County by County - The numbers behind Martins win.

[Raffi Ella]

:bluebox: See the exact numbers at the link below!


The numbers behind Martins win.


By Dick Pettys
InsiderAdvantage Georgia

(8/11/08) I spent a little time crunching numbers over the weekend to see if there were any interesting morsels we’d overlooked in the spot coverage of the Democratic runoff last week. Nothing fell into the “Holy Cow, Mabel!” category. But I’ll list a few tidbits below and then print the spreadsheet for those who might like to pour over the numbers in one simple chart instead of flipping back and forth among several.


* A “rough” assessment is that while the July 15 Democratic primary drew 10.3% of Georgia’s registered voters, that fell to 6.7% in the Aug. 5 runoff. (That counts only voters who participated in the Democratic race for U.S. Senate, and it uses voter registration statistics from June 16.)


* Martin beat Jones in the runoff by 63,189 votes. More than half of that margin (34,896) came from just three counties – Fulton, DeKalb and Clayton. Jones led Martin in all three of those counties in the primary. (In Fulton, black voters are 41% of the registered electorate; in DeKalb, they constitute 54% of the electorate and in Clayton, they are 69% of regisered voters.)


* 24 counties, including Fulton, DeKalb and Clayton, flipped from Jones to Martin in the runoff. 16 counties flipped from Martin to Jones in the runoff.


Now, a word about the chart below. This comes from combining the results posted on the Secretary of State’s website for both the primary and the runoff with the stats on the SOS’s page for voter registration, and then running some simple formulas in Excel. The primary results have been certified. The runoff results are still unofficial.


:bluebox: Click and scroll down for exact totals county by county.