Living in Dryden

Who voted in 2011, by party and district

The 2011 Dryden election results startled me. Partly it was the 3-2 Democratic majority, and partly it was the Democratic victories in so many election districts. The final results moderated things a tiny bit, with Republicans reclaiming their utterly solid District 3 by a few votes through absentee ballots, but overall, it was still pretty smashing.

The part that puzzled me most, though, was the results in Districts 10 and 11. The southeastern corner of the Town is not exactly friendly territory for Democrats, but we carried both districts by substantial margins. That made me wonder how many Republican voters had crossed party lines. I knew of a few who'd told me they did, but was it really a trend?

The Board of Elections voter data does report who voted in which election. Obviously, it doesn't tell you who voted which way, but you can get a sense of how many people of which parties voted in each district.

I combined the totals for Democrats, Working Families, and Greens, as well as for Republicans and Conservatives, and also Blank, Independence, and Other. It's not a perfect combination, but it makes the math possible.

Next, I compared the vote totals by party to the candidate tallies. (This isn't perfect - 19 people left this line blank, and I think that means I'm missing six people, likely voters who were around for the election but moved afterward.)

Sumner outperformed a raw bet based on party affiliation pretty drastically, but the district-by-district totals are especially interesting. By this score, Schickel outperformed Sumner in only two districts: Dryden 5, Etna, and Dryden 7, the east side of the Village of Dryden to the Virgil line. Sumner outperformed Schickel drastically in the southwest, districts 4, 8, and 9, but that wasn't a big surprise given past history.

The places that really surprised me were, again, the southeast: Districts 10 and especially 11. District 2, Freeville, also saw some outperformance.

Although the result in 11 doesn't go quite so far that I can state categorically that Republicans voted for Democratic candidates there, it's still shocking when 176 Republicans and 146 Democrats vote, and the result total is 185-219.

My guess is that although the southwest corner of Dryden was ready as usual to vote Democratic, residents of Districts 10, 11, and maybe 2 felt their neighborhoods threatened enough by the prospect of fracking to shift their usual voting patterns.

(I started this analysis a while ago, but never got around to publishing it.)