"WA Democrat Delegate Math"

On Saturday, I was the PCC  (Precinct Caucus Chair) for my Democrat precinct. Below are some of my thoughts. They might be helpful because Wyoming, Guam, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, North Dakota all have caucuses left to go.

For me, with a very large precinct (Precinct 208-  1200 plus registered voters, 166 caucus votes, 10 allotted delegates), everything worked like clockwork. The experience was well planned, well administrated, no personal contention, excellent helpers, etc.  I want to really thank the generous and energetic Democrat volunteers, tech help from WCC and my excellent Tally Clerk and Secretary.  I didn't get the in-house training. I just memorized the 28 page Precinct Caucus  script. I only had four days because my PCO  had just moved so I was busy reading and thinking and simulating votes before Saturday morning. 

However, I had tables, my laptop, auditorium projector, wireless mic.  I kept the script on the big screen and also a spreadsheet I had designed to simulate delegate math.  I think it is important as a PCC to be funny, humble, helpful, honest, fair, ask for help, let people speak. We did four rounds of Bernie v. Hillary.  We had to because it takes a while to count 166 sheets! Our Tally Clerk  actually numbered the corners sequentially of each voter's sheet she received as if she had been trained as a database professional! People really enjoyed speaking. I really had a great though exhausting morning. One subject that has come up is discussion afterwards is precinct caucus math. Below is my take on this math and the delegate selection process.

My Sunday with Bernie Believers

Bernie Believers line up early Sunday morning.

Early Sunday morning my accomplice and I car pooled from Bellingham to Bernie's Seattle rally at the Key Arena . A friend of our family had made it to the head of the line before 6:00 AM and posted as such on Facebook. "I think I can be at your house by eight," my fellow Bernie supporter said.  By 9:30 we had made Key Arena and were standing in a line probably about 200 ' x 6 people deep in the light rain. That line would quickly grow much longer. It was 2 1/2 hours before before the noon admission and you might think those hours would be an arduous wait, but then you probably have never stood in a crowd of Bernie Believers before.

Democrat Caucus Locations for Saturday, March 26, 2016 9:30 AM Registration! 10:00 AM Start!

3:05 PM 3/19/2016 Update! Best links for finding your precinct and your  March 26th caucus site:

• http://pollingplaces.democrats.org/
• https://www.demcaucus.com/register

These links may also be informative for all of us Bernie Believers:

• https://vote.berniesanders.com/
• http://whatcomforbernie.com/
• https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zPrEbjVkRCzQ.kTGDlekyJebU

All this week long the 103 E. Holly Bernie office needs your help canvassing and phone banking. I just talked with the Bernie campaign representatives there and the focus is on making sure they get people going to the caucus and involved in the process. They need precinct captains. If you are willing to volunteer or help, make sure to make it to 103 E. Holly. There are a lot of Bernie groups on Facebook, but the official Bernie office needs your help canvassing the neighborhoods! Bring your smart phone to do this so you can download the MiniVAN app. If you are coming to the office to phone bank, bring your laptop, smart phone, chargers. You can also phone bank for Bernie at home. Be Ready for next Saturday: The March 26th Democrat Caucus!!

voterdb data as 03/16/2016

Age, Gender, City, Zip, LastUpdateDate, Status Reason, Ballot Counted for Last Five Primaries below the break.

Please Caucus!

Dear Readers:

On March 26th, the Whatcom Democrats will host this year's Democratic Caucus. This is your chance to caucus for your presidential candidate! Yes, you need to be there unless you filled out a surrogate form by March 18th. Otherwise, you need to be there  and stay there to cast your votes.  Make sure your address and registration is up to date at http://myvote.wa.gov , fill out the Democratic caucus precinct sign-in, find your caucus site  and come ready to debate, paricipate and cast votes! Be there early, doors will open after 9:00 AM! Should you want to do more, you can join the party, volunteer for the Democratic Party or you can volunteer for Bernie. You can probably volunteer for Hillary as well, but I will let you find your way to that :-).  Team Bernie is hosting two days of action today and tomorrow. Please see more after the break below.   Please Caucus!!!

Phone Banking for Bernie Sanders

I sat through the phone bank training for Benie Sanders:  https://go.berniesanders.com/page/content/phonebank .  They have 15 minute interactive training going on all the day long and they could really use you for GOTV messages for the next two days. The March 15 (!Tuesday!) primaries are 691 delegates:

• Florida:214
• Illinois:156
• Ohio:143 delegates 
• North Carolina:107
• Missouri :71

These are the 3, 5, 7, 9 and 18 largest states . Together, they represent over 61M people or about 20% of the U.S. population. I am going to practice the script, acquaint with Bernie issues and start calling.   Person to person makes the biggest difference in politics. North Carolina and Florida are the last and perhaps the most important southern states for Democrats because they are large and Democrats win them sometimes. However, Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio are critical as well. More information is here: https://go.berniesanders.com/page/content/march15/

For those of you who haven't done phone banking before, you will probably need a laptop or tablet, dedicated phone line or cell phone, cell buds or headset for your analog phone, comfortable chair. It seems daunting when you first start and then the script just falls into place. Sticking to the script and seeming authentic isn't as hard as it seems after your first ten calls.  It is good practice talking and working with others.  This is something that is critical right now you can do if you have the time.

The failed "Southern Strategy" of the 2016 Democrats

Click to Enlarge: Sum of all Democrat votes divided into CVAP_EST 2014

Code for this post. [1,2]

We have to ask ourselves at some point: What are the mechanisms for the suppression of the black vote in the South and how do we define it? Is it any different than in regions outside the South? The Democrats lost 910 legislative seats nationwide between 2009 - 2014. This happened here in WA as well. But it *really* happened in the South where literally dozens of legislative seats flipped from Democrat to Republican. 

Super Tuesday Data

Note: Fixed Vermont totals - RMF 1:09 PM 3/2/2016
Super Tuesday Data. For these 12 states, some data is incomplete or incomparable for various reasons: Dem caucus held later for AK, Republican Caucus will not be held at all for CO, all precincts were not 100%  reporting as of this morning, MN,CO,AK held caucuses, not primaries etc. But here are some interesting factoids:

• 2.7M more votes for Republicans than Democrats in these states primaries/caucuses as opposed to the 1.9M for Romney than Obama in GE2012
• These 12 primaries/caucuses generated (5.9M(D) +  8.5M(R)) = 14.5M votes.  In the 2012GE these same states generated 32M votes, 14.7M for Obama alone.
• Only MA,MN (Caucus),VT had more Democrats vote than Republicans
• Reputedly, AR had more Republicans vote than Democrats for the first time since the Reconstruction
• The states here showing some "swing" potential are Virginia,Oklahoma,Colorado. Fundamentally a (complicated) southern state, Virginia actually went to Obama in 2012 as did Florida.Oklahoma went Republican in 2012, Colorado went Democrat. Both came out for Bernie Saunders in this primary.

If you see errors, let me know. Click to enlarge charts. Charts and data compare GE 2012 with Primary 2016:

Data from:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=2012
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/01/super-tuesday-trump-clinton-sanders-cruz-rubio

Register to VOTE!!...then...Sign In to your Democratic Precinct Caucus!

After you have made sure you are a registered voter at myvote.wa.gov, you can fill out, print and sign your *DEMOCRATIC PRECINCT CAUCUS SIGN IN* : https://www.demcaucus.com/register. I found on Win7/Chromium that I could save to it to PDF if I couldn't print it immediately. That put me in the system, gave me my primary location, my precinct ID, my VAN ID and let the Democrats know I was coming! You eventually need to print it out and sign it and bring it with you to your caucus location!

Whatcom County Voter History Database as of 1/27/2016

Editor's note: Are you a WA candidate that needs information like the data and analysis below for your campaign? I am considering marketing my data analytic services this year. If you are interested, you can find me from my blogger profile. -RMF

The data above is from a 1/27/2016 voterdb history.  On the left, the rainbow background and the fading shadows in front of it show the per precinct difference between registered voters and participation in the GE 2014 and GE 2015 balloting. (The most recent voter birth years are not included.) Curiously, despite heavy registration of those under 65, voter turnout has collapsed as it heads toward the youngest birth years in Whatcom County. Click on the graphs to enlarge.

The dense band of mean birth years of registered voters between years 1960 and 1970 is a statistical mirage brought about by heavy registration of both boomers and millenials on either side. GenXrs are the bluish trough (far top left chart) between prewars  + boomers and millenials, + perhaps Gen "Z". At right, a relatively high SD per precinct helps hide an accurate assessment of voter age in Whatcom County. More age statistics are below. Click on the graphs to enlarge.

All school and fire Levies pass. A look back at November 2015

Updated 2/10/2016: All School and Fire levies pass. 32% turnout with 40K voting.
Today (February 9th) there is a special election for school  and fire district financing throughout the county ... Remember to Vote. Drop Boxes are placed throughout the county. If you mail your ballot, it must be postmarked (with stamp) by February 9th. If you are around downtown Bellingham, there will be a drive through drop box near the court house open until 8 p.m.  You can check your voter status, update your address, or register to vote online in WA at MyVote.wa.gov .  Some Charts from the 2015 Election are below the break.

The Death of LaVoy Finicum

Defense Indexes vs Mass Shooting Database >= 14 'Dead + Injured'

In my last post, I established that the FBI will complete the three year period (2013 - 2015) with ~64M NICS background checks for firearms purchase.  In this post, I look at the relationship between two Defense  index/exchanges traded over the same period. Specifically, I am interested in the whether there is a relationship  between high volume "spree shootings" and equity increases for defense companies. If widespread publicity of spree shootings encourages Americans to purchase extraordinary volumes of weapons, does this in turn equal greater purchase of defense stock? R code here.

Here are the eleven events with (Dead + Injured) >=  14 mass shooting incidents according to Mass Shooting Tracker. I have left out shooter names. Some of these events will be recognizable by location:

AR-15s, Shopping Carts and Gun Ownership in America

Update: December 2015 and 2015 the year broke records which rendered my 2.3M projection for December short. 3.3M NICS  checks were completed for December 2015 bring the yearly totally 23M. Both numbers are records. I will update my projected  December data at some point. - RMF

Last week's cover for the "New Yorker" shows a happy, clean cut, young couple picking up their AR-15 (?) with their milk and hand grenades in their shopping cart at a local super mart.  2.2M NICS FBI  firearm checks were completed in Novermber 2015. After the December totals come in, it looks like we will have over 23M NICS checks for 2015, an all time annual record. Ironically, the day of the San Bernardino shooting (12/2), the NYT announced we broke a record for single day guns sales on the last Black Friday. If we don't already, we probably now have more firearms in America than cars. This would make sense because more people now die from firearms than car accidents in America.  I made a quick projection of the 221M NICS gun checks in America for the last 17 years. Between 2013 - 2015, 29% of all gun checks for the last 17 years will have been processed. I projected December 2015 at 2.3M.:

 (21093273 + 20968547 + (19827376 + 2300000)) / (222363898 - 892840)

2013 + 2014 + projected(2015)  / (eighteen year total  - first incomplete year)

[1] 0.2898311

For the three years 2013 - 2015, there will be (projected) 64,189,196 (~64M) NICS FBI gun checks processed. If all of those checks were approved, that three year total would be equivalent to 20% of our 315M population.  More data on NICS Operations can be found here

This is a (table) matrix from the data found here.  December 2015 data projected. Click to enlarge tables and charts.

Gun Deaths in America: Suicides, Homicides, "Mass Shooting Tracker" Data

Introduction

Important note: RMF:12/24/2015 Shooting Tracker data  is now maintained by Gun Violence Archive at http://www.shootingtracker.com/wiki/Main_Page

This is an attempt to parse some of the data from Shooting Tracker and talk about death by firearms in America. The project took me a bit longer than I wanted because that data needed normalization and corrections and because the subject is somewhat poorly researched due to Congressional limitations on research. See my R code here.  I bound together Shooting Tracker data from three years of  mass shootings which those publishers define as any shooting that injures and/or kills four or more combined. This definition gives us 1,347 dead and 3,817  injured  from "mass shootings" for the three year period 2013 - 2015 (to date).  Before we talk about this comparatively small number of deaths and injury, some background statistics are in order on gun violence in America. I assume the data is accurate and analyze it as I find it for all my sources including Mass Shooting Tracker, CDC and the FBI.

GIS based precinct maps: Ballots Good, Jack and Joy.

These are 2015 precinct election maps. GIS code in R is time consuming and complex. Click to enlarge these maps. The equal frequency (quartile) class intervals are expressed as: (min,max) for good ballots for the 2014 and 2015 general elections. The Jack Louws, Joy Gilifilen, and  precinct differences (Jack - Joy) totals for 2015 are expressed in color driven scales which have separate ranges (indexes) per map. Both precincts 182 and 183 have part of their data hidden in the totals by the state of WA to protect privacy. The shape files  and precinct maps can be found here. My R code (which is very derivative - see 1,2) can be found here (3,4).  If you are a friend and you need code and data, email me.

2015 Voting Analysis Under Construction: Joy vs. Jack, Jail_yes vs. Jail_no

 By precinct diffs. Those points above the horizontal blue 0 line are precincts that sided with Jack Luows. Those points left of the vertical red 0 line are precincts that voted against the jail.   (Vertical Axis: (Louws - Gilfilen) ~ Horizontal Axis ( Jail_Yes - Jail_No)) . Strong relationships are revealed between those precincts voting  more for Jack and the Jail  (far right) and those voting more for Joy and not for the Jail (bottom left).  The dense 'crook' in the middle of the graph represents those precincts still mostly totaling for Jack  Luows but very split in voting for or against the jail.  Click to enlarge.

Race and WWU

Belina Seare, president of WWU’s Associated Students,  discussed racial threats made against her and others on WWU campus. King5 has additional reporting:

http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/2015/11/24/western-wash-cancels-classes-due-online-hate-speech/76303356/

http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/bellingham/2015/11/25/threatened-wwu-student-know-my-safety-not-priority/76381562/


http://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/local/article46488630.html

Still Counting Ballots, 11/16/2015 Matchback Report, We are the sixth highest in total ballots in WA.

Top ten WA Counties by ballots counted in table below. Note that Whatcom County outvoted three counties more populous than than itself this year, making us the county with the sixth largest vote in WA. 2014 population figures (1000s): Whatcom = 208K, Yakima = 247K, Kitsap = 254K, Thurston = 265K . High turnouts are very useful and advantageous. Politicians and other pundits notice when your county can "bring it"!

Matchbacks for 11/12/2015