BCR early voting poll: Committee faces uphill climb?

Continuing our tradition of pre-election polling, we canvassed the early voting site at the Board of Elections downtown yesterday to try to get an answer to the pressing political question in local politics this week: just who will win the races for the Board of County Commissioners and the District Attorney position?

Between 10:30 am and 1:00 pm yesterday, we asked voters queued up to go into the polls about their preferences for the BOCC and DA races. Of course, any such poll is fraught with methodological issues we'd be crazy not to acknowledge up front. First off, by asking on the way into rather than out of the polls, the responses are going to be less accurate in capturing actual voter behavior. Secondly, our sample size is quite small -- 130 responses, which translates to a margin of error for just the BOE polling site alone of almost 9%.

Third, the presence this year of three early voting sites means the sample is biased towards the downtown site. We saw many west-central and South Durham voters yesterday, and it appears that the presence of graduation at NCCU may have steered East Durham early voters towards the BOE site. Still, the count underrepresents voters in East and North Durham -- the latter of which may be particularly important given the political conservatism of many of that region's precincts.

Still, there were some interesting trends that emerged from the data, particularly among demographic lines, that suggest the direction of the race.

The Bottom Line

For the BOCC race, based on the data from Saturday polling, BCR predicts:

• All three incumbents (Ellen Reckhow, Michael Page and Becky Heron) are safe.
• Don Moffitt and Brenda Howerton will draw primarily from white voters but will draw enough black voters swayed by the PA, Indy, and other endorsements to pull them ahead of Joe Bowser and Fred Foster, Jr.
• Victoria Peterson and Doug Wright appear to be out of contention. Josh Parker's main chance of avoiding the same fate lies in a good turnout of voters swayed by the Friends of Durham and Herald-Sun endorsements. (Three voters Saturday said they'd been influenced by those two sources -- one-tenth the number who relied on the PA or Indy for their selections.) A strong Friends/H-S crowd could push Parker to the previous tier of contention.

One key to the election: differential candidate voting by white and black respondents, linked we suspect to endorsements. Bowser and Foster -- both endorsed by only the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People -- earned zero votes from any of the white respondents in Saturday's polling. Bowser and Foster earned 43% and 35% of black respondents' votes, but then too, so did Reckhow (27%), Heron (20%), Moffitt (10%), and Howerton (6%).

Bottom line: this seems to be due from black voters choosing in many cases the Committee slate plus one or two other candidates who were endorsed by PACs that overlap with these voters' political interests (e.g., the Indy and PA).

The result? Even if black turnout matches or surpasses white turnout, the presence of even a low rate of additional votes for Reckhow, Heron, Moffitt and Howerton means that Bowser and Foster have an uphill battle trying to catch up with these front-runners.

In the DA race, BCR predicts Tracey Cline to have enough of a lead in a left-leaning Democratic primary battle as to dispatch Keith Bishop, Freda Black, and Mitchell Garrell with relative ease.

Turnout: A top-of-the ticket affair?

One of the questions that surrounds this year's BOCC and DA races is, quite simply, whether the surge of voters turning out for the Obama-Clinton race will end up voting down the ballot for local races.

The data suggest that a substantial number of yesterday's early voters -- almost one-third -- didn't have their minds made up as to how they'd vote in the County Commissioner or DA races.

About one-fifth of both white and black respondents (based on this observer's classification of respondents by race, an imperfect measure) said that they had no plans to vote in the BOCC race, but the percentage of respondents who had not yet decided whom they'd support by the time they were in line to vote varied substantially by race: 15% of whites, 29% of blacks.

The higher uncertainty level could have an impact going into an election, as such a voter might tend to vote for candidates based on name recognition (helping incumbents) or, perhaps more likely, to not vote at all.

In all, 68% of white respondents noted their advance support for at least one BOCC candidate, compared to 59% of black respondents. (Some of these respondents are also coded as being unsure of exactly whom they'd vote for even if they expressed a preference.)

Also of interest: whites who voted in the BOCC race expressed a preference for an average of 3.8 candidates per, versus just 3.4 for black voters. Some of this seems likely due to the Committee's decision to only endorse three candidates for the post.

In the DA race, surprisingly, just 57% of white voters and 59% of black voters already knew for whom they'd vote for the seat formerly held by Mike Nifong. Still, almost one-fifth of these voters said they were still trying to make up their minds before voting.

BOCC by demographics: PA/Indy solidarity to bear fruit?

Among voters who already knew whom they'd support for the BOCC going into the polls, the numbers suggest a four-way breakdown of candidates:

• Incumbents Ellen Reckhow (supported by 46% of early voters sampled), Michael Page (41%), and Becky Heron (36%) drew the broadest support from yesterday's respondents.
• The two challengers who earned the endorsements of both the PA and the Indy -- Brenda Howerton (31%) and Don Moffitt (29%) -- fell into a clear second tier of voter support.
• Joe Bowser (16%) and Fred Foster (15%), the remaining two Committee endorsees, held tight at a solid third tier.
• Josh Parker (6%), Victoria Peterson (4%), and Doug Wright (0.8%) trailed significantly in overall support and seem to face long odds for election this cycle. (Still, as noted above, the sample isn't representative of more conservative voters, who are likely to swap-in Parker for Howerton in the numbers above.)

If we look at the top-seven vote-getters in this round -- of whom five will proceed to earn County Commission seats -- the real question would seem to be, how much of Moffitt and Howerton's collective lead over Bowser and Foster has to do with the pool of voters out today? Would a strong African-American turnout overall, spurred by the Committee's endorsements, mean that Bowser and Foster would walk away to victory? And are incumbents Reckhow and Heron really safe?

The latter point's easier to address than the former. Black voters polled expressed voting plans that translated to a total of 99 votes for BOCC members. 62 of those were pledged to the three Committee endorsees -- Bowser, Foster and Page. But of the remaining 37, two-thirds went to Reckhow (13) and Heron (10).

(Among black voters in total, the tally was Page 49%, Bowser 43%, Foster 35%, Reckhow 27%, Heron 20%, Moffitt 10%, Peterson 8%, Howerton 6%, Parker 4%.)

In short, a significant number of black voters polled expressed plans to vote for the Committee slate plus two, with those two typically (but not always) being Reckhow and Heron. Assuming these results scale across the voting population at large, even a large black turnout is likely to mean incremental additional support for the PA and Indy slates' candidates.

On the other hand, Bowser and Foster saw no support from white voters in the poll, a situation I doubt is going to change with the addition of more Friends voters in North Durham.

To test the impact, we rebalanced the early voting data to reflect equal numbers of white and black votes cast. In that scenario, Reckhow, Page, Heron, Howerton and Moffitt still win (and with sufficient plurarity as to avoid a run-off.) By our calculations, black turnout would have to be 35% higher than white turn-out -- assuming the trends of voting seen in this polling, and importantly assuming that undecided voters didn't actually make voting choices -- before Bowser would catch up with Howerton and Moffitt.

What's the likelihood that such a turnout situation happens? It comes down to the independent voters. Black Dems outnumber white Dems in Durham, 51,500 to 40,000. Add the independents in -- who can choose which primary to vote in -- and you're at 58,500 to 62,000.

If we see large numbers of independents choosing to vote Democratic this time around, and they participate in the BOCC race, the prospect of such differential turnout is unlikely.

Given the PA/Indy crowd bias towards this result, what happens in an electorate with a larger percentage of Friends and H-S endorsement readers? Howerton goes down, Parker goes up. Moffitt still looks safe, but the fifth seat is still shaky. Joe Bowser does seem to be the most likely to benefit if Parker and Howerton end up doing equally well with partisans, though a run-off situation would be a possibility.

DA race: It's Cline to beat

While the split endorsements of the Committee and the PA make things interesting (to say the least) on the BOCC end, the combined endorsement of the Committee, PA and Indy of Tracey Cline for District Attorney seems to seal the deal for her chances this week.

In our exit polling, Cline did equally well among white and black voters, polling four times the level of support (35%+ to 9%) as her closest competitor, Freda Black. Bishop and Garrell also trail in the single digits.

The big caveat here is that with the Friends electorate not visible in these exit polling data, you should expect Freda Black to do much, much better in more conservative districts than she's done here. Still, given that this race (like the BOCC) is being decided in a Democratic primary, you're automatically selecting out registered Republicanswho don't get a say at this phase.

Although one-fifth of respondents indicated that they hadn't made up their mind yet whom to vote for in the DA race, it's unlikely that any one single candidate would benefit from those unclaimed votes. For this reason, we predict Cline has this one just about sewn up.

Comments

[Gary]

I have nothing constructive to add to the dialog here, except it was nice meeting you in line. I was the guy voting with the Indy voting guide who just recently moved to town.

[Jon]

Excellent coverage as always, Kevin. I voted Saturday at the BOE and waited about 2 1/2 hours. It was nice to be able to speak with so many candidates while waiting to vote. I met Cline, Bishop, and Black, along with Moffitt, Parker, Peterson, Reckhow, Howerton and Heron. Also spoke with school board candidates Leigh Bordley and Nancy Cox.

At least two state-level candidates were also there. Had a nice little chat with Robin Anderson who is running for Labor Commissioner. And by the time we were about to enter the building, I saw Lt. Gov candidate Hampton Dellinger shaking hands with people in line behind us.