Morganton’s Votes Compared to Georgia’s Numbers

Super Tuesday.  It’s an opportunity to see how folks in my neck of Fannin County, Morganton, feel about the presidential candidates without having to ask noisy questions to neighbors about how they voted.  So, at 7:20 I headed over to Morganton’s City Hall annex on Lake Drive to find out the political lay of the land around Hwy. 60 south.

I got the numbers hot off the press, when the precinct first publicly posted its results on the door.  By law, precincts must publicly post their numbers at the precinct before delivering their locked boxes to the Board of Elections.

549 people voted at the Morganton precinct: 62 Democrats and 487 Republicans. For Democrats, it was 42 votes for Clinton and 20 votes for Sanders.  Percentage wise, Clinton was roughly 3% lower and Sanders 3% higher than overall Democratic results in Georgia.  For Republicans, Trump, with 257 votes, represented 53% of Morganton’s Republican voters.  Statewide, he only got 39%.  The next highest vote getters were Cruz with 98 votes and Rubio with 68 votes.  For Cruz, it was just 4% less than state results of 24.7%.  Rubio, on the other hand, with 68 votes, scored 10% less in Morganton than he did across Georgia.  Carson with 39 votes was at 8% compared to his statewide percentage of 6.3%.  Kasich, with represented 4% of Morganton’s voters, which is 1.5% less than his statewide take.  Since, Georgia’s ballots still had names of candidates who had dropped out of the race weeks before, 4 voters were able to vote for their first choice of candidates – two votes to Bush, one to Fiorina and one to Huckabee.

So, with 549 votes, I can describe my Democrat neighbors as being a tad left of Georgia’s Democrats. One out of every two of my Republican neighbors support Trump, one out of five support Cruz and there is a markedly lower Rubio base in Morganton than in Georgia.

As I gathered my numbers, the weary poll workers were ready to go home, thirteen and one-half hours after they started their day at 6 am.  The precinct director, though, still had responsibilities to go as he drove off into the night to guard and deliver Morganton’s choice to the Fannin County Courthouse.