First, let’s get the obligatory Mark Twain line out of the way, about three types of mistruths: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

What follows are going to be some observations about statistics, and if the reader wants to write off the bulk of it as blather about falsities, well, it’s your browser.

But looking at new voter registration statistics from the California Secretary of State’s office does reveal some surprising attributes about the two counties that might be sometimes overlooked.

To wit, three of the five districts in Yuba County are actually blue, that is, they have more registered Democrats than Republican.

With Beale Air Force Base nearby, that might seem unlikely, but the First, Second and Third Districts all have more Ds than Rs, though by less than 100 in the first two.

Those three districts roughly encompass Marysville, Linda and Olivehurst, the most urbanized part of the county, so it’s not too surprising they trend toward Democrats, as is common with other urban areas.

And it should be pointed out too: District 1, which is represented by Andy Vasquez, arguably the most right-leaning on the board, actually has more Democrats. Of course, voter registration is one thing; who actually votes is often very different.

Looking at the other two Yuba County districts, it’s clear the county overall is still heavily tilted toward Republicans. There are nearly 800 more GOP voters in the district encompassing Wheatland, the Fourth District, and the split is more than 1,500 toward Republicans in the Fifth District, which takes in the county foothills.

Demographics helps explain this too, as rural areas tend to be more Republican. And for the Fifth District in particular, one speculates the population overall is a bit older, whiter and wealthier than the rest of the county, which also translates into tilting to the GOP side more often.

Overall, the registration breakdown in Yuba County is 39.56 percent for Republicans, 32.75 percent for Democrats and 21.34 percent for decline-to-state, which has seen the biggest growth in the state in the last decade. One more point there, Yuba County’s percentage of those voters is the second-closest in the state to the overall percentage in California, 21.24 percent.

Going over to Sutter County, there aren’t as many surprises. All five supervisorial districts have more Republicans than Democrats, and the closest gap is in District 4, where it’s 232 voters. The gap is the biggest in the Third District, centered in Yuba City, where Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 2,300 voters.

That’s the district with the largest population of voters overall, at 9,777. Remember, redistricting is done by population, not registered voters, so a district with an older population might have far more voters but about the same number of people as one with a lot of young families.

Sutter County’s overall percentage is 45.75 percent Republican, 32.89 percent Democrat and 16.77 percent decline to state.

One other observation out of the numbers from our neighbors in Colusa County: Some parties are mighty lonely in those parts.

In one supervisorial district there, there’s a grand total of one, yes one, Green party member, while another district has but one person registered Peace and Freedom.

No wonder we never heard about an Occupy Colusa movement. It would just resemble loitering.

You can take a look at the numbers yourself, broken down in several ways, here.

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