Moving in the Right Direction

When I first looked at Tuesday's poll results I wasn't very happy with what I saw. Nationally, Bob Barr didn't do nearly as well as anticipated. In Virginia, he did even worse. In Fairfax County, Barr's vote total and percentage were both much lower than the LP ticket from 2004. Barr received 1,253 votes, which is only .28% of all votes cast in the county this year. In 2004, Badnarik received 1,743 votes, which is .37% of votes cast that year. Any way you look at them, these are pretty lousy results.

So, if I had just stopped there, I would have nothing to feel good about. Fortunately, I dug much deeper, and here is what I found:

Bob Barr received about 30% fewer votes than Badnarik in Fairfax County. However, in the precincts that we targeted with canvassing efforts, yard signs, and sample ballots, the results were much better. In the Lake Braddock precinct the LP presidential ticket received 113% more votes than in 2004. In the Signal Hill precinct, the ticket received 38% more votes than in 2004. These increases are great, and seem even better when you consider that the county as a whole cast far fewer votes for the LP ticket.

As for Bill Redpath, he received 2,454 votes in Fairfax County - about twice as many votes as Barr. He also received substantially more votes in our two target precincts than he did in other similar precincts. Unfortunately, we don't have any previous results to measure against, but it looks as though our efforts paid off for the Redpath campaign too.

Now, I know that this is not a scientific comparison. There are many factors that could have caused the increase in LP votes in these two precincts. However, it seems likely that our money and hard work may have paid off. At least, that's what I'm going with.