Pat Ryan became a national celebrity following his narrow victory over Marc Molinaro in the special congressional election on August 23. The Ulster County executive was interviewed on major television shows. He was lionized in the liberal press and pretty much ignored by Fox News…
He received an amount of national attention unusual for a rookie congressmember.
Democrats were especially attentive to Ryan’s inspirational message. To win against retrograde, out-of-touch MAGA Trumpism, he said in his resonant voice, all his party needed to do was to fight harder for equal rights, democracy and freedom for all, while reaching out to and listening to everyone. The stakes were high. People needed to have confidence in their values, he said, and be willing to fight for them.
Ryan’s team realized the Supreme Court’s abortion decision of June 24 was particularly unpopular. “Freedom includes a woman’s right to choose,” Ryan said in an ad, addressing the camera. “How can we be a free country if the government tries to control women’s bodies?”
Maybe this new guy from upstate New York, a former military man with progressive stances on many issues, has the winning message for our troubled times, the national Democrats thought. You can bet that the Democratic politicos are now clawing their way into line to have their pictures taken with him. Welcome to Washington, Mr. Smith.
In his speech last Thursday, president Joe Biden adopted some of the same message that Ryan had used, including the need for Americans to fight against the threat to democracy that he said Trumpism represented.
How was Pat Ryan able to squeeze out a win in a district that the pundits said was leaning Republican and had predicted would go for Molinaro? “In your typical midterm election with an unpopular Democratic president, you’d expect Republicans to be flying high,” said the liberal-leaning website FiveThirtyEight. “But the evidence is mounting that the national political environment right now actually leans toward Democrats.”
Did Ryan possess a secret sauce that could rescue the Democrats in the November 8 general election? If so, how should it be expressed on the national stage? What was it in his message that had resulted in a robust turnout for a special election and resonated with a skeptical electorate?
Welcome to the Democrats as it was, Ryan’s victory was no landslide. He won by fewer than 3000 votes. Like Antonio Delgado four years before him against John Faso, he carried only a few eastern counties of the sprawling congressional district.
The Covid migration
Two years ago, the Covid epidemic caused a mass exodus from most of America’s most populous urban areas. New York City alone lost about 300,000 people in a few tumultuous months.
“New York City’s Population Plummeted During Peak Covid — And It’s Still Likely Shrinking,” blared a headline in The City dated May 31 of this year. “Anyone fighting to find a scarce apartment to rent might think the local population is rebounding two years after Covid drove an exodus out of New York City,” Suhail Bhat wrote. “But information tracked by the federal government suggests that, while the rate of decline is slowing, more people are continuing to exit or die than are being born or moving here.”
Many of the out-migrants, most of whom fled Manhattan and Brooklyn, moved to the inner Hudson Valley suburban counties. But in this still-dawning age of hybrid work, a considerable number chose the exurban counties of the Hudson Valley.
Out-migration from New York City is nothing new. It’s been happening for decades. What’s new is only that the Covid pandemic accelerated it.
The political consequences of this movement of people have shown up in fluctuations in the number of political registrations. Because people don’t necessarily change their place of voting as soon as they migrate, the numbers are a lagging indicator. It is an interesting coincidence, however, that New York City lost 60,000 active voters from February 2019 to February 2022, and that the nine Hudson Valley counties gained about 60,000 active voters in the same period.
The four southernmost counties — Westchester, Rockland, Orange and Putnam — gained the lion’s share of new active voters in the three-year period ending this February. But the other counties of the Hudson Valley — except for Sullivan — weren’t far behind.
Most of the upstate counties that don’t border the Hudson River didn’t share in the population surge. Maybe it’s the water.
By the numbers
There were 118,268 people enrolled to vote in Ulster County in February 2019 and 122,195 in February of this year. That’s an increase of almost 4000 in three years. Not bad for a county that didn’t grow in population at all between 2010 and 2020.
As everywhere in the Hudson Valley counties, the Democratic enrollment of active voters increased more than the number of Republican active voters did.
Some 46,877 active voters were registered as Ulster County Democrats in February 2019 and 50,875 in February 2022, a gain of 3998. In contrast, the Republicans lost 521 active voters in the county, dropping in enrollment from 28,328 to 27,807. Those active voters not enrolled in any party increased from 33,400 to 34,770, an increase of 1370.
The registration pattern in Ulster County was similar to that in Dutchess and Orange counties. The three counties are the arena for the congressional election on November 8, in which potential Democratic lion king Ryan will be facing off against Republican one-term assemblyperson from Orange County Colin Schmitt.
The additional enrollment of active voters in Dutchess County in the past three years was 11,907 and in Orange County 16,853.
The Democratic surge
To politicos, what’s important is not the increase in enrollment but the political allegiance of the enrollees. The 32,757 additional enrollees in the three Hudson Valley counties — both local and in-migrants — enrolled overwhelmingly as Democrats: 17,834 newly enrolled Democrats and 610 Republicans.
The rest of the new active voters in Dutchess, Orange and Ulster counties consisted of 14,088 not enrolled in any party, and the remainder scattered among minor parties.
Considering that a goodly number of the new active voters in the three mid-Hudson counties came from Brooklyn and Manhattan, where the active Democratic voters outnumber the active Republicans by nine to one, that result should not have come as a surprise.
The contest for Delgado’s former seat between Ryan and Molinaro did not take place only in the Hudson Valley, but also in the hinterlands to the west — counties where the Republicans remain dominant. Those counties did not see the same surge in the Democratic numbers in the past three years as the counties bordering the Hudson River did, further evidence that it was the New York City out-migrants who created the political changes of the past three years.
Assuming the new in-migrant active voters of the Hudson Valley cast their ballots for the major party in which they had enrolled at the time of the Ryan-Molinaro special election, their numbers were an important contributor to the 2991-vote margin by which he won.
What it all means
The influx of Covid refugees to the eastern part of the congressional district in which the competition took place in effect cancelled out the Republican off-year-election undertow.
As the Roman historian Tacitus said almost 2000 years ago, “Victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone.”
The arena has been changed. Looking at the future in the new congressional district in which southern Ulster County is now included, the full weight of the new enrollees will be consequential.
The Democratic tide on the 18th C.D. creates great difficulties for Schmitt, Ryan’s Republican opponent. All three former GOP strongholds that constitute the district are now solidly Democratic, even more so by their recent reinforcements, the new urban in-migrants. Democratic active voters now outnumber Republican ones by over 20,000 in Ulster and Dutchess counties and by a few hundred short of that in Orange County, Lacking a political turnabout in the next two months, Pat Ryan should have an easier race against Schmitt in the new district than he had against Molinaro in the old one.
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