Primary Election Wrap-up

The 2011 Kentucky Primary Election is now behind us and we can take some time to analyze the results and the impact of our Voter Empowerment work before moving forward.

The strongest theme throughout the day, unfortunately, was low voter turnout, predicted between 9% and 10%.  Actual turnout was still quite poor, but at least beat the odds a bit to hit 10.35% - a good bit above the abysmal 1999 primary turnout, but still a far cry from the numbers you'd think would be necessary to have a Democracy. 

We suspect that our 7,000 KFTC members voted in much higher numbers, but we'll have to check the statistics in a few months and post that information later. 

KFTC's non-partisan Voter Empowerment work this primary was humble, but important, including voter registration events in many communities earlier this year, solid voter mobilization phone banks in several chapters last week, passing out voter guides, receiving 13,000 page views on our site at www.KentuckyElection.org,   running a voter mobilization add on Facebook that was seen 800,000 times, 950 people pledged to vote through a KFTC Facebook event, we sent a postcard mailer to 13,400 households of KFTC members and friends, and kept up a good drum-beat of news coming through our blog, balancing the scales, etc. about the primary, and there were some other good chapter-level events to educate and mobilize voters.

Here are some of the actual results of the races:

Governor - Republican Primary
Name                        Votes      Vote %
Williams, David       68,540      48%
Moffett, Phil             53,950      38%
Holsclaw, Barbara   19,616      14%

Secretary of State - Democratic Primary
Name                      Votes       Vote %
Grimes, Alison        85,438       55%
Walker, Elaine         69,202       45%

Secretary of State - Republican Primary
Name                     Votes         Vote %
Johnson, Bill         66,430        50%
Legg, Hilda            65,332        50%

Auditor - Republican Primary
Name                       Votes         Vote %
Kemper, John          70,874        57%
Wuchner, Addia     52,876        43%
               
Treasurer - Democratic Primary
Name                         Votes     Vote %
Hollenbach, Todd     106,174     71%
Hamrick, Steve          43,463     29%

Agriculture Commissioner - Democratic Primary
Name                         Votes     Vote %
Farmer, Robert         45,666     30%
Lackey, John            31,560     21%
Wilson, B.D.            29,245     19%
Gritton, Stewart       24,897     17%
Williams, David       18,879     13%

Agriculture Commissioner - Republican Primary
Name                          Votes     Vote %
Comer, James             86,322     67%
Rothenburger, Rob   43,142     33%

An interesting take-away from this is just how few votes it may have taken to shift the results of some of these races one way or another.  The closest by far was the Republican Secretary of State's race, won by just 1,098 votes.  But just 14,000 to 18,000 votes separate such large races as Democratic Secretary of State, Republican Auditor, Democratic Agriculture Commissioner, and even the Republican Governor's Primary.

Looking on to the big election this Fall, Oct 11th is the Voter Registration Deadline, followed by the General Election on Tuesday, November 8th.

And these will be the match ups:

Governor - Steve Beshear (D) vs. David Williams (R) vs. Gatewood Galbraith (I)

Secretary of State - Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) vs. Bill Johnson (R)

Agriculture Commissioner - Bob Farmer (D) vs. James Comer (R)

Attorney General - Jack Conway (D) vs. Todd P'Pool (R)

Treasurer - Todd Hollenbach (D) vs. KC Crosbie (R) vs. Ken Moellman (I)

State Auditor - Adam Edelen (D) vs John Kemper (R)

*Note that the deadline to actually file for office has not yet passed for independent candidates and so the field might widen a bit between now and then.

As for KFTC's non-partisan Voter Empowerment work, we'll be sending candidate surveys shortly to candidates who did not have primary contests to start things  moving on our voter guides. 

We have a lot of plans to make about our door-to-door work, voter registration campaigns and phone banks and just how much effort to put into those endeavors.  We'll post more as the plans start to come together.