Senate vote by Boston neighborhood
By adamg - 1/22/10 - 1:35 pm
Bob LeLievre breaks down Coakley's large win in Boston by neighborhood, along with comparisons to 2006 numbers for Deval Patrick. Some interesting numbers: She lost South Boston, barely took West Roxbury, Charlestown and Tom Menino's redoubt of Readville, but got 96% of the vote in Mattapan and 92% in Roxbury.
Comments
Sounds like....
...Irish Catholics in Boston didn't like Martha C much.
Perhaps
I think it's probably an easier sell to say she didn't have strong support among conservatives, Catholic or otherwise. Why a fellow who posed nude for Cosmo DID is a good question, though :-)
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
Or rather working
Or rather working Catholics.
Quincy, Waltham, yada yada.
Give Teddy credit, he's always reach out to consituents. Martha wrote them off a sure bets and paid them no attention. They didn't appreciate that one bit.
Can't draw any conclusions
I don't understand the results of this race, no matter how much I read about it. Maybe it's too obvious for me to understand.
I really like the author's spreadsheet of break-down by neighborhood, not just because it shows the results of the Coakley-Brown-Kennedy race but because it shows which wards/precincts are in each neighborhoods - something I've never been able to find, elsewhere.
Brown won West Roxbury
From the West Roxbury Transcript:
"Brown took 6,142 votes to Coakley’s 5,967, or 49.4 percent to 48 percent, in West Roxbury."
and a link: http://www.wickedlocal.com/west-roxbury/news/x1689215885/Brown-wins-election-and-West-Roxbury-but-Coakley-took-Boston-and-Roslindale
That first column - % White
That first column - % White Population is from the 2000 Census, and needs to be updated. Readville is far from 84% white now. The vast majority of kids I see on the streets and in the playgrounds are black or hispanic. I'd be amazed if Readville is 70% white now - the actual number is probably closer to 50%. Tom Menino's old redoubt - the heavily Italian-American community of 40-50 years ago - doesn't exist any more.
Not sure that's better ..
The choices are data from the United States Census Bureau or one person's school playground assessment? No offense, but I'll go with the US Census.
Ten-year-old census data
Just sayin'.
(Also, shortly after the 2000 census, I was working in a community where a huge chunk of the population were Latino farm workers, many of whom were migrant and many of whom were undocumented. Census data said the town was 84% non-Latino white. School data showed that kids attending school were 41% non-Latino white. For you public-school-fearing folks around here, remember that this is in an area where there's not much else. Yes, I know school data is more accurate than someone looking around at a playground, but just pointing out how the census sometimes misses people.)
Boston Neighborhood designations
I got the precinct-to-neighborhood links from a BRA file 7-8 years ago. Apparently there are a few versions floating around, because I've had a few people argue strongly about certain precincts being in the wrong neighborhood.
In any case, I think it's way more interesting to look at election results this way vs. by ward, which mostly don't correspond to neighborhoods very well, and are really only understood by a small group of city hall insiders.
Census race data
The census data used to generate the Boston neighborhood summaries is tabulated from precinct data from the full census every ten years. The census does a precinct breakdown to help folks re-draw legislative districts every ten years - this is the data that got Tom Finneran kicked out of office by perjuring himself by claiming he wasn't involved in making his district much more white.
So the next update will be available by mid-2111, after the 2010 census is all processed. You can see how Boston changed from 1990 to 2000 here:
http://bostonmaelections.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/boston-population-changes-1990-2000/
For example, Readville went from 97% white in 1990 to 84% white in 2000.
Vote
I too think it's probably an easier way to say that she didn't have strong support among conservatives, Catholic or otherwise.