Saturday’s upcoming election for the recently vacated District 2 seat has low voter turn out and the voters are overwhelmingly older educated voters. Running for the open seat are Josh Acevedo, Verónica Carbajal, Judy Gutierrez and Ben Mendoza. At the start of the election cycle, Carbajal had significant name recognition and engaged canvassers talking to potential voters. According to a social media post made by Carbajal, her election team has reached about 4,000 voting households. However, the early voting period, which ended on Tuesday, shows that voters are not engaged and the number of likely ballots cast will be about 1,800 ballots cast in this election. As of Tuesday, when the early voting period ended, 1,077 ballots have been cast.
Although there are four candidates vying for the seat, only three candidates; Acevedo, Carbajal and Gutierrez are viable to win the seat. Ben Mendoza is unlikely to receive enough votes to change the results once the ballots are counted. The first to announce her candidacy was Carbajal who enjoyed significant name recognition and deployed an organized team of volunteers. Acevedo, and to a lesser extent Gutierrez, who both enjoy name recognition in the district launched their campaigns. On the surface the likely election outcome is down to Acevedo and Carbajal. However, although Gutierrez is not campaigning significantly, the El Paso Progress SPAC has supported Gutierrez and focused on bringing attention to Carbajal’s vote to issue $400 million in non-voter approved debt for the University Medical Center of El Paso (UMC). The SPAC has also highlighted Carbajal’s support of Proposition K in mailers to voters in the district.
The likely beneficiary of the SPACS’ activities is Josh Acevedo as he has focused on campaigning while the SPAC has likely siphoned votes from Carbajal.
El Paso News analyzed the voters that cast ballots during the early voting period. We also applied the voters to our modeling. This is what we found.
The average age of the voters who voted during the early voting period is 70. Voters 70 and older account for 55.27% of the ballots. Voters older than 59, but less than 70 account for 26.55% of those to have voted. Voters that are 40 to 59 years old accounted for 13.06% of the votes cast during early voting. The youngest voter was a 23-year-old voter and those in their twenties accounted for less than 2% of the voters who cast a ballot through Tuesday. The older voting age suggests that voters are voting for Acevedo or Gutierrez.
We also noted that 78%, or 841 of the voters who cast a ballot during the early voting period also voted in the May 6, 2023 election where Proposition K, the so-called climate charter, was rejected by 82% of the voters. It is likely that the 841 voters that voted in May remember Carbajal’s support of Proposition K and their votes may reflect similar results to their votes in May, especially considering the age of the voters casting ballots this cycle.
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El Paso News modeled 85% of the voters who have cast a ballot through Tuesday. According to our models, 14% of the voters are modeled Republican voters. Our models also suggest that 56% of the voters have a college degree or higher. Our modeling also shows that 46% of the voters earn less than $50,000 annually.
The largest turnout of voters by precinct were precincts 69 (12%), and 60 & 71 at 10%, each. Five precincts: 65, 79, 80, 81 and 188 each had less than 1% of the ballots cast. Two precincts, 65 and 188 each had two voters cast a ballot.
Finally, 47% of the ballots cast were female and 32% we modeled as likely married.
Election Day is Saturday. We expect that the Elections Department will release the early voting results by 7:00pm. If our predictive model holds, we expect that the early voting results will hold through Election Day giving us an indication of the results before the final ballot is counted.
El Paso News will be monitoring the results and will report the results as they become available.
As a reminder, our voter modeling is open to any voter in El Paso free of charge to review and to create your own models. Simply go to El Paso Votes to create a free account.
Disclosure
Each election cycle, El Paso News publishes the names of the political candidates that the technology company owned by Martín Paredes provides branding and technology services to. Although not required to, we provide this list to our readers for transparency purposes. Clients of Cognent have no influence over the stories we choose to cover. Click here for more details.