Mapping the 2020 Presidential Election in Albany, New York
In a city as deeply blue as Albany, New York, it was a foregone conclusion that Joe Biden would clean up on Election Day — just as Hillary Clinton did four years earlier.
And he did. Biden won all 128 of Albany’s election districts by wide margins. Donald Trump did not even break 10 percent of the vote share in a quarter of those districts. And he only broke 30 percent in two.
Still, I thought it would be worth looking at the returns spatially to see if there was anything interesting going on at the neighborhood level because it’s a pandemic, and you can only watch so much Netflix. Other than that Trump was slightly (but only really slightly) less unpopular in the whiter, wealthier and more suburban uptown neighborhoods, Biden’s win was pretty broad and decisive.
Where it gets more interesting is when you look at Biden’s performance vs. Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 and Trump’s 2020 showing vs. Trump’s 2016 performance against Clinton.
I’ve mapped each of these below, and if you hover your cursor over each ED, the vote data will pop up. The map has three layers:
- Biden vs. Trump 2020
- Biden 2020 vs. Clinton 2016
- Trump 2020 vs. Trump 2016
A note of caution. While looking at election districts is the best way to understand voting patterns at a neighborhood level, these districts are really small. In many cases, you’re talking about only a couple-hundred votes cast — or less. From small numbers you get percentages — and year-over-year changes — that are sometimes not super meaningful. To account for some of this, these maps only consider year-to-year changes in vote share of at least 0.5 percent. Arguably, the bar should be even higher than that.
Also, election district lines can change from year to year. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. That means looking at election results from 2016 with the ED lines as they were drawn in 2020, as I have done here, can be messy and occasionally misleading. Take, for example, ED 12–9. That’s election district 9 in Albany’s 12th Ward up along Central Avenue near the city line. ED 12–9 is very small and did not exist in 2016, yet in 2020 it gave Trump his largest vote share in the city — 45% of the whopping 57 votes cast. In 2016, those voters were incorporated into other EDs, and there is no clean way to account for that in these maps.
I’m not a political analyst, so I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the numbers. But I think a couple of things are pretty clear/interesting in the data. I’ll point them out briefly here:
Turnout was higher in 2020 by 1,343 votes — an increase of about 3.8 percent. As measured against active voters on the rolls in Albany this year (50,268), the 36,099 ballots cast in the presidential election amount to a turnout of nearly 72 percent. (I used active voters when calculating turnout. If you were to include voters on the roll but listed as inactive, the turnout percentage would be lower.)
Biden got more votes, and in greater percentages, than Clinton. Overall, Biden won about 81 percent of the votes cast in 2020, compared to about 77.1 percent for Clinton in 2016. Trump won about 16.1 percent this year, compared about 16 percent in 2016. In other words, despite the greater turnout, Biden improved on Clinton by much more than Trump improved on his own 2016 showing. At the ED level, Biden grabbed a larger percentage of the vote than Clinton in two-thirds (89) of the city’s 128 election districts. Clinton did better in 25 EDs — mostly in Arbor Hill, West Hill and the South End. Again, I stress that some of these differences are very small. They basically ran even in 11 districts. No votes were cast in either year in two EDs that have no voters in them, and one ED that existed this year (12–9) did not exist in 2016, so no comparison is possible.
Yes, Trump lost bigly — but more than just Republicans supported him. Trump’s 16.1 percent vote share citywide actually over-performs the Republican/Conservative voter enrollment in Albany, which is only about 6.7 percent of active voters. Biden also over-performed Democratic/Working Families Party enrollment. He got about 81 percent of the vote citywide compared their 73 percent share of active enrollment. The difference for both really has to be the roughly 17 percent of voters registered to vote but not affiliated with any party. That’s not surprising. Everyone loves to agonize over how so-called independents will vote. This year, they seem to have split more or less evenly between Biden and Trump — maybe slightly favoring Trump. Then again, I guess if you’re registered as a blank in Albany you may be disproportionately more likely to be a Republican because there’s no real reason to register as a blank in a city where everything is decided in the Democratic primary unless you’re actually a Republican who for some reason does not want to register that way.
Trump improved in some parts of Albany. Trump did better by at least a half percentage point in 50 election districts, while there was no meaningful change in another 21. Not surprisingly, some of the areas where Trump did at least a little bit better this year are the same areas — parts of North Albany, Arbor Hill, West Hill and the South End — where Clinton did better than Biden. This might be consistent with other evidence that Trump (somewhat counterintuitively) did better this year in some urban communities of color. But again, I have to stress that Trump’s vote totals in some of these EDs were so small that it would not take many votes to move these percentages in ways that can be misleading.
Third party candidates were weaker in 2020, and that probably helped Biden. Despite the fact that there were more third-party candidates on the ballot in 2020 than 2016, they collectively received a much smaller share of the vote. In 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein (2.46%) and Libertarian/Independence Party candidate Gary Johnson (2.35%) accounted for about 5 percent of total votes cast for president in the city. This year, Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins (0.75%), Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen (0.96%) and Independence Party candidate Brock Pierce (0.32%) only won about 1.9 percent of the vote. When you consider that Trump’s vote share remained more or less the same from 2016 to 2020, while Biden improved on Clinton by about four percentage points, it seems those third-party candidates may have hurt Clinton more than Trump in 2016.
Fewer people skipped the presidential election on their ballots this year. There were twice as many undervotes in 2016 (268) than in 2020 (129), despite the fact that 1,343 more people voted this year than four years ago. An undervote is when someone submits a valid ballot but doesn’t vote in a particular race. The rate at which this happens usually increases as you proceed down the ballot to more obscure races, but it’s unusual for people to intentionally skip the top race on the ballot. In a presidential election year, the top race on the ballot is the race for president. A certain percentage of undervotes are inadvertent. Barring some kind of significant ballot redesign, though, it’s hard to interpret fewer undervotes despite more ballots cast any other way than people being somewhat exasperated by their choices and sitting the presidential election out four years ago. If all of those “extra” undervotes in 2016 had gone to Clinton, she would have raised her vote share by about half a percentage point to 77.6 percent. You can’t just assume it would have happened that way. But given that it seems third-party votes disproportionately hurt Clinton, it’s not crazy to think so.
BE KIND. I mostly did this late at night, so if you see any errors or things that look wonky, just let me know.
