Post Election Campaign Reflection

New York 18th Congressional District

I chose NY 18 to follow because of news articles I had seen just a few days prior to the beginning of the semester about the special election that had occurred due to redistricting.

The two candidates for the race were Democrat Pat Ryan, the former county executive of Ulster County, and Republican Colin Schmidtt, an Assemblyman for the 99th New York State Assembly District.

While Pat Ryan was technically considered the incumbent candidate for the 18th district, he was still at the time representing the 19th district in New York, which he had only just won in a special election on August 23, 2022. That election occurred after the incumbent, Democrat Antonio Delgado, left to become New York’s lieutenant governor. Also on the same day as his special election victory in the 19th district, Ryan won the Democratic primary nomination for the November general election in the 18th district.

At the time of the special election, I thought this would be an interesting race to cover and research, not understanding the challenges that come from using data to predict a district that was heavily redistricted!

The Representative for the 18th District was previously Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney, who chose to run in the 19th District after redistricting.

In the newly drawn New York 18th district, there are 776,971 residents. 62.83% are white, 18.26% are Hispanic, 9.94% are Black, and 3% are Asian. In 2020, the demographic breakdown of NY 18 residents was 67% white, 17.76% Hispanic, 9% Black, and 3% Asian. Comparing the two, it’s clear that redistricting NY 18 to include more of Poughkeepsie made the district more white, although it did not drastically change the other percentages of racial makeup.

New York District 18 Map - Before and After Redistricting

Predictions
From my model, I predicted that the Democratic candidate - Pat Ryan - would win 52.36% of the vote. In their final prediction, FiveThirtyEight predicted that Ryan was favored to win with a 71% chance. They also predicted that the popular vote for the seat would be 52% in favor of Ryan.

Results
Pat Ryan won 50.5% of the vote with 132,365 votes, as compared to the Republican candidate Colin Schmidtt’s 49.5% and 129,757 votes. The margin was very tight, favoring Ryan by less than 3,000 votes.

In 2020, Biden won 54.2% of the vote in the counties that now make up the 18th district as compared to Trump’s 45.8%, a margin of about 8 percentage points. This election, Ryan’s win by just a singular percentage point does indicate a shift towards the GOP. In the New York Times’ analysis of the race, here is how the following counties voted in this election compared to their votes in 2020.

Orange County: Schmitt +8; R+0.1
Dutchess County: Ryan +4; D+14
Ulster County: Ryan +17; D+20

The following graph from the NYT demonstrates the shift in vote share margin towards the Republican Party.

Vote Share Margin Shift - NY 18 2020 vs 2022

All counties shifted more Republican in 2022, given the smaller margins of victory for Ryan in the two Democratic-leaning counties and the larger margin of victory for Schmitt in the Republican county, as compared to the 2020 results. To note, Ryan is from Ulster County and previously served as county executive, so the vote share for that district shifted much less towards the Republicans than Dutchess County.

Campaign Information
Pat Ryan
As a West Point graduate, Ryan centered his campaign on the West Point motto and values of duty, honor, and country.

The three top priorities Ryan’s website promotes are: Leveling the Playing Field, Protecting our Foundational Freedoms, and Keeping our Community Safe. Within Lynn Vavreck’s framework of campaigning, Ryan should be running an insurgent campaign given his status as an incumbent (at least in the sense of party control of the district) and the bad status of the economy. Instead of discussing the economy, Ryan should highlight other important issues that the voters favor overall. While the “Leveling the Playing Field” priority does touch on the economy, the other two would be cited as Lynn Vavreck as good for an insurgent campaign. However even within the “Leveling the Playing Field” pillar of Ryan’s campaign, he just highlights that he has “fought greedy corporations, cut taxes, and brought jobs to New York.”

With the US Supreme Court Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v Wade and ended the constitutional protection of abortion rights announced just two months before his special election, Ryan was able to focus his campaign during that election on abortion access, which Vavreck would approve of. He continued to advocate for abortion access during his general election campaign, using the momentum he gained from the special election win to carry him through. Ryan also focused his campaign for the general election broadly on protecting basic freedoms in the United States, capitalizing on promoting the fight for democracy. He clearly states: “I always perceived the greatest threat to be foreign, but it is clear with right-wing attacks on our democracy, women’s healthcare, and our ability to keep guns off our streets, we must stand up to domestic extremists.”

Colin Schmitt
Schmitt’s website capitalizes on the economy and monetary policy, with his central issue being that he “led the effort to make the state’s property tax cap permanent and successfully secured millions of dollars in funding for area schools, libraries and infrastructure projects.” In fact, the main page of his website only highlights the economy, as the first blurb about himself says “As a lifelong Hudson Valley resident, Colin will stand up for local families and their values in the U.S. House of Representatives by fighting for lower taxes and more jobs and defending the region’s wonderful quality-of-life.” In this sense, Schmitt did focus on what Vavreck would deem a “clarifying campaign,” centering the economy as a non-incumbent running at a time when the economy is in a bad position.

Considerations and Implications
Ballotpedia cites the Federal Elections Commission’s campaign finance data and reported that as of October 19, 2022, Ryan had received $4,029,497 and had $729,971 in cash on hand. Schmitt had received $1,925,436 and had $387,171 in cash on hand. This comparison to some extent demonstrates the divide between the two in overall popularity, with more people willing to donate to Ryan’s campaign over Schmitt’s. Given the close race, outside groups and PACs also contributed heavily to both campaigns - as of early October, the Republican super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, reported spending $1.14 million in support of Schmitt. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had spent $433,000 in support of Ryan.

The results of the race were much tighter than expected, especially in the broad consideration of Biden’s +8 victory just 2 years ago. However, this may be due to some lack of name recognition for Ryan as he was not technically the incumbent, or simply due to lower turnout that is seen in midterm years. 356,687 citizens voted in the 2020 Presidential, compared to 262,122 in the 2022 midterms - a decrease of 26%. There is no data yet on the demographic split of the vote in the district, but that could be one way to test whether or not the midterm year affected Ryan’s vote share compared to Biden’s, comparing the percentages of each demographic group and the way they voted in the two elections.

For the NY 19th district special election Ryan ran in, he only won with 51% of the vote. While the districts are not the exact same, the similar tight margin may just be indicative of the state of elections in the general area of New York. This is evident when looking at the NY 17th district election that Sean Patrick Maloney ran in. Maloney lost, with a very similar margin to Ryan’s race but in favor of the Republican Mike Lawler, with Lawler receiving 50.41% of the vote. However, Maloney was previously the incumbent for NY 18 before redistricting. The very close margin of that race, and it not going Maloney’s way, is another implication that candidates who may be affiliated with a district or even hold office do not have a clear advantage after redistricting.

Testing this further, you could look at all districts - in NY or otherwise across the country - in which redistricting meant a candidate ran in a different district than they had office in. Incumbency may only be an advantage to a certain degree. Another factor that may have helped Ryan but explain why Maloney did not win could be the special election that was held just over two months before the general election. The news coverage of it may have propelled Ryan to victory if people were more familiar with his name and the campaign he had just run.

References
Lynn Vavreck. The message matters: the economy and presidential campaigns. Princeton University Press, 2009.