Same as it ever was
A couple months ago Ivan Jurado posted a link to a NY Times article which described San Diego as becoming more liberal. Then, just a few days ago, Patrick Finucane of the weblog San Diego Politics linked to a LA Times article which also described San Diego as leaning more to the left.
Yesterday, I used these articles as the basis of my argument that our local media is becoming more conservative as our local people are becoming more liberal, but SMASH and MAS were right to point out that votes for Republican Bush actually increased this year compared to the 2000 elections.
So, trying to settle the issue, I went to the Secretary of State’s website to look up the voter registration records over the past couple years. What I found is that county wide, not much has really changed over the past three years.
Democrats - 35.44%
Republicans - 41.09%
Independents - 2.34%
Greens - 0.78%
Libertarian - 0.80%
Democrats - 34.65%
Republicans - 41.81%
Independents - 2.21%
Greens - 0.82%
Libertarian - 0.74%
Democrats - 34.65%
Republicans - 40.04%
Independents - 2.26%
Greens - 0.74%
Libertarian - 0.68%
The differences are statistically insignificant. But it should be noted that this is voter registration county wide. County Supervisorial districts 1 and 4 are registered more heavily Democratic while districts 2, 3, and 5 are more heavily Republican.
There is a wealth of voter registration stats (since 1999) all available for download in PDF or Excel file formats. If anyone has a lot of time to kill, it would be very intersting to see various charts of the statistics.
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Andrew Phelps said on Thursday, December 23, 2004, 16:47
The city of San Diego (as far as I know) has long been a Democratic city. It’s the surrounding county that’s conservative/Republican.
San Diego is a blue city in a red county in a blue state in a red country in a blue world. (Stolen from an NCTimes letter to the editor.)
Anita Cohen-Williams said on Sunday, December 26, 2004, 22:57
Voter registrations do not mean much in the general election because voters do not always vote the party line.
JTD said on Tuesday, December 28, 2004, 0:37
[Apologies for reposting.]
There’s a big difference between city and county political orientations, as it is in most places. Hence Bush (County including City), Frye (City).
The LA Times ran a good piece after the election about the Repubs win coming from the exurbs. So-Cal is so dense that we don’t have a lot of places that fit that description til you get to the outer counties, for us Temecula, Murieta. But in-county, places like Vista and Alpine, maybe Carlsbad. Wonder if they leaned particularly any direction…
Meanwhile, cities voted for Kerry in this election, even in red states. Seattle’s ‘The Stranger’ has a great rant/manifesto about this: The Urban Archipelago. San Diego differs only in that the city (1.3M) couldn’t carry the county (3M total).