Last week we anticipated the industry political consultants would look for ways to justify how they spent $1 million to lose the frack ban election. Sure enough, they made a bunch of stuff up about supposed college “bloc voting,” threw around non-existent data about “permanent” and “transient” residents of Denton, and all the while insinuated that young and non-home owning voters were less important in the future of a city. Using early election data available from the county election office, we demonstrated their narrative to be categorically false.
We now have complete voter data from the November 4 election to supplement our earlier analysis.
Out of 26,266 total Denton city voters:
- The average age of voters in this election was 52. That’s only down 1 year from the last midterm/gubernatorial election in November 2010.
- Only 1920 college-aged voters voted in this election. That’s only 7.3% of the total voting population.
- The frack ban won by 4386 votes – even if all of these young voters voted for the ban, that’s not even enough to split the spread in half.
- 4509 people registered to vote since May 1, 2014 in preparation for the Nov 4 election. Only 2084 of them showed up to vote in this election.
