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| In the 2018 Whatcom Conservation District election, Alan Chapman (endorsed by both the Riveter's Collection and the Whatcom Democrats) appears to have defeated incumbent Larry Helm by 31 votes. Last year, Heather Christianson defeated Suzanne Snyder. Click on the chart to enlarge. View this data on a wide screen. Candidate statements here. |
Candidate Vote_1 Vote_2 TotalVotes Round2minusRound1 PCT_Vote_Round2
1: AlanChapman 1796 2110 2110 314 0.15
2: DavidM.Kroontje 183 204 204 21 0.10
3: LarryHelm 1733 2079 2079 346 0.17
4: undervote 1 1 1 0 0.00
5: write_ins 1 1 1 0 0.00
2110 - 2079
[1] 31 Vote margin of victory for Alan Chapman.
Data
Date,Round,Candidate,Votes
03/14/2018,Vote_1,AlanChapman,1796
03/14/2018,Vote_1,LarryHelm,1733
03/14/2018,Vote_1,DavidM.Kroontje,183
03/14/2018,Vote_1,write_ins,1
03/14/2018,Vote_1,undervote,1
03/19/2018,Vote_2,AlanChapman,2110
03/19/2018,Vote_2,LarryHelm,2079
03/19/2018,Vote_2,DavidM.Kroontje,204
03/19/2018,Vote_2,write_ins,1
03/19/2018,Vote_2,undervote,1
R Code:
library(data.table)
library(lattice)
WCD2018 = dcast(fread("WCD2018.csv"),Candidate ~ Round, value.var="Votes")
WCD2018[Vote_1 > 1,TotalVotes:=Vote_2]
WCD2018[,Round2minusRound1:=Vote_2 - Vote_1]
WCD2018[,PCT_Vote_Round2:= Round2minusRound1/Vote_2]
barchart(Candidate ~ Vote_1 + Vote_2,data=WCD2018[1:3],
auto.key=TRUE,
origin=0,
horizontal=TRUE)
WCD2018[]
3 comments:
Kroontje had more votes than the margin between Helm and Chapman. Do we know whether his voters come from the left or the right of the spectrum? If he was on the right, it looks like he was a spoiler that caused Helm to lose.
Kroontje had more votes than the margin between Helm and Chapman. Do we know whether his voters come from the left or the right of the spectrum? If he was on the right, it looks like he was a spoiler that caused Helm to lose.
This can be hard to determine. For example, a third party candidate in a small election such as this may have a singular following that wouldn't have voted for anyone else. (This election is technically non-partisan.) Also, it is possible independent or third party candidates simply draw from both middle left and middle right, neutralizing the spoiler effect. Comparatively small social effects can have large consequences in small samples. However, the election was very close.
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