Eric Osorio was upfront about why he did not vote earlier this month.

“I didn’t have time,” the 19-year old Pasadena construction worker said. “Tomorrow Imma go to Corpus Christi at 1 in the morning. Gotta drive far. Be back home late at night. Go back to sleep and wake up the next day for work. I don’t got time.”

Osorio said he would have voted if he had the chance, but he hadn’t really thought about who to vote for.

“Whoever wins, wins. As long as the economy is good, I don’t really care.”

Osorio was among the 40 percent of Harris County’s 2.7 million registered voters who skipped the Nov. 5 election, resulting in the lowest turnout in a presidential election year since 2004.

A Houston Landing review of election data found 418 precincts, mostly stretched across central and east Harris County, in which 50 percent or fewer registered voters ventured to the polls.

For example, Precinct 81 near Galena Park has 2,357 registered voters. Only 988 voted.

In Precinct 487 in Alief, 1,829 out of 4,394 registered voters cast ballots.

In a handful of precincts, less than a quarter of voters turned out. Among them: Precinct 1122 near Aldine saw 458 out of 1,863 voters participate in the election.

Precincts in the northwest and northeast parts of the county saw turnouts greater than 50 percent, and sometimes greater than 75 percent.

“I think at its core, turnout is all about demographics, costs and motivations,” University of Houston Political Science Professor Brandon Rottinghaus said. “The cost of voting includes the time displacement for voting, which may be actual salary or money that you would otherwise earn, but also includes sort of the difficulty of voting.”

That was the case for Shina Keller, 29, who cited work and money as reasons why she did not vote. The double shift she worked on Election Day would help her save up for the holidays.

“Christmas coming up. Thanksgiving coming up. And her birthday,” Keller said, referring to her daughter.

Michael Adams, a professor of public affairs at Texas Southern University, said such sentiments make it clear  Democratic Party messaging did not resonate with large portions of the population.

“Many of the voters when they wake up in the morning and they sit around the kitchen table, they’re not really concerned about democracy,” Adams said. “But they are concerned about whether or not they’ll be able to provide food or whether they can pay the bills or send their kids to college.”

Adams said the election should act as a wake-up call, signaling “a need for more inclusive campaigning and also an engaging political strategy that really addresses the community’s concerns and also the diversity that we see in Harris County.”

Johnny Padilla, 41, who has lived in northeastern Houston for 13 years,  said he has grown frustrated with the neglect of persistent sewer problems in his neighborhood. Padilla pointed to a storm drain near his house in frustration and said he saw no reason to vote for politicians that never pay attention to his neighborhood’s concerns.

“It doesn’t change anything,” Padilla said. “We asked five years ago for them to deal with this problem, but they don’t pay attention to us.”

City of Houston elections were held last year.

Rottinhaus said people who don’t vote may not see a big difference between the two major parties.

“Parties make promises they can’t deliver and people become jaded and they decide that neither party can really deliver,” he said. “Or they’ll say, you know what, we’ve had Republicans in office, we’ve got Democrats in office and it never changes my pocketbook.”

Carolyn Derkowski, 82, said she has only voted once in recent memory, when Hillary Clinton ran against Donald Trump in 2016. This time, the retired day care worker said she didn’t see much point in casting a ballot.

“They say things and they don’t do nothing about it,” she said. If she had gone to the polls, Derkowski said, she probably would have voted for Trump this time.

Adams said he did not see a robust get-out-the-vote effort from the Democratic Party. “How effective was that?” he said. “That would be the question. Did the parties put money in the ground?” 

Cip Ramon, 84, who served for many years as a precinct judge, said people in his neighborhood used to turn out in larger numbers. But the fact that most politicking now happens on-line has sapped interest for many of his neighbors.

“Everything has changed,” he said. “You do not see candidates walking the streets anymore. No more face-to-face. We haven’t seen a representative out here in two or three years. They only come when they are running for re-election. They just don’t show up.”

Harris County Democratic Party Chair Mike Doyle said getting infrequent voters to turn out this year was a challenge.

“There was certainly a resource shortage,” said Doyle, who said party volunteers spent months knocking on doors, gathering data, and talking to voters about what issues mattered most to them. “We would have been well served with even 1 percent of the budget or the money that was spent by the Collin Allred campaign.”

A spokesperson for the Harris County Republican Party was not immediately available for comment Tuesday.

The motivation to vote outweighs the amount of money spent to get people to vote, according to Rottingaus.

“If people don’t feel like their vote matters, and the cost of living is too high, they simply won’t turn out regardless of how persuasive a particular mailing list is.”

He could have been describing 29-year old Missael Salas, from Pasadena.

“I’m just uninterested about it,” Salas said. “You know how people are interested in football and, ‘Oh I love this team so much’? It just doesn’t interest me as a person.”

Reporters Dion Nissenbaum, Tim Carlin, Hanna Holthaus and McKenna Oxenden contributed to this story.

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