Here’s a first pass at the Boston 2009 Primary results from a neighborhood perspective (lots more to come in the next few days). Sorry, but spreadsheets don’t format well here, so you have to see the data at the link below:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tC-o5gXDBVzxwpU12yKDa4A&output=html
The story of the mayor’s race:
Menino did very well in the non-white neighborhoods and decently in the white liberal-voting neighborhoods. Menino took enough votes away from Yoon there to keep Yoon out of second place.
Overall turnout was decent, not great, for a contested primary. The whitest conservative-voting neighborhoods turned out best in this moderate-turnout election, as expected. The rule of thumb is that this white neighborhood turnout advantage shrinks as the overall city turnout goes up. Those With an expected decent turnout increase for the November general, this is good news for the non-white city council candidates and bad news for Flaherty. Also, Yoon’s liberal and non-white voters are more likely to switch to Menino than Flaherty
Details:
- Menino (50% citywide) was strongest in the least-white neighborhoods like Mattapan and parts of Dorchester (90+% non-white population) with 70+% of the votes there. He was also very strong in his home turf of Hyde Park and Readville, about 70%.
- Flaherty (24% citywide) was strongest in the whitest neighborhoods. Outside of South Boston (61%), he got 30-42% of the vote in West Roxbury, Charlestown, and the white parts of Dorchester. He got less than 10% in the least-white neighborhoods.
- Yoon (21% citywide) did best in the liberal-voting neighborhoods like Jamaica Plain, South End, Back Bay, and Beacon Hill with 30%-40% of the vote there. He got 17%-28% in the more non-white neighborhoods. Yoon’s problem was that Menino was more popular in his base than in Flaherty’s base. Even in Chinatown, Menino beat Yoon 58% to 24%.
- McCrea (4% citywide) did best in the downtown neighborhoods with high single-digits there.
- Turnout had the usual distribution of whiter neighborhoods turning out better than liberal-voting and non-white neighborhoods. But other than the very low turnout in the student neighborhoods like Allston / Fenway/ Back Bay (about 15%), the the gap between the white and non-white neighborhoods was not so big.
- The chart shows the 2005 vs. 2009 turnout changes. The citywide turnout was up 100%. The whitest neighborhoods like South Boston / West Roxbury / parts of Dorchester were up only 50 – 66%. The non-whitest neighborhoods were up 200+%.
In the interest of making public records public, here’s a link to some raw precinct data (thank you Dragon voice recognition software!) More to come!
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ArYPkyBtYlUKdHFRZVgzVFBCWTlLQ21Ca3o0Qy1jSXc&hl=en
Here’s a link to the not-so-useful version from the Boston Election Department.
thanks as usual Bob for initiating this discussion. Interesting that Yoon beat Flaherty in 12 of your 21 neighborhoods and came within one point on 4 more. Relative turnout as usual tells a big part of the story. Yoon beat Flaherty probably in something like those same neighborhoods in the last city council election; I may go back and check.
Comment by Steve Backman — September 23, 2009 @ 6:10 pm