Harris County, TX - Presidential results precinct map link

[freepcrusher]

also one of my questions is this: if you live in Tomball or Cyfair and you are sort of a Mark Kirk republican, what party do you run as if you want to run for office (congress or state lege)

[Indy Texas]

The "White Flight havens" on Houston's periphery have always creeped me out. I tend to think if you want to have 90%+ of your neighbors be non-Hispanic whites, you need to find somewhere other than Houston to live (Utah or Minnesota, perhaps). I'm occasionally in Cypress visiting family friends who are a Santorum-Palin GOP's wet dream: wife never attended college, they go to an evangelical church twice a week, husband collects bumper stickers that are the Right's equivalent of snark ("Somewhere in Kenya, a village is missing its idiot"). And the cookie cutter houses around the cul de sac are full of cookie cutter neighbors; an F-150 and an Expedition in every driveway (preferably with a Browning deer or Semper Fi sticker) and Fox News on every plasma TV.

what's the SES of the area like? The way you're describing them, I'm surprised they can afford to live in that area.

Houston-area real estate is dirt cheap. It's a combination of flat land that doesn't have to be graded; no zoning laws restricting housing supply; cheap immigrant labor; and ample real estate as the small farms and ranches that used to occupy most of the outlying areas have been sold by their heirs. You can get a 3-bedroom/2.5-bath house in a fairly decent neighborhood for less than $150K in these parts. You could argue that this contributes to the conservative proclivities of the inhabitants. A working-class family that would be renting in other parts of the country can own their own home and have it paid off within a fairly reasonable time frame, and they view themselves more as "taxpayers" and "stakeholders" in the middle- and upper-class sense.

[Indy Texas]

also one of my questions is this: if you live in Tomball or Cyfair and you are sort of a Mark Kirk republican, what party do you run as if you want to run for office (congress or state lege)

You don't. A moderate Republican couldn't get elected in this area before 2010, let alone in the current Republican primary climate. This is the part of Harris County that keeps sending Debbie Riddle - famous for her illegal immigrant and terror baby conspiracy rants on CNN alongside Louie Gohmert - to the State House. She got primaried last year by a man who thought she wasn't conservative enough.

[freepcrusher]

also one of my questions is this: if you live in Tomball or Cyfair and you are sort of a Mark Kirk republican, what party do you run as if you want to run for office (congress or state lege)

You don't. A moderate Republican couldn't get elected in this area before 2010, let alone in the current Republican primary climate. This is the part of Harris County that keeps sending Debbie Riddle - famous for her illegal immigrant and terror baby conspiracy rants on CNN alongside Louie Gohmert - to the State House. She got primaried last year by a man who thought she wasn't conservative enough.

so do you run as a dem instead?

[Indy Texas]

also one of my questions is this: if you live in Tomball or Cyfair and you are sort of a Mark Kirk republican, what party do you run as if you want to run for office (congress or state lege)

You don't. A moderate Republican couldn't get elected in this area before 2010, let alone in the current Republican primary climate. This is the part of Harris County that keeps sending Debbie Riddle - famous for her illegal immigrant and terror baby conspiracy rants on CNN alongside Louie Gohmert - to the State House. She got primaried last year by a man who thought she wasn't conservative enough.

so do you run as a dem instead?

You don't run. Period. Most of the state/local races in that area have Republicans running unopposed. Occasionally you have a token Democratic candidate, but it's usually either a liberal who has no chance of winning or an Old White Trial Lawyer type who also has no chance of winning.

I would really like to see the Texas Democrats find more Kathleen Sebelius types who can appeal to suburban Republicans - probably not many in the area we're discussing but more in the inner suburbs where the KBH-type Republicans are.

[AndrewTX]

Hey! I live in Harris County. YAY!

[BaldEagle1991]

Hey! I live in Harris County. YAY!

Obama won it though.

[BaldEagle1991]

I would really like to see the Texas Democrats find more Kathleen Sebelius types who can appeal to suburban Republicans - probably not many in the area we're discussing but more in the inner suburbs where the KBH-type Republicans are.

I think we have a few but they are too scared to run.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

Seems like a very polarized county (Houston is hard blue in non-Atlas colors, the suburbs hard red)

[Chaddyr23]

Wow this is a pretty amazing map. You can tell what demographic groups live where base on this map. haha