did so by amassing a broad coalition of blacks, liberals and red-state Democrats - paying off dividends across the country except in California.  Hillary Clinton's ten-point win here exceeded expectations, and such baffling returns will keep progressives guessing for days what went wrong in the Golden State.  Clinton won in part because she got a large share of support from white women and Latinos - her traditional base - as well as from Asian-Americans.  But Obama also got slaughtered in the Central Valley and other conservative parts of the state - defying the national trend, and confining his base to San Francisco and other liberal coastal counties.  The state's electorate was also very conservative when it came to Propositions: voters approved 4 anti-labor Indian gaming compacts, sinked a measure to fund community colleges, and (while it's good news for progressives that Prop 93 failed) kept the status quo for term limits.

Polls are now closed in OH-05. Results will be updated HERE.

Also we may get live reports from HQ where they're watching local TV coverage.

Swing State Project has a handy chart of baseline numbers for how each county performed in 2006 when Robin Weirauch won 43% of the vote.

Update [2007-12-11 19:49:47 by Todd Beeton]:OK, they're taking their sweet time. Anyone care to make some predictions?

<Update [2007-12-11 22:6:52 by Todd Beeton]: Results are trickling, and I do mean trickling in.

With 79.13% precincts reporting:

Latta (R): 56.05%
Weirauch (D): 43.77 %

And by the way, check out this sweet interactive election returns map.

Update [2007-12-11 22:2:52 by Todd Beeton]:The AP has officially called it for Latta. Good effort everyone and thanks to all the volunteers on the ground and of course, Robin. If there's a takeaway, it's that it's going to take outspending us 2 to 1 to keep Democratic challengers to 2006 levels and we all know they just don't have that kind of money. We made them blow a huge wad of cash this time around.

I wanted to share with everyone a brand new site that we have been putting together over the past couple of months: DC Critters. This site lists every House and Senate incumbent and the vote totals by county for each race. The site also lists any challenger or potential challenger for the seat in 2008 (the Senate seats that are up in 2010 and 2012 will be updated as candidates announce as well.)

This should be somewhat of a clearinghouse for election data and candidate announcements so we will keep it updated as the candidates begin to announce for 2008.

If you are a data geek like us, this site is pure heaven!

To some people, this will seem like a rush of numbers with little context.  True, I can't do the analysis particularly, I don't know the congressional districts well enough to comment.  So, I'd appreciate it if you'd provide the qualitative analysis to go along with my quantitative numbers.

Most of this has been diaried and stuff already.  In accounting, they tell you there is a trade off between accuracy and relevence.  That is, the longer you wait to get total precision in the numbers, the more time passes and the less people care.

It's interesting to compare the midterm elections going back to 1990.  The most interesting thing is that the partisan leanings of the public changed each cycle, and the difference it caused in the voting.

The 1990-1998 house vote is from the House Clerk site: http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/elect ionInfo/index.html

I compiled 2002 and 2006.

Indiana and Mississippi finally posted final election returns.  Unfortunaly, Mississippi is also making changes to their Secretary of State website, and by the time I got back to get their numbers, the website was down.

So, this isn't 100% final as the Mississippi totals are from the CNN website. Still, I doubt there were large differences between the two.  I'm doing this now rather than waiting because I have time to post this now.  I'll edit Mississippi when their web site is back up.

Total vote: 80,121,069
Democratic: 42,339,571 52.8% 420 candidates
Republican: 35,938,282 44.9% 391 candidates
Other.....:  1,843,266  2.3%  

This total covers 430 Congressional districts.  Florida had 5 districts where Democrats were reelected by acclamation and did not appear on the ballot.  In all other states, candidates facing no challenger still appear on the ballot.

This is all from the November elections.  Not the runoffs.

Over the flip is state by state totals

The Working Families Party is up to 151,953 votes on our ballot line in this election with about a week and a half to go before the vote count is completed and certified.  That's up from 90,533 votes in the last gubernatorial election in 2002.

I want to share information on where in the state those votes are coming from (all based on unofficial returns).  These charts and maps are pretty detailed so they might be hard to read, but if you click on the chart or map you're reading you'll get a bigger version.

First overall turnout:

• 2002 : 5 million voters overall
• 2004 : 7.5 million voters overall
• 2006 : 4 million voters overall

Here is the broad breakdown of where the WFP's 2006 votes came from:

New York City (in red) 74,221 votes, 49%
Upstate (in yellow) 55,437 votes, 36%
Metro Suburbs (in blue) 22,295, 15%

For comparison here's that same breakdown of the WFP's 2002 votes:

New York City (in red) 53,557 votes, 59%
Upstate (in yellow) 24,901 votes, 28%
Metro Suburbs (in blue) 12,075, 13%

And the WFP's 2004 votes:

New York City (in red) 67,593 votes, 40%
Upstate (in yellow) 69,141 votes, 41%
Metro Suburbs (in blue) 31,985, 19%

Our gubernatorial vote in New York City continues to go up, while the proportion of our vote from Upstate and in the Metro Suburbs is growing (comparing 2006 to 2002).

Here's a county-by-county breakdown of where the WFP's 2006 vote came from.  You'll probably need to click on this chart to be able to read it.

This map shows a county-by-county breakdown of the WFP's percentage of the vote total (so if 100 people voted and 5 voted on the WFP line that's 5%).  The redder a county the higher the WFP percentage of the vote in that county.

This map goes county-by-county and shows the change of the WFP's percentage of the vote total from 2002 to 2006. The darker the county, the more the WFP percentage of the vote increased in that county.

Now it's your turn: what do you make of this data?