Mapping the N.M. vote

County-by-county breakdown of the 2008 presidential election in New Mexico. Maps by NMI

RIO RANCHO — President-elect Barack Obama won New Mexico easily on Tuesday. Obama received 120,000, or 14.6 percent, more votes than his Republican counterpart, John McCain, in New Mexico. This landed Obama five more electoral votes on his way to a provisional 365-173 victory in the Electoral College. As a result, New Mexico is once again blue in the ubiquitous red-blue election result maps from different news sources.

But New Mexico as a blue state doesn’t tell the whole story.

Not all of New Mexico went equally to Obama or McCain. Some areas were more favorable to the Democratic candidate, some to the Republican. There are 33 counties in New Mexico, and Obama won 18, or 54 percent of them. The counties that went to Obama include the state’s four largest in terms of voter registration — Bernalillo, Doña Ana, Santa Fe and Sandoval. These four counties account for 56.98 percent of the state’s registered voters. And Obama won these counties by an average of 26.32 percent over John McCain. This was an 116,199-vote advantage. Obama ended up winning by 120,197 votes, according to preliminary numbers from the Secretary of State’s office.

As a point of comparison, Obama outperformed John Kerry’s 2004 totals significantly in these four key counties. Kerry won these counties by an average of 12.07 percent. Kerry, in fact, lost Sandoval County by 2.71 percent to George W. Bush. Kerry won these counties by a combined total of 40,413. Kerry lost the state by 5,988 votes.

How Barack Obama did compared to Al Gore in 2000 (left) and John Kerry in 2004 (right). The darker the shade of blue in each map indicates the degree to which Obama outperformed the Gore or Kerry vote. Green represents the counties that the Gore vote outperformed the Obama vote. Kerry did not outperform Obama in any New Mexico county.

And while Bernalillo and Doña Ana counties were within 5 percent margins of victory for Kerry in 2004, both were above 15 percent margins for Obama in 2008.

The difference between Gore’s slight victory in the state in 2000 and Obama’s large victory were just as striking in the state’s four most populous counties. Gore won by just 10.64 percent in these four counties, with a total of 24,380. Gore won the state by 366 votes. And, like Kerry four years later, Gore lost Sandoval County to Bush, by 1.65 percent.

But it wasn’t just these four counties that sealed the deal for the new president-elect. Obama outperformed Kerry in all 33 counties. Overall Obama outperformed Kerry by 15.51 percent in the state. County by county, it ranged from a 2.52 percent in final results in Harding County to 24.45 percent in Mora County. Obama outperformed Gore in 30 of the 33 counties in the state, only trailing Gore in DeBaca, Union and Eddy counties. All three went to the Republicans easily in each of the last three elections.

County-by-county results from the 2000 presidential election (left) and 2004 (right). Dark blue or red indicates a larger margin of victory for the Democrat or Republican, respectively.

Voter turnout

The voter turnout was actually slightly better in the 15 counties McCain won than in the 18 counties that went for Obama.

In the McCain counties, 68.45 percent of registered voters cast presidential ballots, while in the Obama counties, the figure was 66.41 percent. But the total of registered voters in the Obama counties was significantly higher. The registration in Obama counties was 925,911 — or more than 75 percent of the state’s registered voters. McCain counties contain just 267,079 registered voters.

The fact that voters largely voted along party lines did not help McCain either. According to CNN exit polling, which this reporter told readers to ignore but will now proceed to do the exact opposite, 91 percent of Democrats voted for Obama, while an equal percentage of Republicans voted for McCain. Democrats hold a registration advantage of 52 percent to 33 percent, with 12.4 percent decline-to-state (also known as independents) and 2 percent registered with other parties. This exit polling shows that 28 percent of the electorate were decline-to-state voters, which would mean that 228,655 decline-to-state voters voted. But there are just 184,846 decline-to-state voters, according to the Secretary of State’s office. Adding in third parties to this number would push that total to 217,700. Another reason not to believe exit polling.

But the trend is clear — Obama managed at least to come near McCain’s performance within his own party. In CNN’s 2004 exit polling, just 84 percent of Democrats voted for Kerry in New Mexico, compared to Bush retaining 95 percent of New Mexico Republican voters that year.

Map of turnout in the 2008 president election by county. The darker the color, the higher the percentage of votes cast relative to total registered voters in each county.

Over 70 percent of registered voters in key counties like Bernalillo (71.4 percent), Santa Fe (71.85 percent) and Sandoval (73.06 percent) cast ballots in the presidential race. Meanwhile in the largest county that favors Republicans, San Juan County, 69.96 percent of registered voters cast ballots in the presidential race. When three of the four big counties go for Obama by above 55 percent and are in the top 10 for voter turnout, that shows that Obama’s get-out-to-vote efforts were very successful.

Ballots cast in presidential race down from 2004

Interestingly enough, presidential ballots cast were actually down from 2004. In the Kerry-Bush race, 73.7 percent of registered voters cast ballots. In Sandoval County in 2004, 71.7 percent of registered voters voted in the presidential race. In Santa Fe in 2004, 71.6 percent of registered voters participated in the presidential election. In Doña Ana County, 67.6 percent of registered voters voted in 2004, compared to just 61.3 percent in 2008. Doña Ana ranked 28th of 33 counties.

Also interesting are the vote totals of New Mexico, compared to past elections. In 2004 Bush won by 0.79 percent of the vote. In 2000 Gore won by a razor-thin 0.06 percent of the vote. But even the relatively easy victories by Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 were not near the level of Obama’s victory. In 1992 Clinton won by 8.56 percent of the vote. In 1996, the incumbent Democratic president’s margin of victory dipped to 7.32 percent. But even with the victory, the largest by a Democrat in New Mexico since President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, Obama was no match for the juggernaut of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. In 1980, Reagan won by 18.19 percent of the vote in New Mexico. In 1984, Reagan won by 18.19 percent. His successor, President George H.W. Bush, couldn’t match that level of victory, winning by 4.96 percent.

Also notable is that Obama outperformed the national average by such a wide margin. Obama’s nationwide victory was 6.35 percent. New Mexico’s 14.6-percent victory represents the first time since Reagan’s first victory that New Mexico has voted for the president by a percentage margin twice that of the national vote.

In 1980, Reagan won nationally by 9.74 percent over President Jimmy Carter. In each election since then, New Mexico has voted for the victor by within 3 percent of the national popular vote percentage.

So what changed?

It appears that the Obama campaign was more successful than McCain’s in getting its voters out. Obama had 39 field offices in New Mexico, while McCain had just 10. The much-vaunted 72-hour, get-out-to-vote operation that helped George W. Bush win two elections was no match for the army of volunteers and staffers that the Obama campaign had in New Mexico and, indeed, nationwide. As documentary photographer Brett Marty outlined in a Daily Kos diary, the disparity between the ground games of the two campaigns was staggering even back in September:

For a state that went to Bush by only 5,988 votes in 2004, it was a shock to see how lopsided the state was in terms of field offices. Obama had just opened his 39th office when we were there in mid-September, all of which were heavily active. McCain had just gone from five offices to a generous “ten,” a good portion of which turned out to be skeleton operations.

The mood of the year wasn’t a help to McCain either. The same wave that swept Obama to a large electoral- and popular-vote victory also helped Democrats capture every federal office in 2008 by wide margins. Look back Tuesday for analysis of the Senate race and three congressional races county-by-county.