For this electoral go-round, the Chronicle number crunching team decided to focus on two variables: turnout, and the average margin of victory per box for the winning candidate. Here’s what we found:
TURNOUT MAP
The red boxes represent the higher turnouts, gray represents below average. Clearly, the Turnout Fairy was working west of Lamar Boulevard, where we find all 13 boxes where turnout topped the May 1997 general election’s 17.09% citywide average. By contrast, even more boxes than usual voted at below this election’s 8.38% citywide average — the Low Turnout Zone, which used to be fairly well confined to the east and south, has now spread across the bulk of town. Nearly three-fourths of the total vote came from fewer than one-fourth of the city’s precincts.
PLACES 1 AND 4
And, big surprise, guess who those people voted for? Much is made of the Circle C bogeyman, where Chad Crow beat Daryl Slusher by 900 votes, but it only took three Central Austin boxes — Zilker, Mathews, and Rosedale elementaries — to more than completely wipe out the Circle C vote. Note how Slusher and Griffith’s big boxes — the blue ones — spread beyond the actual city center. Perhaps the best evidence that we are in a new political era: Both incumbents won handily at Anderson High School and at Casis Elementary. The traditional Northwest and Southwest voting blocs were, in this election, truncated to the few dark grey boxes on the map — which are, of course, the newly annexed neighborhoods, where people are so angry they even voted for Alyssa Eacono, the Place 3 candidate for student-body president.
ELECTION RESULTS
Total Votes 34,211 of 408,891 registered voters — 8.36% turnout
Place 1
| Daryl Slusher | 18,721 | 55.23% |
| Chad Crow | 9,653 | 28.48% |
| Marcos de Leon | 1,900 | 5.60% |
| Vic Vreeland | 1,544 | 4.55% |
| Dolores M. Duran | 1,150 | 3.39% |
| Scott White | 923 | 2.72% |
Place 3
| Jackie Goodman | 21,747 | 65.91% |
| Alyssa N. Eacono | 11,244 | 34.08% |
Place 4
| Beverly Griffith | 17,085 | 51.19% |
| Bob Stobaugh | 6,431 | 19.26% |
| Amy Wong Mok | 2,861 | 8.57% |
| Hector Ortiz | 1,986 | 5.95% |
| Linda Dailey | 1,552 | 4.65% |
| Chuck McMullen | 1,453 | 4.35% |
| Douglas G. Alford | 837 | 2.50% |
| Jennifer L. Gale | 691 | 2.07% |
| Ray Vrudhula | 478 | 1.43% |
MARGINS BY REGION
Those annexees can’t compete with a Central voting bloc, where Slusher and Griffith won every box by an average of more than 180 votes. It is notable that, while Griffith did better than Slusher, on average, in the Northwest and Southwest, the two incumbents had remarkably consistent results even though they were facing remarkably different fields of opponents. What that means is that people voted for ultra-right Chad Crow, and then turned around and voted for leftish candidates like Amy Mok, Hector Ortiz, and Linda Dailey.
| TURNOUT | CENTRAL | EAST | N/NE | S/SE | NW | SW | TOTAL |
| Total Boxes | 35 | 16 | 31 | 31 | 27 | 25 | 165 |
| Votes cast | 10,300 | 2,212 | 4,354 | 2,886 | 7,421 | 7,038 | 34,211 |
| Turnout % | 12.7% | 6.4% | %6.8 | 4.4% | 9.5% | 10.6% | %\8.4% |
| # of Boxes over 1997 | 9 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 14 |
| # of Boxes above average | 28 | 3 | 7 | 1 | 15 | 14 | 68 |
| PLACE 1 | |||||||
| Total Margin for Slusher* | 6,408 | 1,046 | 1,245 | 880 | 237 | 591 | 9,068 |
| Boxes won by Slusher | 35 | 16 | 29 | 26 | 18 | 16 | 140 |
| Avg. margin — votes | 183 | 65 | 43 | 35 | 37 | 49 | 79 |
| Avg. margin — % | 64.6% | 48.3% | 30.3% | 31.6% | 14.7% | 18.4% | 37.8% |
| Boxes won by Challengers | 0 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 9 | 9 | 25 |
| Avg. margin — votes | -7 | -4 | -101 | -153 | -93 | ||
| Avg. margin — % | -3.5% | -7.6% | -23.5% | -28.5% | -20.5% | ||
| PLACE 4 | |||||||
| Total Margin for Griffith* | 6,325 | 513 | 1,400 | 851 | 721 | -19 | 10,654 |
| Boxes won by Griffith | 35 | 12 | 31 | 28 | 22 | 18 | 146 |
| Avg. margin — votes | 181 | 50 | 45 | 31 | 60 | 63 | 80 |
| Avg. margin — % | 61.6% | 30.7% | 29.9%2 | 9.0% | 23.5% | 22.9% | 35.6% |
| Boxes won by Challengers | 0 | 4 | 0 | 3 | 5 | 7 | 10 |
| Avg. margin — votes | -22 | -6 | -118 | -164 | -97 | ||
| Avg. margin — % | -20.5% | -10.6% | -23.2% | -22.9% | -20.6% |
* Margin (plus or minus) compares the incumbent to the strongest challenger in each precinct; totals are slightly low, because the strongest challenger varied from box to box.
AND SOME ASIDES
The big loser of the day was undoubtedly Place 4 candidate Ray Vrudhula, whose supposedly high profile and commendable record as a planning commissioner got him fewer than 500 votes. Marcos de Leon surely underperformed as well, but his lousy showing is attributable as much to the nearly nonexistent turnout in his best boxes (in South/Southeast Austin and in West Campus) as to Chad Crow’s genuine, if insufficient, support throughout much of Austin. Conversely, Bob Stobaugh’s overall second-place, double-digit finish is a little misleading; outside of the high-turnout Northwest and Southwest, the race for runner-up in Place 4 was quite competitive, with Mok, Ortiz, and Dailey showing more strength than Stobaugh in Central, East, and South/Southeast Austin. All nine candidates in Place 4 — even Jennifer Gale — managed to score second place in at least one box
This article appears in May 7 • 1999 and May 7 • 1999 (Cover).