Assembly Majority Leader Joe Morelle captured an impressive victory in the June 26th Democratic Primary for New York State’s 25th congressional district. He won every municipality in the district, more than doubled the vote total of his closest competitor, and surpassed 50% of votes cast in half of the towns in the district. In short, Morelle won by a commanding and comfortable margin, as the chart below shows.
Still, there are some interesting insights that can be gained from the primary results, as there were different pockets of strength for each of the four candidates in the race. I played around with some of the municipal and election district data available on Monroe County’s Board of Elections website to see if I could find anything interesting. A few things stood out to me.
First, turnout varied considerably by municipality. East side suburbs, led by Brighton at 32%, had substantially higher levels of voter participation compared to towns west of Rochester. Brighton has barely half the number of registered Democrats of Greece, but had over 800 more voters at the polls on the 26th. Irondequoit, Penfield, Perinton, and Pittsford also had turnout above 20%, while fewer than 13% of Democrats in Parma and Gates voted.
The chart below shows the total votes cast by voters in the different municipalities that comprise the 25th Congressional District, and the color coding indicates the level of turnout (blue = higher than district-wide turnout, red = lower).
While Joe Morelle won every town and the one city in the 25th Congressional District, that top-line result obscures some significantly different voter preferences within the district. Specifically, Morelle won the City of Rochester, but it was still his weakest municipality in the district, largely due to Adam McFadden’s strength within the City. McFadden won over a third of the vote in the City, and only lost Rochester by 15 votes to Morelle. However, he only cracked 10% of the vote in 4 of the towns in the 25th CD, and finished last in nearly all of the suburban and rural towns in the district. Robin Wilt performed best in Brighton, where she serves as a town board member, and Pittsford, where she grew up, but did not exceed 20% anywhere else in the district. Finally, Rachel Barnhart struggled mightily in Democratic strongholds like Brighton, Irondequoit, and the City of Rochester. She only received 13 to 14% of the vote in those municipalities. Conversely, she performed best among Democratic voters who reside in the more Republican parts of the district.
The map below shows the winner of each election district within the district. Joe Morelle won an overwhelming majority of election districts in the 25th CD, although Adam McFadden won a majority of City neighborhoods and was particularly strong in predominantly Black and Hispanic parts of the City. Robin Wilt also captured several neighborhoods in the southeast portion of the City of Rochester, while Rachel Barnhart won a few parts of several west side communities.
The map becomes much more interesting geographically when one examines the non-Morelle winner of each district, as shown below. Adam McFadden’s strengths extend outward from his Rochester base into parts of Greece, Gates, and Henrietta. As noted above, Robin Wilt demonstrates a clear geographic advantage in Brighton, where she serves as a town board member, along with nearly the entire southeast portion of the City of Rochester and parts of Pittsford. And Rachel Barnhart emerges as the clear runner-up in most of the suburban and rural parts of the district.
Finally, the maps below show the relative strengths of each of the four candidates in a greater level of geographic detail than one can gather from municipal level results.
great visualizations