NY-29: Candidate performance by county (w/pretty graphs)
How much did Massa improve over Barend?
That seems to be the question on a lot of folks’ minds, post-election. It’s not just “silver lining” thinking, it’s also instructive on what’s possible in the district. I put together a “stacked chart” of the 2004 results vs. this year. Barend was great, but Massa was a much stronger candidate, and it shows.
What jumps out immediately is that in all but 3 of the counties (Monroe, Allegany, Cattaraugus), Massa gains over Barend at least offset the Conservative slice of the vote– what The Fighting 29th called “Randy’s Sure Nickel“. That “Sure Nickel” translated into 6%, 4%, and 3% in Catt, Yates, and Steuben, repsectively. (We’ll have to wait for the official results to see the how the Conservative party did in other counties and the 29th overall.)
Let’s look at the change in county performance another way, purely by gain in % of the vote. The Dem candidate:
Massa made gains in every county over Barend in 04. Some questions arise. What’s up with Yates Co.? I can’t attribute it entirely to the “rural voter” swing Exile posted on before, since Allegany and Catt counties both are equivalently rural to Yates. (More on that in a followup post.)
Kuhl, on the other hand, gained a little, and lost a little, despite picking up Assini’s (the Conservative candidate from 04) nickel off the sidewalk for 06.
Kuhl made modest gains in Monroe (where the Con vote was about 10% in 04– yikes!), Catt, and Allegany counties (hey, Rural Patriot! WTF? What are we paying you people for anyway? :-))
But he just held the lines in Ontario and Chemung counties, and lost vote share in Schuyler, Steuben and Yates. The relatively large loss in Yates mirroring Massa’s gain.
Thoughts? Comments? Followup requests?
I’ll do a followup post where I analyize (and graph, of course), Massa’s performance vs. key demographic data from census.gov.
Related posts:
Nice graphs.
Yates cast ~6K votes in ‘06 so a tiny absolute change in votes can equal a large percentage change.
Perhaps some sort of weighted graph might be helpful…but the reality is that comparative analysis in the 29th is hard because the changeover from Houghton to Kuhl was huge, the effect of 3rd party candidates is hard to factor out, and off-year vs. presidential year further muddies the ‘06/’04 comparison. Your 2nd graph is probably the most meaningful - Massa did a hell of a lot better than Barend, end of story.
Yep. With that many factors, it’s almost as “apples-to-oranges” as 2 consecutive congressional races can get. Knowing the main reason that Massa lost (and not at liberty to talk about it), it’s also an exercise to see if there was any way I could predict it for “next time”, whenever/whoever that might be.
Knowing the main reason Massa lost and not at liberty to talk about it - there is a question begging to be asked. There is a main reason? A single cause? Actually there are probably several individual and isolated reasons that all contributed.
Right– that’s sort of what I was getting at (poorly). The main reason manifested itself due to an aggregation of conditions. Can we identify what those individual and isolated reasons are? We’d be a long way towards mitigating the main reason next time. Meanwhile, I’ll try to think of how to rephrase the above without all my 10-cent words.