2 years ago
ALBANY, N.Y. — Democratic enrollment gains over the past four years have been centered in the Hudson Valley, new state Board of Elections data showed.
The figures released Monday shows there were 11.9 million registered voters in New York as of Feb. 21. That’s down from 12.4 million a year ago, continuing a long-standing trend in which the voter rolls decrease due to attrition in the aftermath of a presidential-year surge.
In the spring of 2018, the comparable point of the previous four-year election cycle, there were 11.3 million registered voters.
The data Monday showed there were 5.93 million Democrats, making up 49.8 percent of the rolls. That compares to 6.22 million (50.1 percent) in 2021 and 5.62 million (49.7 percent) in 2018.
There were 2.65 million Republicans (22.2 percent of total registered voters), compared to 2.75 million (22.1 percent) in 2021 and 2.63 million (23.3 percent) in 2018.
There were 16 counties in which the total number of Democrats has increased by more than 10 percent in the past four years. And the vast majority of them either bordered or were near the Hudson Valley, with the biggest gains in Columbia (26 percent), Greene (22.3 percent), Saratoga (21.8 percent) and Ulster (17.8 percent) counties.
The number of Democrats decreased in 14 counties, most of which were rural and upstate. The biggest loss — a decrease of 7.6 percent, from 4,065 to 3,758 — was in Lewis County, a small county in the North Country.
There was only one sizable county where Republicans have made major enrollment gains since 2018: Staten Island, where the number of enrolled members of the GOP increased 12 percent to 95,308.
Republicans also made gains of note in Sullivan (an increase of 15 percent), Schuyler (10.1 percent) and Schoharie (10 percent) counties.
By a wide margin, the biggest GOP losses were in Manhattan, which was already heavily blue.
The number of Republicans there plummeted 23.5 percent, from 86,776 to 66,394. For comparison, there are now more Republicans in Orange County (population 401,310) than in the borough that was the long-time home to the most recent Republican president, Donald Trump. The population of Manhattan is nearly 1.7 million.
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