Results of the 2023 Election in the Mid-Hudson
Historic firsts and more of the same
Good morning everyone. Last week I gave us a bit of a blow-by-blow of what to watch for in the 2023 elections and a more personal piece on why I, someone who attends college hundreds of miles away, still feel the itch to write on my native region even when the economic reality is that I’m unlikely to ever return.
As stated in my note a few days ago, I’ve held off because in my experience there tends to always be some outstanding ballots the first few days after and many of these races are close enough that those can have some influence. Secondarily, I don’t want the graphics I create to be rendered immediately obsolete as my intention with these articles is always that they are something that people should be able to find in the future and have the information presented be accurate, particularly the maps.
This is going to roughly mirror last week’s piece on what one should watch for in these elections, but will not cover 1:1 every race. Likewise, I will mention races I did not in that first article. I seek to focus on races with unexpected conclusions and races with interesting details I didn’t mention. Got it? Let’s begin:
Dutchess
Countywide
The main question I asked going into last Tuesday was this: can Serino hold together the Molinaro coalition? The answer appears to be yes, but not without qualification.
A fixture in Dutchess County politics since the age of 18, Marc Molinaro resigned his office to take a seat in the U.S. Congress last year. However, there was certainly no better recruit for the county Republicans than former state senator Sue Serino (R, C), another fixture in local politics who had represented most of the county until she was drawn with an incumbent Democrat into a seat with much of Ulster County and lost in 2022. The question was never really “Will Serino win?” but rather “How much will Serino win by?” The answer was about four points worse than Molinaro in 2019, a notable decrease for sure but not armageddon. Consider for example that the 2016-2020 swing was in excess of nine points towards Biden.
I would kill to see the precinct-level data for 2019 to compare the Molinaro and Serino coalitions. Did Serino collapse in Molinaro’s native Red Hook in exchange for larger margins in her own Hyde Park? Did Beacon become bluer as the transplant population increased through COVID? Did Molinaro do this well in the City of Poughkeepsie, where Zurhellen’s collapse is staggeringly apparent? Unfortunately precinct-level results are not easily accessible for 2019, but our good friend FOIA will be of great use for my future piece on Molinaro.
That’s not to say County Democrats have nothing to celebrate. The race for County DA shows a far different map. For the first time ever, Dutchess County will have a Democratic DA. Yes I said “ever,” I will write eventually on the history of Dutchess County politics and briefly touched on it in my first article here, but the county like all other counties in the Hudson Valley is about as ancestrally Republican as it gets. Dutchess never even gave their native son FDR the nod in any of his four landslide bids for the White House.
The incumbent William Grady (R, C) retired this cycle after having been unopposed for about 40 years, that is until 2019 when he squeaked out a slim win in his first competitive race. And last week on the same ballot other county Republicans dominated, Pairisi managed a three-point win. Scroll back up to the Serino map to get a sense of just how different it is. To understand how this happened, we must look at the data:
The first of these charts shows the Democratic margin of victory by percentage in county races since 2003, where zero is the threshold for a Democratic win. The second shows that same Democratic margin but this time relative to how the candidate for County Executive did, that blue line from the first graph becomes our new zero. It can be used to normalize the results and show us how much Democratic candidates for each office overperformed the Executive’s race. Missing data points for each represent uncontested races, something very common in these counties until more recent Trump-era polarization of politics. It used to not matter to most people if their County Clerk was a Republican or Democrat.
Note in the first chart that since the last pre-Trump election of 2015, all of these races have trended towards Democrats. In the second chart, there are no dramatic disparities in relative margin between these three most recent elections for any of these offices.
What I seek to propose then is not that Parisi ran a uniquely good campaign or Zurhellen a uniquely bad one, but that the baselines for their support in notoriously ticket-splitting Dutchess County were far different. There are of course reasons for these different baselines: name recognition, incumbency, cross-aisle goodwill. Hell, this is even apparent in streetview of campaign signs. Flowers (D), Parisi (D, WF), Serino (R, C), and Kendall (R, C) all had lawn signs together in front of an attorney’s office on the Arterial in Poughkeepsie two months ago. All won!
While Parisi did improve the margin relative to the County Executive race from 2019, the bigger factor at play here was a four-point collapse across the board in Republican vote share, enough to re-elect everyone else comfortably, but just enough for Parisi to get over the finish line. Grady was wise to the math here in choosing to retire.
Legislature
I did not mention any legislative races because quite frankly the Republican legislative majority was never at risk this cycle and won’t be in the near future. Regardless, there were some interesting races here I want to briefly touch on:
In District 1 (Northern Town of Poughkeepsie), incumbent Giancarlo Llaverias (D, WeAreTownOfPok) lost by 44 votes to Bob Gorman (R, C). Llaverias has been controversial since it was revealed during his 2019 bid for re-election that he allegedly admitted to abusing his girlfriend and made rape jokes on social media. He nonetheless won that race, but this cycle was hit with allegations of his ballot petition being fraudulent. You may recognize the name of the Republican lawyer named given it is John Ciampoli (R), the Long Island election lawyer Republicans put up for our upstate Supreme Court seat due to lack of locals willing to run. New York politics is a surprisingly small circle.
In District 4 (parts of Town of Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park), Brendan Lawler (D, WF) is returning to the Legislature after the man who beat him last cycle Ben Geller (C) declined to seek re-election. Geller is a character to say the least and one it brings me great sadness that I likely won’t ever have the opportunity to write about beyond this. I’ll refrain from saying anything further for reasons.
In District 19 (Many towns in the northeast of the county including… North East) Chairman of the Legislature Gregg Pulver (R, Common Ground) lost by 42 votes to Chris Drago (D, WF).
Poughkeepsie (Town of)
Incumbent Town Supervisor Jon J. Baisley (R, C) lost to Rebecca Edwards (D, WeAreTownofPok) and the Town Board’s composition will go from 5R-1D to 3R-3D. You may have noticed that obnoxiously long secondary ballot line these candidates have, which refers to We Are the Town of Poughkeepsie, a local newsletter mostly centered around opposition to a proposal to buy the old Poughkeepsie Day School campus and convert it to a “municipal campus,” a proposal that would require a tax hike and which the newsletter argues is unnecessary. Needless to say, this campaign was successful, as while Baisley was re-elected in 2021 by 8 points, he lost this time by about a point as did the two boardmembers behind the plan, hence the change in composition. The new ballot line was the margin of victory in all races at about 3-4% of the vote except notably in Ward 4 where it was the only opposition and got 25%.
Pleasant Valley
Ola Hawatmeh (R, C) lost her race for Town Supervisor. She is a regular candidate in the area most noted for her 2020 “MAGA Republican” congressional race against the eventual Republican nominee, the late Kyle Van De Water. Upon losing the primary, Hawatmeh ran as a write-in candidate and assuming all write-ins went to her got about 0.6% of the vote. She similarly ran for County Comptroller the next year and lost. To go a bit meta, I’ve noticed editing this article that Hawatmeh sometimes uses what I presume to be her maiden name Nesheiwat in campaign materials and on the streetview I posted earlier, the lawyer’s office in question is that of Steven Nesheiwat. I don’t know definitively if they’re related, but I repeat again how surprisingly small the circle of New York politics is.
Wappinger
24-year-old County Legislator Joseph D. Cavaccini (R, C) won the race for Town Supervisor. Appointed town historian at the age of 12, Cavaccini has been aggressive in his bids for actual political office. Keep an eye on him, I suspect we’ll be seeing more of him in years to come.
Ulster
Countywide
While I was correct in the outcomes of all of my predictions last week, I was most wrong in saying Manny Nneji (D, WF) was “heavily favored” for County DA. His opponent Michael J. Kavanagh (R, C) ran a very strong campaign against Democratic candidate David Clegg (D, WF) in 2019, but lost by 0.15%, a mere 78 votes. My assumption was that the past four years of demographic change would lead to a more distant victory for the Democratic candidate. While Nneji did win, he did so by only 0.42% or 202 votes. I would love to map it as I did with Dutchess, but unfortunately Ulster County hasn’t made precinct data available.
Legislature
The one race I refused to make an explicit prediction on, retiring Brian Cahill (D)’s District 4 went overwhelmingly for Eric J. Kitchen (R, C).
Woodstock
I covered the bizarre races for Town Supervisor and Board before the election and won’t recap it here for the sake of space, but you can read about it here. Bill McKenna (D) beat Bennet Ratcliff (WF) by about 30 points. Let it be known Woodstock is weird, but even Woodstock has its limits.
Columbia
Countywide
I made a pretty significant prediction here: that every contested county race on the ballot (County Treasurer Paul Keeler (R, C) was uncontested) would be won by Democrats, despite all of them having incumbent Republicans. This came to pass, and to illustrate what exactly happened I’ve made another margin chart. Percentage share of the vote isn’t a very useful metric in a county of 60,000 people, so instead I’ve charted the raw vote margin. Positive numbers are Democrat victories, negative Republicans, and as with Dutchess earlier uncontested races are not charted. Also not charted are two county judicial races which Democrats won but are not elected often enough for the data to be significant.
The first thing important to note is that in 2019 Columbia County elected a Republican coroner uncontested, so that “decrease” in vote share doesn’t reflect an actual drop in vote share. I’ve also charted County Sheriff which is elected two years off the other races as a bit of a canary in the coalmine for what is happening here.
Due to its small population, few counties have changed as much in the past few years of increased migration from NYC than Columbia County. I will delve deep into how those migrations are shaping the politics of the region given it’s the stated intent of this entire Substack eventually, but for now it will suffice to say they are mostly from the city, absurdly wealthy, and both of these things track with not just a higher likelihood to prefer the Democrats but also a higher likelihood to vote in the first place.
Undeniably this was a large part of propelling the first Democratic DA of the county in 35 years to office as well as two Democratic Judges and a Sheriff for the first time in county history.
Next time…
Later this week, I will be coining a term for a pattern I’ve noticed, particularly in the Hudson Valley but elsewhere in the country too among congressional candidates: Carhartt Politics. What do I mean by that? Without entirely spoiling my next article it’s closely related to carpetbagging but on the fence enough to deserve its own category. I think it warrants being called out where it is present, yet “carpetbagger” just isn’t the right term. Even if you don’t follow local politics at all, you’ll recognize the names of those I’ll be labelling pejoratively as Carhartters. If you know what Carhartt is, you probably know where I’m going with this.
As always thank you for your support and I hope to see you next week. Share if you can and subscribe for free if you haven’t already.