Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

In preparing a report for ACC's Center for Public Policy & Political Studies, I found an interesting relationship between the straight-ticket vote and the swing vote (non-straight-ticket vote) in the contest between incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Congressman Beto O'Rourke. In the seven counties that cast slightly more than one-half of the total vote in Texas, here is the relationship between the straight-ticket vote and swing vote in each county for each candidate. Although the correlation between the straight-ticket vote and swing vote is not perfectly correlated, the Pearson for Cruz is .854 and for O'Rourke is .874. It is fairly obvious that in these counties, both candidates did well in drawing the straight-ticket vote and the swing vote in the counties that they won. Here are the results for each of the counties in the graphs: Candidate County % STV % Swing Cruz Harris 44.0% ...