Even as voters prepared to make their selections for the Shelby County primary, Smartsoft, an analytics and software company operated by county election commissioner Bennie Smith, has drawn conclusions from the early voting period that may have an impact on what is to come.
As presented by Smith’s associate, Kemba Ford, the number of eligible voters in Shelby County is roughly 582,000 persons, of whom only 39,300 actually participated in early voting. Smart-Soft estimates that, after the regular round of election-day voting on May 3rd, the total will rise to 52,000, so that the percentage of voters taking part in county primaries would be less than 10 percent of those eligible to do so.
Among the early voting number of 39,300, the logical conclusion would seem to be that Black females dominated. There were 24,800 female voters overall, as against 14,500 males. Some 22,200 of the early voters were African American, as against 9,100 thousand whites and about 8,000 who opted for the description “other.”
Of the 39,300 early voters, 32,000 were over the age of 50, a statistic that prevailed in the voting as a whole by all voters.
There were some anomalies. While Democrats voting in their primaries predominated among those voting in the nine districts thought to be demographically Democratic, they also voted in larger numbers in the heavily Republican District 1 (northern Shelby County), to the tune of 1,590 Democrats to 897 Republicans. There was no contest between the parties, of course, only votes for the single Republican and the single Democrat running in their respective primaries, as well as votes in each primary for mayor, sheriff, and other county-wide positions.
The presumed partisan tilt toward Republicans held, however, in another heavily Republican district. That would be District 1 (Collierville), where 1,350 Republicans voted, as against 1,086 Democrats. Again, there were no direct votes pitting Republicans vs. Democrats.
The one case in which Republicans most clearly dominated in voting was for the District 4 County Commission seat, in which GOP incumbent Brandon Morrison has a party challenger in the Republican primary, Jordan Carpenter. There were 3,054 Republican votes in that district versus 1,317 Democratic votes. Again, only the Republican votes counted in the Morrison-Carpenter showdown.
District 4 spans sections of both East Memphis and Germantown. For the record, 58 percent of the District 4 vote came from the Memphis part of the district, 42 from Germantown.
