Local Motion

When I was born in Denton in August 1973, the city of Denton was a small university town that was beginning to grow as a bedroom community for commuters working in Dallas and Fort Worth. A number of small communities, predominantly farming or ranching in nature, were scattered across the remainder of mostly rural Collin County and slightly less rural Denton County: Corinth, Flower Mound, Allen and Frisco.

Looking down on the same region today, you see not fields of grain and cattle, but fields of some of the fastest growing suburban and exurban area in the United States. Master planned communities, toll roads, malls and beep-and-creep traffic congestion are the hallmarks of Collin and Denton County in 2005. Denton is no longer a small university town, but rather is the northernmost tip of North Texas' version of Southern California's Inland Empire, with a similarly developed sibling to our east in Collin County. No longer small nor farming nor ranching in nature, Corinth, Flower Mound, Allen and Frisco are all heavily suburbanized portions of these mirrored Inland Empires.

Denton County is one county among a tier of suburban/exurban/rural (SER) counties that border urban centers in the State of Texas. SER counties are found in close proximity to metropolitan areas, usually bordering an urban or urbanized county. These are also counties where Texas Democrats have lost the most electoral ground to Texas Republicans over the last three decades. Since these counties are among the fastest growing in the state, they will play key roles in shaping the political future of Texas.

In this article, we will examine Denton County's U.S. Senate, U.S. Presidential and Texas gubernatorial votes from the 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006 election cycles in the context of three other comparable SER counties in Texas: Denton's neighboring county to the east, Collin County, Fort Bend County (south of Harris County) and Williamson County (to the north of Travis County). As a starting point, Table 1 provides the 2005 estimated populations for selected Texas counties grouped by the core urban county and followed by the SER county (counties in the case of Dallas); the numbers for of the State of Texas are provided on the last line of the table for comparison.

Table 1: Texas County Demographics, 2000-2005

The pattern of SER counties and their wider metropolitan areas is easy to see in the data in Table 1: Population growth in SER counties outpaces that of their associated urban area several times over. The literature in geography, economics and sociology offers up many reasons for these types of growth, but the main one for most new residents of SER counties is the availability of affordable housing. While the motivations of people moving to SER counties do have an implied political subtext, the bottom line from a demographic point of view is that the SER counties have grown at a much more rapid pace than their urban neighbors in six of the seven years covered in this analysis.

Denton County: 2000-2006

For visual displays of electoral data from 2000-2006 used in this article, I've chosen to use difference scores instead of raw numbers of votes. Since the SER counties used in comparison to Denton County are of different sizes, it is not of much use to the reader to compare raw vote totals between counties, particularly since I want to use the state of Texas as a comparison category. Also, since we're comparing between years, there is an additional problem as well as the two just discussed: The number of registered voters will change from one election cycle to the next. Calculating a simple difference score in Excel (dividing the total number of Republican votes in a race by the total number of Democratic votes in a race) for each Presidential, Senatorial and Gubernatorial election provides the reader with an easy to understand difference score of the distance between Democratic and Republican vote totals in a given county in a given race in a given election cycle.

Figure 1 shows the difference scores from race to race across all statewide elections held between 2000 and 2006 in Denton County. Across both Presidential races in the time frame of this article and across both Governor's races in the time frame of this article, Denton County moved in a slightly Democratic direction. The dynamics in the difference of the Senate race scores is indeterminate.

Denton County in Comparison, 2000-2006

Figure 2 shows the change in difference scores in the different races by county with the entire state as a final reference category. Since the difference scores were calculated by dividing the raw number of Republican votes by the raw number of Democratic votes, a negative change from one election to the next indicates a Democratic gain while a positive change from one election to the next indicates a Republican gain. While there is more ground to make up for Democrats in SER counties, these numbers are encouraging. There was more change in favor of Democrats in SER counties in Presidential elections from 2000 to 2004; I do not think it is overly optimistic to expect even more change in favor of Democrats in 2008 since George W. Bush will no longer be the Republican candidate for President; it is particularly interesting to note that in two elections with a former Texas Governor on the Republican ticket, the second time obviously as an incumbent, the more Republican SER counties moved in a Democratic direction while the state as a whole moved in a slightly Republican direction.

In terms of who resides in the Governor's Mansion in Austin, the numbers are once more in favor of Democrats. When presented with an authentic Democratic candidate for Governor, Texans in SER counties moved in Chris Bell's favor. With another four years of Rick Perry's absentee leadership guaranteeing more Texans will be left behind in his second term, I believe that these numbers will continue to improve for Democrats in 2010 as long as we can avoid another candidate of opportunity such as we had in 2002. As with the Presidential numbers, Denton, Collin and Williamson all moved in a more Democratic direction than did Fort Bend and the rest of the state.

To my mind, the most interesting numbers across the board were in the Senate changes in differences. The impact that popular centrist Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk had on voters in SER counties as well as statewide is the strongest change from one election cycle to the next given the population and time frame examined in this article. While it is true that anyone doing even a minimum of active campaigning would be an improvement over Gene Kelly, the true impact of Kirk's campaign is seen in the change between Kirk's difference scores and those of Barbara Ann Radnofsky; her race was the only one in this population and time frame that became more Republican from one election cycle to the next. Without delving into linear regression and maximum likelihood estimation techniques to divine a statistical reason for this difference, I would venture the guess that a large part of it has to do with the fact that Ron Kirk's opponent was a polarizing first time candidate for Senate and Kirk had a long track record of public service culminating in being Mayor of Dallas while Radnofsky's opponent was a popular incumbent who was perceived as being centrist and Radnofsky entered the Senate race out of private legal practice. That difference in name recognition would be expected to play heavily in Ron Kirk's favor.

In conclusion, while Denton County has found itself deeply Republican over the six years of interest in this article, we are not without hope, nor are other Democrats in other SER counties like Collin, Fort Bend and Williamson. While we have more ground to cover and more obstacles to overcome, these findings should give us hope that we can organize ourselves, build out our ground game for 2008 and beyond and mobilize the wider community to continue to turn our county from a deep shade of red to a more politically-viable shade of blue.