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PolitickerKY Partners
November 25, 2008 - 1:25pm
News
Heavy straight-ticket voting in one county has local official questioning party labels
By Trey Pollard, PolitickerKY.com ReporterWestern Kentucky's Henderson County was one of eight Kentucky counties that went for President-elect Barack Obama in this year's general election. A new analysis by The Gleaner newspaper in Henderson finds that one-third of the county's voters selected a straight-ticket option - a trend that led one local official said had him contemplating switching parties.
Several precincts in Henderson had over forty percent of voters choose straight-ticket votes, with Democratic straight-tickets topping Republican straight-tickets by about two-to-one.
Those margins evidently were noticed by some local officials, including Henderson City Commissioner Robby Mills - the only elected registered Republican in the area.
"I consider myself to represent the people of Henderson; I believe I'm pretty much a middle ground person," Mills told the Gleaner, noting he was considering changing party affiliation. "It tells me that I may be more of a Democrat than a Republican when it comes to representing people."
Henderson favored Obama by 2.1 percent this year, but went Republican for President in 2004, picking George W. Bush for re-election by nearly 13 percent.
The county went Democratic in all three elections prior to 2004.
Related topics: Barack Obama
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Interesting analsysis by the
Interesting analsysis by the Henderson paper, but to think that Sandy Watkins the JE is taking credit is a far stretch of the imagination.
First, Their local media market is fed from Evansville which was receiving paid campaign commercials from Obama every other minute, thus they were being bombarded with pro Obama messages just as Hoosiers were.
Secondly, Lunsford actually got more votes than Obama 10,049 to Lunsfords 11,048. How much of that was drive by the fact Lunsford came to Henderson a few times or the folks in Henderson were still seething over a special senate election a few years is unknown.
The 2nd area you have to look at would be the 1 st CD. Whitfield trounced Heather Ryan 11,290 to 8,155 giving him the largest winning margin of any federal office seeker. If the good folks were voting their "consicence" as the JE describes, this number would not have been nearly as lopsided.
Yes, the media does drive the vote. In Obamas case it helped dramatically, however in Whitfields, it was sheer name id, as he did relatively little campaigning or paid media in the Evansville market.
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