Politics

In part 1 of this series I discussed the formation of the Howard County Council as part of an bipartisan effort to modernize Howard County government at the time Columbia was founded, with five at-large council members elected in 1969. In part 2 we see the beginnings of a political backlash against Columbia on the part of rural Howard County voters, a backlash that however proves unable to stop the growing political power of Columbia. (Yes, we still haven’t talked about county council districts, let alone redistricting, but trust me, this is background you need to know.) ...

Now that the 2010 Maryland general election is over, the thoughts of Howard County political activists are turning to the 2014 county elections. Adding an extra twist to the conversation is the upcoming task (occasioned by the 2010 census) of redrawing district lines for national, state, and county legislative districts. I have a particular interest in redistricting as it relates to the Howard County Council, and have been doing some research into past council redistricting efforts in an effort to understand how we came to the present point. ...

In part 3 of this series we constructed a linear model in R to estimate the proportion of voters in the 2010 Howard County general election who are unaffiliated or members of other parties. (See also part 1 and part 2.) For our second prediction we’ll estimate the percentage of those voting who are Democrats. We’ll again make use of the lm() function, but this time we can make use of the fact that the result of lm() can be stored in a variable (which in this case we arbitrarily name lmd): ...

In part 1 of this series I discussed downloading and installing the R statistical package and loading it with Howard County election data, and then in part 2 we began to explore how to use that data to estimate the percentages of voters in the 2010 general election who are Democrats, Republicans, or unaffiliated or members of other parties. In our initial explorations we discovered that the percentage of those voting who were Republicans seemed to be relatively static over the years. ...

In a previous post I promised to explore how we can use the statistics package R to produce estimates for the relative proportions of Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated and other voters within the total population voting in the 2010 general election. However I spent all of last post on the preliminaries: how to download and install R, and how to load into R turnout data from past Howard County gubernatorial primary and general elections. In this post we can start doing some real work. ...

HoCo Rising recently commented on supposed high Republican turnout in the Maryland House of Delegates race in District 9A, and wondered whether Bob Flanagan would have beaten Courtney Watson if Republicans had seen similar turnout in Howard County Council District 1. Well, as commenter Ralph Norton was quick to point out, most of Council District 1 is actually in District 9A: Out of the 22 precincts in Council District 1, only 6 are not in 9A, and overall more than three quarters of the registered voters in Council District 1 vote in District 9A (28,335 registered voters out of 37,008 total registered voters in Council District 1 at the time of the general election). ...

There’s this meme going around that Howard County Republicans fared badly because Howard County has so many government workers, and they all vote for Democrats because they have an interest in growing the size of government. For example, from an Columbia Flier story quoting Joan Becker of the Howard County Republican Party: The Republican message of smaller government didn’t play well in Maryland, the home of hundreds of government agencies and contractors, Becker said. ...

The Maryland and Howard County general elections are now over, and we (mostly) know who won. However there’s still one major question I’m waiting on the answer to, namely, what were the relatively proportions of Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated and other voters within the total population voting in the general election? If you recall, I previously predicted that Democrats would be 46-47% of those voting in Howard County, Republicans 36%, and unaffiliated and other voters 16-17%. I made a similar prediction for Maryland statewide (54% Democrats, 33% Republicans, and 13% unaffiliated and other). I’m curious to see how close I came to the actual numbers. ...

Continuing my series of posts related to my political beliefs, today I thought I’d look at the issue of independent voters and what their “independence” actually entails. One of HoCo Rising’s comments to me was regarding whether the concept of a “partisan moderate” actually made sense. Whether the label actually applies to me is a separate question, and one which after thinking about it I’ll likely end up answering in the negative. However I did think it was interesting that the concept of being a political moderate seems to be getting conflated with the idea of being relatively nonpartisan and independent in one’s political views. ...

A while back in the course of a comment thread for a HoCo Rising post I promised to write more about my political views, so that people could decide whether I was a rabid lefty or just a wimpy lefty. Rather than do this in an organized way (“these are the things I believe,” “this is my position on the Nolan chart,” and so on), I thought it would be more fun to expose my beliefs in a more informal and indirect way by commenting on various issues that have come up on local blogs. (Warning: This is to a large degree me “thinking out loud,” so don’t expect it to be either totally comprehensive or totally coherent, just expect it to be long.) ...