This is an elections returns (and my description of my city’s political geography) heavy diary. This is not intended as commentary on the current presidential primary.
I’m a Democratic primary voter in Syracuse, NY. In September 2018, we had four primary elections that all pitted establishment candidates against insurgents from the left, three of them statewide, one municipal. I’m going to focus first on the three way Syracuse City Court Judge race compared to the four way primary for NYS Attorney General and use the results from the Governor and Lieutenant Governor’s races to reinforce my point.
It’s almost as if the AG and city court races were a lab designed experiment to discern the difference between running a white progressive candidate and a progressive candidate of color in a Democratic primary. Both were open seat, low key affairs. In both races black candidates received almost the same vote share, there was one white moderate in each race, and one candidate running from the left in each race. The main difference, the independent variable if you will, was that the progressive in the city court race was an immigrant and the progressive for AG was white.
The party backed candidate in the city court race was Ann Magnarelli, scion of a local political family. This election was mostly conducted by mailer and her’s were in the vein of “qualified”, “experience”, “endorsed by X” etc. Very much the establishment candidate. Her main opposition was Shadia Tadros, who highlighted being a Jordanian immigrant and utilized criminal justice reform phrasing, very obviously appealing to the left. The third candidate was Felicia Pitts-Davis, an African-American woman who had worked for the previous mayor but had a falling out and was running an underground campaign targeting the black vote. I wasn’t even aware of her campaign until the last week of the election.
I paired up Sean Patrick Maloney (SPM), the AG candidate who essentially ran as the Upstate white guy, with Magnarelli. I called them “Bland”, basically the boring white candidates. While SPM wasn’t backed by the state party, he carried the city of Syracuse and performed like an establishment candidate here. Zephyr Teachout, who challenged Andrew Cuomo in the 2014 gubernatorial primary, was the obvious pairing for Tadros, they are “Left”. The last category, which I simply called “Black”, is a little more tricky, because the AG candidates Leticia James (party backed, Downstate focused, highlighted race) and Leecia Eve (talked more like an Upstate moderate, downplayed race) and Pitts-Davis each ran very different campaigns, but James’ and Eve’s combined vote shares were closely aligned with Pitts-Davids’.
The city court race, which Magnarelli should have won in a blow out, was shockingly close:
Syracuse city court |
% |
magnarelli |
35.4 |
Tadros |
34.1 |
Pitts-Davis |
30.6 |
And here’s the results of the AG race in Syracuse:
ag |
% |
maloney |
39 |
teachout |
29 |
james |
27 |
eve |
5 |
“black” |
32 |
Note the divergence between the SPM/Magnarelli Teachout/Tadros numbers.
And here’s a comparison of the three lanes (AG number first) by the four sides of town (with the relative size of the citywide vote share for the AG primary for each side of town, the city court turnout was similar):
syracuse |
bland |
left |
black |
north 26% |
47/52 |
28/27 |
25/21 |
west 14% |
49/44 |
25/35 |
26/21 |
south 29% |
39/24 |
17/28 |
44/48 |
east 31% |
27/29 |
44/45 |
29/26 |
North is Magnarelli’s side of the city, majority white and least Democratic, used to be heavily Italian (still residually is) and has always been a magnet for immigrants and refugees. West is historically Irish (hence a guy named Sean Patrick Maloney doing so well), more WWC than North, with significant Puerto Rican and black populations. South has the largest black community, combined with the much whiter Valley and Strathmore neighborhoods. Both Pitts-Davis and Tadros are from South. East is liberal college-educated white territory, Syracuse University, Lemoyne College, and hospitals, the kind of place where the left usually does well.
Notable how strong SPM was in South, he actually beat James by a point there. That seems to speak to the conventional wisdom that black Democratic primary voters are more moderate than their white counterparts.
However, the main takeaway to me is that Tadros ran so much farther ahead of Teachout in the South and West sides of the Syracuse, where the percentage of the non-white vote is higher. I think that by leaning into her identity, Tadros was able to make inroads that Teachout just couldn’t make with minority voters, which is borne out in the precinct level returns. So while there is a lot of data that suggests black voters will prefer the moderate candidate to the more progressive one, these results suggest maybe it’s the messenger, not the message. Which brings me to...
We vote for Governor and Lieutenant Governor separately, so we also have results from those two races from the same primary day that offer some additional insight. Incumbents Gov Andrew Cuomo and LG Kathy Hochul, running against challengers Cynthia Nixon and Jumaane Williams, had some divergent results:
|
nixon/cuomo |
williams/hochul |
north |
40/60 |
43/57 |
west |
43/57 |
44/56 |
south |
32/68 |
52/48 |
east |
47/53 |
55/45 |
citywide |
40/60 |
49/51 |
These races don’t map as neatly onto the other two races I’ve been highlighting because Cuomo and Hochul were incumbents, they were head-to-head races, and the governor’s race was a higher profile affair. But the difference between (white) Nixon and (black) Williams is striking, particularly in South. Nixon got creamed in the black part of town on the way to a 20 point defeat in the city, but Williams, a liberal NYC politician, almost carried Syracuse against a moderate white Upstate Democratic incumbent LG based in large part on his strength with black voters.
My main takeaway here is that it’s well known that white outsider candidates running to the left have consistently had trouble gaining traction with minority voting blocs, but these results from the 2018 primary suggest that candidates of color running to the left don’t have that same weakness.