Kevin Roden for Denton City Council

The Final Word on Demographics of Frack Ban Vote

November 12th, 2014Uncategorized1 comment

Last week we anticipated the industry political consultants would look for ways to justify how they spent $1 million to lose the frack ban election. Sure enough, they made a bunch of stuff up about supposed college “bloc voting,” threw around non-existent data about “permanent” and “transient”  residents of Denton, and all the while insinuated that young and non-home owning voters were less important in the future of a city. Using early election data available from the county election office, we demonstrated their narrative to be categorically false.

We now have complete voter data from the November 4 election to supplement our earlier analysis.

Out of 26,266 total Denton city voters:

• The average age of voters in this election was 52. That’s only down 1 year from the last midterm/gubernatorial election in November 2010.
• Only 1920 college-aged voters voted in this election. That’s only 7.3% of the total voting population.
• The frack ban won by 4386 votes – even if all of these young voters voted for the ban, that’s not even enough to split the spread in half.
• 4509 people registered to vote since May 1, 2014 in preparation for the Nov 4 election. Only 2084 of them showed up to vote in this election.