Before the November election, New York Congressional District 19 looked like an open seat that would be an easy win for the Democrats. The vacating House representative, Chris Gibson, is a Republican who stood against his party now and then and voters in the district didn’t seem to mind. A couple of years ago, when the Republican Chair of the Armed Services Committee wrote provisions into the annual defense spending bill calling for regime change in Syria, Gibson fought it as a member of the committee and a US Army veteran who served for 20 years. He dug his heels in with an amendment to have the regime change language struck from the spending bill and he brought it to the floor for debate and a vote. It wasn’t passed but it was good to see.
According to Cook Political’s Partisan Voting Index, NY CD-19 is split almost evenly with a rating of D+1. In 2008, Obama carried the district by 8 points, and in 2012, he won by 6 points there.
The Democratic candidate, Zephyr Teachout, primaried Governor Cuomo from the Left in 2014. She was a much better candidate this time. The district is situated in the Hudson River Valley at the northern edge of the New York Metro Area where the far outer suburbs give way to rural upstate counties that have been dying for 50 years. In this ad, she said all the right things.
Teachout was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and he campaigned for her in the district. As this ad demonstrates, Donald Trump wasn’t the only candidate who spoke to voters about jobs and trade. For a district that encompasses seven counties that lost jobs since the economic recovery began, this sounded like the right message.
The Republicans ran an ad for their candidate, John Faso, that I’m not going to link or embed. It was inept, poorly produced, and plain ugly to look at. It featured a Teachout lookalike sitting at a desk reading a book about Socialism. The camera panned around the room which was filled with a collection of Sanders campaign paraphernalia while a narrator warned of taxes, taxes, taxes. It was one of the lamest campaign ads ever.
The election results were disappointing. Voters didn’t respond as expected. District-wide, Teachout had 43% of the vote. She did slightly better than that in Dutchess County which is within the boundaries of the New York Metro Area. It also has the highest income from wages out of all the counties in the district. In Montgomery County, where wages are $12,000/yr. lower and Schoharie County, where wages are $14,000/yr. lower, Teachout’s vote totals were dismal.
Ironically, Hillary Clinton ran ahead of Teachout with 45.6% of the vote in the district but that still left the Democrats 3 points behind the Republicans.
Nationwide, there was strong correlation between race and Donald Trump’s vote totals. The whiter the population, the higher Trump’s vote total with a correlation of +.91 where +1.00 is perfect correlation.
The population of NY CD-19 isn’t large enough and there isn't enough variation in the district's counties to test Trump's vote totals there for White Identity. The White proportion of the population in the district suggests vote totals ranging between 50% and 64% for Trump. Six counties did fall into that range but his vote totals were lower in the other five.
If voters in the district weren’t particularly motivated by the corruption in Albany or on Wall Street, and they weren’t very concerned about jobs and the economy, and White Identity wasn’t on their minds, either, what did they see in Faso and Trump?
There was a stir in Ulster County a year ago after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino when the local sheriff urged licensed gun owners to carry their firearms with them and to be prepared to use them, if necessary. The possibility of terrorists choosing one of the tiny villages in the county instead of a higher profile location like New York City which is two hours away must have seemed reasonable. Maybe Faso benefitted from Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims.
It‘s also possible that the cheap and simple-minded Republican ad warning of Socialism and taxes looked good to enough residents in the area for Faso to prevail.