What we’re doing today.
Comparing Midterm election performance in our Constitutional offices. That’s our governor, lt. governor, secretary of state, etc.
Ok, no suspense. Most popular elected official?
This guy.
If I asked you who the most popular Arkansas elected official was this Midterm, you might say Sarah Huckabee Sanders or John Boozman. But you’d be wrong.
It’s Tommy Land, our State Land Commissioner.
More people cast their vote for Tommy Land than any other official on the ballot in Arkansas this year – including the US Senator John Boozman.
If you guessed Sarah Huckabee Sanders? She actually performed worse than any other statewide elected official.
Performance by total votes received
Tommy Land received more than 611,000 votes, around 40,000 more votes than Sarah Huckabee Sanders received. That’s despite the fact that about 18,000 fewer people voted in the Land Commissioner’s race compared to the Governor’s race.
You can see the breakdown of the constitutional offices below. Basically, by total votes received, the order of performance was:
Land Commissioner – Tommy Land
Attorney General – Tim Griffin
Secretary of State – John Thurston
Auditor – Dennis Milligan
Treasurer – Mark Lowery
Lt. Governor – Leslie Rutledge
Governor – Sarah Huckabee Sanders
(click chart below to go to interactive version)
Remember in our previous post, we noted how important the number of candidates is when comparing race performance? That’s at play somewhat here. The top 3 candidates on the list above were all in 2-candidate races (a Republican and Democrat only). Three of the bottom 4 candidates were in races with 3 candidates. Mark Lowery in the Treasurer’s Office was the outlier there, receiving less votes than the other Republicans in 2-candidate races.
You can see this in the chart below. It’s divided into sections – races with 2 candidates and races with 3 candidates. The horizontal line across represents the average number of votes the winner got for each race type.
(click chart below to go to interactive version)
Performance by % of vote attained
So what if we look at the percent of the vote the candidate received instead of the total votes they received? Does that change anything? Not substantially.
Statewide Republican candidates averaged 66% of the vote. That’s slightly worse than the average performance of Republican State Senators (69%) and Republican State Representatives (68%). So one way to think about this is the local Republican candidates tended to do better than the statewide Republican candidates.
You can see below that the top performer, Tommy Land, received 69% of the vote, 3% more than the average. Sarah Huckabee Sanders received 63% of the vote, 3% less than the average.
(click chart below to go to interactive version)
Remember how we keep harping on how important the number of candidates in the race is? You can see that here. Those in 2-candidate races averaged 68% of the vote. Those in 3-candidate races averaged 65% of the vote.
Here are those same races broken down by the number of candidates in the race.
(click chart below to go to interactive version)
Next up?
So, you can see that Republicans clearly dominated the races for Constitutional offices, with slight variations in performance among the candidates. And perhaps the stronger candidates weren’t necessarily the ones that were expected.
Next up, we’ll dive into what may have caused those variations and where particular candidates did well and maybe not so well. We’ll look at gender, geography, and third-party pull.
Coming up next: Why and Where