Kevin Roden for Denton City Council

Did a “College Town” Ban Fracking?

November 7th, 2014Uncategorized5 comments

If Tuesday’s fracking ban really was the result of a good number of the city’s 50,000 college students exercising their predictably left-of-center viewpoints at the ballot box, perhaps the results of this election would be easy to dismiss. Already you are seeing many among the industry and state entities writing Denton’s historic vote off as the work of an activist student population.  And most national news stories on the topic refer to Denton as “a small college town.”

We don’t yet have specific demographic information for election day voters, but given that an early voting location was on the campus of UNT and we faced all-day heavy rain showers on election day, it is safe to say the college students of Denton were more likely to early vote.

Of the roughly 15,000 early voters in the city of Denton, the average age of all voters was 51. That’s only down slightly from the 2010 midterm elections where the average age was 53.  What’s more, only 1030 of them were between the ages of 18 and 22 (the average age of college students). That’s only about 7% of all the voters (and likely to go down in percentage once the election dat voters are factored in).

That is up from 2010 when only 3.3% of the total voters were of college age.

But, and this is the most important stat, the 7% figure is still below the percentage of college age registered voters in the city of Denton – 12% of registered voters in our city are between the ages of 18-22. College students didn’t even vote in proportion to their numbers in the general registered voter population.

Here’s an additional breakdown from Devin Taylor:

The only group that showed up LESS than the 18-22′s was the 23-30′s. Over half of 70+ year olds early voted, 1 in 8 college age voters and less than 1 in 10 23-30 year olds bothered to show up.

Average Early Voter turnout 24.27%
Born after 1991 12.37%
1984-1991 9.61%
1975-1984 15.47%
1965-1974 19.26%
1955-1964 28.16%
1945-1954 44.28%
pre-1945 52.12%

AN UPDATE (11/8): After this post was written, the Denton Taxpayers for a Strong Economy put out a press release arguing that the Fracking Ban “would have failed if not for massive bloc voting by University of North Texas and Texas Woman’s University college students.” Their data is wildly inaccurate, claiming to cite voting data that doesn’t even exist such as supposed distinctions between “permanent residents” and non-permanent residents.

Fortunately, some journalists are beginning to call foul and question their analysis. Here’s a story that aired on WFAA on Friday night.