Results are still unofficial, but unless a pile of absentee votes turns up, Dryden Town Supervisor Mary Ann Sumner got more votes last year in a local race than Republican candidate for President Mitt Romney received in a national race with much higher turnout.
| Description | Sumner (11) | Romney (12) |
|---|---|---|
| West Dryden | 185 | 266 |
| Freeville area | 185 | 318 |
| Malloryville/McLean | 36 | 76 |
| Varna | 236 | 118 |
| Etna | 111 | 138 |
| Village of Dryden | 199 | 286 |
| E and N of Dryden | 177 | 316 |
| Snyder Hill, Rt 79 | 376 | 165 |
| Ellis Hollow Creek | 389 | 119 |
| South Central | 210 | 224 |
| Dryden Lake | 219 | 271 |
| Total | 2323 | 2297 |
President Obama still wins the comparison overall, with 3967 votes. Congressman Tom Reed barely outperformed Romney with 2308 votes, still not as many as Sumner's prior total.
I'm normally pretty cautious about comparing election results from different years. Turnouts are very different, populations shift, and so on. Next year we'll even have some different election district boundaries because of shifting county legislative lines.
This comparison, though, suggests that local Republicans have a lot of work to do. Even in a year that brings far more voters out to the polls, their national candidate couldn't do better than a local Democrat in a race with considerably lower turnout.
I still absolutely expect local races will be competitive for a long time, and 2011 may be a highpoint for Dryden Democratic results for a while, but this is not something I dreamed possible when I first started writing this blog.
Posted by simon at December 6, 2012 9:25 PM in
It's all to do with the Republican Party going completely insane. After a while, people notice!
The best thing which could happen to this country would be for far more people to notice and for the Republican Party to evaporate completely. This would create room (under a system dominated by Duverger's Law) for a *second party*.
At the moment, elections are very consistently a contest between "Democrat who may be decent or may be terrible" and "Complete lunatic Republican who should not be allowed out on the streets by himself". This isn't healthy. We need a second party, but to do that we have to get rid of the Republican Party. Thankfully this is starting to happen.