Countywide margin
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Countywide Democratic share, 2018 to 2026
Democratic two-party share of the top countywide race in each August county
general. 2018, 2022 and 2026 are the mayor's race; 2020 and 2024 have no mayor on the ballot, so
they show county law director — a different office with different candidates, which is why the
line is a lean indicator and not a like-for-like series.
Precinct target list — where a point of share is worth the most
Click any column to sort, or any row to isolate that precinct on the map.
Priority combines three things: how many net votes one point of share buys there (45%),
how close the precinct already sits to 50/50 (35%), and how far it moved between 2022 and 2026
(20%). A big precinct that is nearly tied and already trending outranks a bigger one that is
safe and static. Role is the strategic job — hold and grow a base precinct, flip a
battleground, or trim the margin in hostile ground. The dropdown narrows the list to a single
county commission and school board district — the two share boundaries in Knox County — or to a
Tennessee House or Senate district.
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Results. Knox County Election Commission precinct reports for the August county general in
2018, 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2026. 2026 is unofficial; the rest are official. All margins two-party.What "countywide margin" means each year. County mayor is on the ballot only in 2018, 2022
and 2026. For 2020 and 2024 the map uses county law director, the top contested countywide race
those years; 2024 also offers assessor of property in the dropdown. These are different offices
with different candidates, so the five-year line is a lean indicator, not a like-for-like series.Party labels. The reports leave the party column blank on every race. Hawk/Henderson,
Helsley/Jacobs, Haney/Jacobs and Jenkins/Sofield were supplied directly. Everything else is
labelled by correlating each candidate's precinct-level share against that year's known
Democratic benchmark. Correlations run above 0.87 and mostly above 0.97, and the method
independently reproduces five known cases — Jenkins, Bike, Henley, Triplett, and Betsy Henderson
in the 2022 District 6 school board race. It is inference; confirm against the ballot before
publishing a candidate's party.Nonpartisan years. The 2018, 2020 and 2022 reports list county races as nonpartisan
contests; 2024 and 2026 list them as partisan generals. For the earlier years the D and R labels
describe voting patterns, not ballot labels.Races that have no margin. All 43 district races across the five cycles are selectable, but
three kinds appear. Two-candidate races map a normal two-party margin. Races with a minor third
candidate — 2024 commission districts 2 and 9 — map the margin between the two major candidates
and report the remainder as "Other" in the tooltip. Unopposed races and genuine multi-candidate
fields have no margin to map at all; those are shaded by turnout on a separate gold scale, with
the full field in the tooltip, and the legend changes to say so. Correlation is deliberately not
used to assign party in a multi-candidate nonpartisan field: in a district where every candidate
belongs to the same party it measures neighbourhood geography rather than partisanship, which is
why the 2022 District 1 school board race is shown as a four-way with no labels.District membership. All 87 map units are placed by ballot evidence from the 2024 and 2026
reports — a precinct that voted a District 5 commission race is in District 5. No boundary
inference is used. Knox County commission and school board districts share the same nine
boundaries, so one filter serves both.State legislative districts. Taken from the same reports: the August ballot carries the
state primaries, so the House or Senate contest a precinct voted identifies its district. Senate
seats are staggered, so Senate 5 and 7 come from 2026 and Senate 6 from 2024. Some precincts
straddle a legislative line and appear in two districts; those are assigned to whichever district
cast more of their primary votes, and the tooltip marks them as split. A few are split only
because the 2020 boundary file forced neighbouring precincts to be drawn as one merged unit.Boundaries. Census TIGER/Line 2020 Voting Districts (tl_2020_47_vtd20), Knox County. 2018
and 2020 match these 89 precincts exactly. 2022 through 2026 do not, so 16 precincts are drawn
merged where the ballot and the 2020 lines disagree; each merged shape sums the precincts inside
it and every year's totals reconcile exactly.The target list is descriptive, not predictive. Priority ranks precincts by leverage,
competitiveness and recent movement. It says nothing about candidates, national conditions, or
who else is on the ballot.
Forge + Field Strategies