I came back from the Varna pancake breakfast thinking there were a lot more Democrats in Dryden than it felt like on Wednesday after the election. Then the Dryden Republicans conveniently put up unofficial results, district by district, and the reasons for that were a lot clearer.
I took the total votes for Supervisor and concocted my own simplified table. I knew the Democrats had carried districts 4, 8, and 9, while the Republicans took the rest, but I hadn't counted on the severe polarization within districts. The table below shows my results. (District names are my own descriptions. For a map, see here.)
| District | Description | Trumbull (R) | Varvayanis (D) | % Democratic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | West Dryden | 146 | 92 | 38% |
| 2 | Freeville area | 196 | 113 | 36% |
| 3 | Malloryville/McLean | 63 | 10 | 13% |
| 4 | Varna | 83 | 169 | 67% |
| 5 | Etna | 92 | 77 | 45% |
| 6 | Village of Dryden | 280 | 87 | 23% |
| 7 | E and N of Dryden | 299 | 75 | 20% |
| 8 | Snyder Hill, Rt 79 | 98 | 211 | 68% |
| 9 | Ellis Hollow Creek | 84 | 240 | 74% |
| 10 | South Central Dryden | 217 | 86 | 28% |
| 11 | Dryden Lake | 250 | 79 | 24% |
| Total | 1808 | 1239 | 40% |
It's not just that the overall race results were 3-2; it's that nearly every district in the town went at least 3-2 one way or another. The only district where the race was at all close was district 5, which is unsurprisingly at the edge of where the heavily Democratic southwestern districts (4, 8, 9) meet the heavily Republican districts. The further north and east, the more severely Republican.
Politically, this looks like two separate towns. I guess that was probably obvious to a lot of the people on both sides, and I knew the general pattern, but I'm still surprised by the degree of polarization.
(If you want to do your own analysis, the table at the GOP site is HTML saved from Microsoft Excel, so you can select the whole table in Internet Explorer, copy it, paste it into Excel, and have an instant spreadsheet, complete with formatting and calculations. Be sure to get the whole thing (including the top row), however. If you don't, you'll get odd messages about circular references from Excel and missing data when you do the paste.)
Posted by simonstl at November 10, 2003 06:45 PM