I based the final chart on some educated speculation about what we see in the above data. Knowing that the contested races appear to return a stable set of conditions I made some estimates on what would have likely happened had there been a Democratic candidate running in District 51 last cycle. Spoiler Alert, we would have an incumbent Democrat in this Clerk of Courts seat.
HOW DID I DETERMINE MY ESTIMATES?
There are a lot of sophisticated statistical modeling that can be done to extrapolate potential outcomes. I tend to rely on the simplest measures. While I cannot prove a negative since there was no candidate we can't know what the outcome might have been. That said, this type of speculation can prove instructive for future strategic planning.
I calculate that if a Democrat had run the last cycle, they would have brought in 10,749 votes. I arrived at that figure by averaging the results of Republican and Democratic votes in each contested House District (3,517 and 3,170 respectively) and then divided the Democratic vote average per district by the Republican vote. That gave me a figure of 90%.
Then I simply multiplied the Republican vote total for House District 51 by 90% to arrive at that 10,749 figure.
From there I made the same calculation between Democratic House votes in contested races and Democratic Clerk votes. That yielded dividing an average of 3,061 votes cast per House District for the Clerk seat in contested districts by the 3,170 Democratic average House of Delegates votes. That boosted the vote total from 6,118 to 10,380 votes in that Clerk of Courts race. More than enough to win the election.
You might raise the point that Republican vote would have gone up to had there been a contested seat. I agree, however, the fact remains that no matter what the Republican vote total ends up being, my methodology would still key the Democratic vote total in that House District to 90% of the Republican vote. That means if the Republican vote count increased, so would the Democratic vote. So holding the Republican vote constant does not affect the outcome of these estimates in any meaningful way.
Without further ado, here is the final bar chart.